March 30, 2021 • 32 mins
The cops went from saying that they couldn’t connect the crimes to saying that one person, Anthony Rauda, had done them all. Is that even possible?
When officials at California State Parks refuse to answer questions, a hiker in Malibu Creek State Park reveals the location of Rauda’s camp.
And Jimmy Rogers, victim of Near MIss #1, describes being awakened just before dawn by an explosion . . . aimed at his head. He says the cops told him vital information about the so-called missing shotgun.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin Memorial Day weekend, twenty nineteen. It's a month after
(00:37):
my meeting with Erica. Tristan Bodett has been dead for
nearly a year. Anthony Route has been in jail for
seven months, and this is the weekend that State Parks
thinks it's safe to open the camp round again. From
the time of Bodette's murder until Route has arrest, the
authorities offered almost nothing to the public, no warnings, little information,
(01:02):
so people in Malibu were left to figure things out
for themselves. There were a lot of creepy similarities among
the near miss and the murder, but publicly the cops
kept repeating the same old story, not related, at least
nothing they would share. But then after Rout's arrest, that changed.
The crimes were all related, and not just that one
(01:25):
person had done them all. Was that even possible? I
need to walk around the campground see it for myself.
So tonight on the grand reopening weekend, I'll be camping out.
(01:46):
Turning off the Canyon Road, there's a long entrance road
leading to a little guard check. The park employees take
your money and give you your parking pass. The two
people working seem skittish. Are they nervous about something? A
park by Site forty nine, that's where Scott McCurdy, Tristan's
(02:08):
brother in law, camped. That's where I'm staying tonight. It's
right next to Site fifty one, where Tristan Bodatt was murdered.
I'm trying not to get creeped out. The campground is
basically deserted, empty campsite after empty campsite. It's a little eerie.
(02:38):
There is a young couple here. They're celebrating their second
wedding anniversary. We were just driving up to go camping,
and we were planning to actually go to Los Padres
National Forest, but we're nubs at the camping game and
did not reserve like six months in advance like everyone
else did. So we call they decided to try Malibu
Creek State Park. So we just popped on in and
(02:59):
there's like a line of you know, cars coming in.
But we said, like or like for sure it's packed,
you know, And so he pulled up and they're like, nope,
there's there's still some spots available. And then we come
and there's like no one here. So then it's just
another like the one other camper here at like eleven
am this morning. It was just like like, oh, you know,
because we're asking if they knew of any hikes, and
(03:21):
he's like, you know, they check this heck out, this
heck out, but don't be scared about the murder. And
we were just like, what are you talking about, Bromly,
are you the murder? Like I gos like, oh my
gotch so, but yeah, maybe we'll lea tonight. Walking around,
(03:44):
I noticed one of those interpretive signs you often see
in state parks, Animals of the night. It says while
campers sleep, the park belongs to the animals. Can you
hear the howl of a coyote, the scratch scratch off mice,
or the hoot of an owl? As you walk through
the park, your flashlights suddenly reflects the glowing eyes of
(04:07):
an animal. The sign talks about bobcats, coyotes, raccoons, but
doesn't say anything about mountain lions. Maybe they didn't want
to start a panic. It starts getting dark, so I
head back to Site forty nine. I pitch my tent
(04:29):
in the meadow beside the fire pit. I light a
fire and sit next to it while I eat my
dinner take out from the grocery store. There's no one
in triest in site Site fifty one. That's strange. When
I drove in the park, workers told me it was
already reserved. I zip into my tent. I text home,
(04:54):
I'm fine, but this feels weird. I have a sleepless night.
Every noise feels too close, rainfalls, I'm sure I feel
something brush up against my tent, the thin wall of
(05:17):
my tent. I'm sure I hear footsteps approach and then recede.
I'm so relieved. When the sky lightens to gray, I
opened up my tent. It's before dawn, lightly drizzling. I
(05:42):
noticed that the anniversary couple didn't make it through the night,
and no one ever showed up to claim Sight fifty one.
I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, Episode four,
(06:30):
Animals of the Night. In the morning, I decide to
explore a little more. The campground is the site of
the murder and two of the near misses. Also the
place people are the most vulnerable, gathered sleeping guards down.
(06:53):
I mean, part of being here is trying to understand
this place that Rooda lived and this place that Tristan
and Burdett died. Tristan's tent might have been there just
beyond the picnic table, or he might have been right
here where I am. But I wondered if his I
(07:18):
wondered where his door was. I guess I study the
map Site forty nine where I am, Site fifty one
where Tristan was. Then the road curves around the meadow
fifty four fifty five, fifty eight fifty eight. That's where
near Miss number two happened. It was November ninth, twenty sixteen,
(07:42):
three thirty am. A man named Ron Carson was lying
in bed when he says his camper was rocked by
an explosion. He later testified that it quote felt like
a bomb went off. He wasn't hit, but when he
turned on the light he saw shotgun pellets stuck into
the wall right next to where his head had been.
(08:04):
Just across the road from Site fifty eight is site
fifty seven, the location of another attack, Near Miss number three.
On January seventh, twenty seventeen, a woman and her boyfriend
were sleeping in the back of her car when they
were awakened by a bang between four and five am.
The next day, she found a hole in her trunk.
(08:25):
State Parks police recovered a metal shotgun slug. This is insane.
These three crime scenes, the camper, the car, and Bodette's
tent are just a couple hundred feet apart. These shootings
happened in a tight cluster in the same corner of
(08:46):
the campground, where a footpath disappears into the woods. I
follow it. It's overgrown with wild mustard and little purple flowers.
I'm kind of curious about this way because this seems like,
I mean, no one is out and about at four am,
so anywhere would be a place you could go wouldn't
(09:06):
be observed. The path heads north toward the mountains. I
know that somewhere out there, two or three miles away,
beyond Mulholland Highway, in a remote and seldom traveled part
of the park is where Anthony Rauta lived. It's where
he was arrested, and it's not that far. There are
(09:39):
only a couple hundred homeless people in Malibu, and they
fall into distinct categories. There are the beach dwellers, a
lot of them living in RV's along Pacific Coast Highway.
They're the mountain men, homestead or loner types like Routa
who live up in the hills, and there are the
townfolk who congregate in and around the library and shops. Yeah,
(10:02):
we'll go. Um, let's just shake over here by the
library and win Park and then we can walk in
the Legacy I'm tagging along with the sheriff departments Homeless
Outreach Team. These deputies make regular welfare checks to the
camps scattered around Malibu. I'm hoping that they might have
run into Route at some point. We're across from the
library in Legacy Park, right behind the ultra high end
(10:25):
Malibu Country Shopping Center. This is a spot where a
lot of homeless people gather. One of the deputies shows
me an app they use to keep a record of
everyone they make contact with. This is everyone I've spoken
to in the last two years. Ozzie Anthony Route's dad
told me that his son had a library card that
he hung out at libraries a lot, in spite of
(10:48):
being a mountain man. I take a deep breath. Would
you be able to check that database for someone for
me to find out if they've received homeless services? And so, Yes, absolutely,
I can check it. Okay, what's the name? Last name? First,
first name, first Anthony. Okay, rout At, r A U
(11:11):
d A seller right, you did it right. Okay, it's
when I'm to scroll up, but it'll see did not
find did not match any client. Okay. Disappointing, but not surprising.
Routa seems like the kind of person who would have
avoided this kind of contact at all costs. But then,
(11:32):
just as we're about to leave, a man named Josh
Crawford walks up to him. My name is Josh Mail.
How he used to camp here? Now he sleeps in
a car. The cops tell me that he actually volunteered
to help fight the Wolsey fire. Sleep over there in
the park man, and uh, you know, kind of giving
up on life. So you know, I'm curious how he
ended up out here. Turns out it's the energy. It's
(11:58):
so beautiful, you know. Mallible is like, I say, that's
the reason people come here, because it's an energy here.
It's a nobody wants to leave. It's like, we'd rather
sleep on the ground here than an apartment in hell?
Do you hear me? I rather sleep on the ground
here around this good energy. How how do you describe
(12:23):
the community of people living in tents and sleeping rough
and homeless around Malibu? Is it a welcoming community? Is
it tight knit? Is it a lot of loaners? What's
the vibe? It's all above, it's tight en it. It's
a lot of loaners. It's you got your junkies, you
got your alcoholics, you got your people that's depressed. You
(12:45):
got people that have lost their kids, made them lose
their mind. You know, it's a lot of reason people
end up out of here. On a psychological level, Can
I ask you about a specific person, if you ever
heard of somebody living in I pull up a picture
of Router on my phone. There are only a few online.
(13:05):
One from the day of his arrest, another one that
looks like an old mug shot, and if few from
his courtroom appearances where he's in a restraint chair wearing
a blue jumpsuit and a spit mask. Now I'm not pure,
but that picture show looks so I think he used
to come down and go to the library. And because
(13:26):
that guy that's like a younger picture of my thing.
He's talking about the old mug shot where Rauda has
a defiant old West outlaw luck. Yeah, because it looks
like this guy used to be with this, uh white
lady that was also you know, she was on the street,
(13:46):
but he was a drinker. Like and uh, yeah, he
had a girlfriend. I don't know about a girlfriend, but
he was a white lady. He will be around every
day and he will be with her. But this was
like a couple of years ago or something. Yeah, I
kind of want to say he had a He kept
a good tar with him too. What no hell of
a player, I know, but he had a guitar with him.
(14:07):
You know, everybody will kinna be out for the rockles
or whatever. He used to say things like about him
singing and stuff like that because he always had a
gata with him, a guitar, a lady friend. It's so
tempting to think of this as Rauta, but I can't
find anyone who'll confirm it. No one else I talked
to in Malibu has ever laid eyes on him until
(14:30):
the day of his capture. I'm trying to catch a shadow.
Rodas so hard to pin down, so hard to place
anywhere when he's not firmly behind bars. For months, I've
(15:00):
been trying to get information from California State Parks, the
government agency that runs Malibu Creek State Park, and for
months they've been totally stonewalling. Hi Dan, Now, this is
Gloria Sandoval from the firm California State Parks, returning your
phone call. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing investigation, we can't
make anybody available for your interview at this time. But
(15:23):
I ask for anything and everything, crime data, staffing levels,
staff lists, occupancy data, incident reports, anything that might shed
even a little light on what happened. Months go by
between my emails and calls and their responses. After a
long wait, I do get some data from State Parks,
(15:43):
but it's incomplete and inconclusive, they tell me repeatedly, in
every way you can think of. No, no, we will
not explain what happened Malibu Creek State Park between twenty
sixteen and twenty eighteen. The parks have their own police force.
Those are the rangers, sworn peace officers with badges and guns.
(16:05):
They could have investigated the shootings. I know from talking
to Sergeant Right that at least one person fairly high
up at the park knew they needed Lostell's help. But
what were they doing over there? It's impossible to find out.
The Only thing I do find out. I learned from court.
It's pretty damning. The tent that Tristan Bodett was killed
(16:26):
in the crime scene itself. It was never booked into evidence,
it was never properly examined. It couldn't be because State
Parks threw it away. If the craziest thing I've learned
about the park is that they left a campground to
open after there'd been multiple shootings there, then this is
(16:49):
the second craziest thing. Someone was murdered in his tent
in that same campground and you throw it in the trash.
No wonder. No one wants to talk to me. The
only thing I can do is keep going back to
the park. One day, I join a walking tour led
(17:11):
by a former ranger to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of
Planet of the Apes, which was filmed in Malibu Creek
State Park. So many people refer to this as the
Jewel of Santa Monica Mounds. That's how desperate I am.
It's roughly a three mile round trip from here. We
will just go up the road a little bit to
see our first scene location. Then we'll come back and
(17:35):
we'll head down into the heart of the park. It's
a motley crew of film buffs and science fiction fans
and people looking to fill as Sunday with a hike
in Malibu Creek State Park. We're about thirty minutes in
when someone brings up the Boudette murder. Oh oh, that
was in the campground. Unsurprisingly, the ranger doesn't want to
talk about it, but I think it's possible they got
(17:56):
the tire. Yeah. Well him, until we got the evidence,
I guess. He does say that the killing has significantly
depressed attendance at the park, and sifting through the data
that state Parks gave me, I've learned that the financial
impact was significant. Revenue fell by fifty percent, a loss
of seven hundred thousand dollars compared to the year before. Ye,
(18:18):
it's all I mean. I'm not the park spokesman. No,
that's for sure. I don't know really any more than
I read in the newspapers or here on the news.
And he says he thinks the element of danger has
been eliminated, but also that there's still a lot that
hasn't been released, which I don't know. But there were
one day that the hills were covered with sheriff's deputies
(18:40):
and they're just you know, following all these various social trails,
and I'm I'm sure this guy went off trail as well, right,
So the more evidence the better, that's, you know, how
you approve the case. During the tour, I've been keeping
my eye on one of the other hikers, a guy
wearing camouflage and to make America Great Again hat. He
(19:01):
seems very interested in the murder talk. I introduced myself
and he tells me his name is Lou Johnson, and
he's here with a boy named Huts and his landlady's son.
We just stopped going anywhere. He tells me that before
the murder, he and Hudson spent their weekends hiking all
over this area. That changed. Just the randomness of it
(19:23):
was very troubling, I think, because it didn't matters like
if you were if you were in the wrong place
at the wrong time and moving in the wilderness, and
this guy saw you, you know, you immortal danger there.
As we fill up our water bottles, he tells me
that one day, as he was driving to work, he
saw that the hills were swarming with deputies collecting evidence
(19:44):
from Rounds campsite. One morning, I came around one of
the last hairpine curves there, and there were police cars,
sheriff's cars everywhere, ranger cars, some sheriffs, a group of
sheriff deputies were coming up the road and I said, Hey,
is this have to do with the investigation wrapping it up?
And said yeah, we're just up here, you know, doing
(20:07):
cleanup and stuff like that. You know, he said a
few years earlier he tried to take Hudson hiking right
there in that exact spot, start hiking up there. There
were animal trails and I remember remarking, Wow, these are
He's really good with animal trails, and this was the
trail in the grass was pretty well trodden. I thought, oh,
maybe some hikers go up here. And it sort of
(20:29):
follows a little canyon rise and there's a lot of
big oak trees there with big canopies, and I remember
we sat up underneath one and he was sort of
just sort of not maybe he didn't feel good. I
don't know what it was, but he just didn't want
to hike. And it was strange, lu says, really out
of character for Hudson. But he couldn't make him go on,
(20:50):
so they turned back, and you know, the thing that
strikes me is now knowing that you know that was
where route as camp was, that that's kind of a
scary thing we could have if we had gone hiking
up in there. Would he have felt threatened? You know,
he would kind of hiding out. I read, you know,
(21:10):
he just didn't like people who knows We don't know.
And it just was now looking back and I was like, wow,
that felt like a close call for us safety wise.
And again, had we known that these other things had
happened at that time, we didn't know about We'd never
heard about any problems. And it just is it's not
(21:31):
kind of frustrating, it's very frustrating. It's infuriating because this
transparency that these guys all take an oath for it.
I support the police. I'm a real supporter of law
enforcement and all that, but when they pull stuff like
this it seems political or for whatever reason, it really
pisses me off. Lu says, the trail to Routa's camp
is not too far from where we are now. He
(21:53):
can show me if I want to meet him out
there when the tour ends. We trade email addresses and
he tells me he'll be in touch after my visits
to the park. I keep thinking about Routa, sleeping night
after night in the wild. With his first letter, he
enclosed a careful pencil drawing of two mountain lion cubs snuggling.
(22:15):
I want to know more about his life outdoors. In
his next letter, he writes, I was hardly ever scared.
I did a lot of hiking, starving and freezing. I
seen little baby bears, foxes, bobcats, eagles. There's a spot
on the Tapanga Mountains where you can see the ocean.
There's a spot on the Pacific Palisades where you can
(22:36):
see to pass a robelus. Those words stop me cold.
I just moved to the Palisades, but he couldn't know
that I've been using a different mailing address. It's right
(22:58):
around that time I start having nightmares about Anthony Rowda Mhore.
(24:13):
So like when I woke up, I woke up like
I almost you could imagine if an explosion went off
by your head, like really suddenly. And I don't really
know why I woke up like that, because there was
no pain or anything. So like the bottom of me,
this is Jimmy Rogers near Miss number one. He was
(24:34):
attacked twenty months before Tristan Bodett was killed. He's agreed
to meet up in this shady grove in Tapia Park,
which is part of Malibu Creek State Park. So like,
I woke up and then I was just like what
happened in all Jimmy's a serious outdoorsman, a trained wildlife
biologist who's worked for the Forest Service. He's telling me
about the morning of November third, twenty sixteen. He was
(24:56):
sleeping in a hammock in the park. He was on
a solo backpacking trip, trying to complete all sixty seven
miles of the Backbone Trail in three days. Between three
and four in the morning, he was startled awake, and
then I felt something was on my arm or something
was like clawing at my arm, which was my initial
thought because my hammock was somewhat low to the ground.
(25:17):
He tumbled out of his hammock, which had split in half.
He stood there listening as his arm began to sting.
His jacket was torn, and when he took it off,
he saw holes in his arm, a lot of them.
It looked like a small animal had been gnawing on him.
Because then I was like, well, if it was an animal.
It had to have been rabbit or something. But I
(25:38):
determined like any animal could have been, whether it was
a rabbit, coyote, or fox, or just dog or skunk
or anything. Even of rats, like they're pretty easy to find,
especially in this oak leaf litter, because they can't move
very fast, and especially he tells me that he ventured
very carefully into the woods. So I walked without a
(26:03):
light down there because I really it's really about hearing
the sounds. To me, I did hear one like that.
It was just a one sudden movement in leaf litter,
so it could have been a very small animal moving
its whole body, or it could have been a person
moving afoot. So I stopped and I just stared at
(26:23):
where that sound was. I wanted to keep going, but
I didn't because I literally thought, I don't want to
get shot in the face. I kind of literally thought
somebody was looking at me, and they probably with that
movement or getting ready to do something. So I sat
there for a couple of minutes. I just said, I'm
just gonna pack up all my stuff and leave. He
(26:46):
gathered up his stuff, walked out of the park and
along the canyon road, till his phone had a signal.
He called his girlfriend and asked her to pick him up.
She took one look at his open wound, dozens of
tiny punctures, and drove him straight to the emergency room
for weeks. Afterward, he says he tried to rationalize the experience,
(27:06):
so just none of the scenarios I kept painting made
any sense. I literally just started thinking about every single
animal that lives out here and it could possibly live
out here. And I kind of ended it on a
crazy thought and I literally determined it was vampire bats.
Vampire bats because when they bite, they secrete this numbing
(27:28):
sensation so you can't feel it. And then they lapped
your blood and it seemed like a superficial wound and
the but then one day something unexpected happened. A round
metal pellet fell out of his arm, then another and another,
and it just popped out and it didn't feel like anything,
(27:49):
and it was just a perfect shallow circle that it left.
And then I found it and it was metal biting
your teeth. You drop it on glass, and like, did
my body just make that? I don't think so. And
then um, and then eventually we just a few of
the wounds were still kind of open, so I go.
(28:09):
Friend started like squeezing at it, so he took that
one out and then we were like, all right, we
need to get X ray and they found four There
were four more embedded in there pretty deep, So then
I went and got surgery. He hadn't been bitten by
a rabbit animal or by a vampire bat good. He'd
been shot with bird shot, small shotgun pellets used to
(28:30):
kill birds in flight. Jimmy shows me the scar. It's
about three and a half inches across on the underside
of his right arm, between the elbow and the shoulder.
It's a big, scary looking wound. If you just look
at the pattern of my arm, like, it looks like
they are pretty close, but it's hard to say. But
within five feet is what the police officers actually told
(28:53):
me it was most likely. But the wound isn't even
the most disturbing part. The most disturbing part is how
Jimmy sleeps. How he was sleeping when he was shot,
bundled up in his down jacket and sleeping bag, wrapped
up in his hammock, with his right arm draped over
his head. It seemed to Jimmy that the person who
(29:15):
shot him was aiming for his head. After the pellets
fell out of his arm, Jimmy went back to the
park and tried to find someone to talk to, someone
he could tell this bizarre story too and maybe get answers.
So I just came out here and I was just
looking around, and I found a state park employee and
just told them what happened. And he told me that
(29:38):
somebody's vehicle was shot with the same bird shot, and
so they were really concerned about it, and so he
gave me the number for the sheriff. I tried to
contact them a few times, but they pretty much never
revealed much information, and so probably after like a couple
of emails and a couple of phone calls, I just stopped.
(30:00):
I asked Jimmy, if he'll indulge me go on a walk.
I want to see how long it takes to get
from where he was shot over to the campground. He's game.
It's not far, but it takes us an hour on
dusty trails through the foothills out a run fifteen minutes max.
(30:22):
So we're going under a little sort of riparian area.
We're in a ripe Parian area. From the campground, we
walked to the entrance of the park out onto the
canyon road where all those cars were shot near misses four, five,
and six. And while we walk, it hits me how
(30:43):
small this area really is. I just want to say
one thing, because we may not be here again. Up
and down this stretch of road is where the tree
dawn shootings at cars were concentrated. Wow, I didn't know that.
That's crazy. It seems so obvious. It is all right here.
(31:09):
Jimmy's right, it is all right here. How could the
Sheriff's department in state parks not have seen that? How
could they think or say they believed these were isolated incidents.
Why wouldn't they have warned the public? The authorities, Jimmy says,
(31:30):
we're pretty unhelpful throughout his ordeal. After taking his report,
they never followed up. They didn't seem to care. But
they did say something odd. Well, they didn't really tell
me much because they said that you can actually kind
of manufacture different weapons. So like the officer actually said,
they could have made something to fire this type around,
(31:53):
like even something really small that you just hit from
the back. It could have been a handheld thing or anything.
This is about the so called missing shotgun, The gun
that was used in near misses one through five, the
one that was fired at Jimmy while he slept in
his hammock, The gun that has never been found. From
(32:15):
what the cops told Jimmy, it sounds like that gun
wasn't a gun at all.
Pushkin Memorial Day weekend, twenty nineteen. It's a month after
(00:37):
my meeting with Erica. Tristan Bodett has been dead for
nearly a year. Anthony Route has been in jail for
seven months, and this is the weekend that State Parks
thinks it's safe to open the camp round again. From
the time of Bodette's murder until Route has arrest, the
authorities offered almost nothing to the public, no warnings, little information,
(01:02):
so people in Malibu were left to figure things out
for themselves. There were a lot of creepy similarities among
the near miss and the murder, but publicly the cops
kept repeating the same old story, not related, at least
nothing they would share. But then after Rout's arrest, that changed.
The crimes were all related, and not just that one
(01:25):
person had done them all. Was that even possible? I
need to walk around the campground see it for myself.
So tonight on the grand reopening weekend, I'll be camping out.
(01:46):
Turning off the Canyon Road, there's a long entrance road
leading to a little guard check. The park employees take
your money and give you your parking pass. The two
people working seem skittish. Are they nervous about something? A
park by Site forty nine, that's where Scott McCurdy, Tristan's
(02:08):
brother in law, camped. That's where I'm staying tonight. It's
right next to Site fifty one, where Tristan Bodatt was murdered.
I'm trying not to get creeped out. The campground is
basically deserted, empty campsite after empty campsite. It's a little eerie.
(02:38):
There is a young couple here. They're celebrating their second
wedding anniversary. We were just driving up to go camping,
and we were planning to actually go to Los Padres
National Forest, but we're nubs at the camping game and
did not reserve like six months in advance like everyone
else did. So we call they decided to try Malibu
Creek State Park. So we just popped on in and
(02:59):
there's like a line of you know, cars coming in.
But we said, like or like for sure it's packed,
you know, And so he pulled up and they're like, nope,
there's there's still some spots available. And then we come
and there's like no one here. So then it's just
another like the one other camper here at like eleven
am this morning. It was just like like, oh, you know,
because we're asking if they knew of any hikes, and
(03:21):
he's like, you know, they check this heck out, this
heck out, but don't be scared about the murder. And
we were just like, what are you talking about, Bromly,
are you the murder? Like I gos like, oh my
gotch so, but yeah, maybe we'll lea tonight. Walking around,
(03:44):
I noticed one of those interpretive signs you often see
in state parks, Animals of the night. It says while
campers sleep, the park belongs to the animals. Can you
hear the howl of a coyote, the scratch scratch off mice,
or the hoot of an owl? As you walk through
the park, your flashlights suddenly reflects the glowing eyes of
(04:07):
an animal. The sign talks about bobcats, coyotes, raccoons, but
doesn't say anything about mountain lions. Maybe they didn't want
to start a panic. It starts getting dark, so I
head back to Site forty nine. I pitch my tent
(04:29):
in the meadow beside the fire pit. I light a
fire and sit next to it while I eat my
dinner take out from the grocery store. There's no one
in triest in site Site fifty one. That's strange. When
I drove in the park, workers told me it was
already reserved. I zip into my tent. I text home,
(04:54):
I'm fine, but this feels weird. I have a sleepless night.
Every noise feels too close, rainfalls, I'm sure I feel
something brush up against my tent, the thin wall of
(05:17):
my tent. I'm sure I hear footsteps approach and then recede.
I'm so relieved. When the sky lightens to gray, I
opened up my tent. It's before dawn, lightly drizzling. I
(05:42):
noticed that the anniversary couple didn't make it through the night,
and no one ever showed up to claim Sight fifty one.
I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, Episode four,
(06:30):
Animals of the Night. In the morning, I decide to
explore a little more. The campground is the site of
the murder and two of the near misses. Also the
place people are the most vulnerable, gathered sleeping guards down.
(06:53):
I mean, part of being here is trying to understand
this place that Rooda lived and this place that Tristan
and Burdett died. Tristan's tent might have been there just
beyond the picnic table, or he might have been right
here where I am. But I wondered if his I
(07:18):
wondered where his door was. I guess I study the
map Site forty nine where I am, Site fifty one
where Tristan was. Then the road curves around the meadow
fifty four fifty five, fifty eight fifty eight. That's where
near Miss number two happened. It was November ninth, twenty sixteen,
(07:42):
three thirty am. A man named Ron Carson was lying
in bed when he says his camper was rocked by
an explosion. He later testified that it quote felt like
a bomb went off. He wasn't hit, but when he
turned on the light he saw shotgun pellets stuck into
the wall right next to where his head had been.
(08:04):
Just across the road from Site fifty eight is site
fifty seven, the location of another attack, Near Miss number three.
On January seventh, twenty seventeen, a woman and her boyfriend
were sleeping in the back of her car when they
were awakened by a bang between four and five am.
The next day, she found a hole in her trunk.
(08:25):
State Parks police recovered a metal shotgun slug. This is insane.
These three crime scenes, the camper, the car, and Bodette's
tent are just a couple hundred feet apart. These shootings
happened in a tight cluster in the same corner of
(08:46):
the campground, where a footpath disappears into the woods. I
follow it. It's overgrown with wild mustard and little purple flowers.
I'm kind of curious about this way because this seems like,
I mean, no one is out and about at four am,
so anywhere would be a place you could go wouldn't
(09:06):
be observed. The path heads north toward the mountains. I
know that somewhere out there, two or three miles away,
beyond Mulholland Highway, in a remote and seldom traveled part
of the park is where Anthony Rauta lived. It's where
he was arrested, and it's not that far. There are
(09:39):
only a couple hundred homeless people in Malibu, and they
fall into distinct categories. There are the beach dwellers, a
lot of them living in RV's along Pacific Coast Highway.
They're the mountain men, homestead or loner types like Routa
who live up in the hills, and there are the
townfolk who congregate in and around the library and shops. Yeah,
(10:02):
we'll go. Um, let's just shake over here by the
library and win Park and then we can walk in
the Legacy I'm tagging along with the sheriff departments Homeless
Outreach Team. These deputies make regular welfare checks to the
camps scattered around Malibu. I'm hoping that they might have
run into Route at some point. We're across from the
library in Legacy Park, right behind the ultra high end
(10:25):
Malibu Country Shopping Center. This is a spot where a
lot of homeless people gather. One of the deputies shows
me an app they use to keep a record of
everyone they make contact with. This is everyone I've spoken
to in the last two years. Ozzie Anthony Route's dad
told me that his son had a library card that
he hung out at libraries a lot, in spite of
(10:48):
being a mountain man. I take a deep breath. Would
you be able to check that database for someone for
me to find out if they've received homeless services? And so, Yes, absolutely,
I can check it. Okay, what's the name? Last name? First,
first name, first Anthony. Okay, rout At, r A U
(11:11):
d A seller right, you did it right. Okay, it's
when I'm to scroll up, but it'll see did not
find did not match any client. Okay. Disappointing, but not surprising.
Routa seems like the kind of person who would have
avoided this kind of contact at all costs. But then,
(11:32):
just as we're about to leave, a man named Josh
Crawford walks up to him. My name is Josh Mail.
How he used to camp here? Now he sleeps in
a car. The cops tell me that he actually volunteered
to help fight the Wolsey fire. Sleep over there in
the park man, and uh, you know, kind of giving
up on life. So you know, I'm curious how he
ended up out here. Turns out it's the energy. It's
(11:58):
so beautiful, you know. Mallible is like, I say, that's
the reason people come here, because it's an energy here.
It's a nobody wants to leave. It's like, we'd rather
sleep on the ground here than an apartment in hell?
Do you hear me? I rather sleep on the ground
here around this good energy. How how do you describe
(12:23):
the community of people living in tents and sleeping rough
and homeless around Malibu? Is it a welcoming community? Is
it tight knit? Is it a lot of loaners? What's
the vibe? It's all above, it's tight en it. It's
a lot of loaners. It's you got your junkies, you
got your alcoholics, you got your people that's depressed. You
(12:45):
got people that have lost their kids, made them lose
their mind. You know, it's a lot of reason people
end up out of here. On a psychological level, Can
I ask you about a specific person, if you ever
heard of somebody living in I pull up a picture
of Router on my phone. There are only a few online.
(13:05):
One from the day of his arrest, another one that
looks like an old mug shot, and if few from
his courtroom appearances where he's in a restraint chair wearing
a blue jumpsuit and a spit mask. Now I'm not pure,
but that picture show looks so I think he used
to come down and go to the library. And because
(13:26):
that guy that's like a younger picture of my thing.
He's talking about the old mug shot where Rauda has
a defiant old West outlaw luck. Yeah, because it looks
like this guy used to be with this, uh white
lady that was also you know, she was on the street,
(13:46):
but he was a drinker. Like and uh, yeah, he
had a girlfriend. I don't know about a girlfriend, but
he was a white lady. He will be around every
day and he will be with her. But this was
like a couple of years ago or something. Yeah, I
kind of want to say he had a He kept
a good tar with him too. What no hell of
a player, I know, but he had a guitar with him.
(14:07):
You know, everybody will kinna be out for the rockles
or whatever. He used to say things like about him
singing and stuff like that because he always had a
gata with him, a guitar, a lady friend. It's so
tempting to think of this as Rauta, but I can't
find anyone who'll confirm it. No one else I talked
to in Malibu has ever laid eyes on him until
(14:30):
the day of his capture. I'm trying to catch a shadow.
Rodas so hard to pin down, so hard to place
anywhere when he's not firmly behind bars. For months, I've
(15:00):
been trying to get information from California State Parks, the
government agency that runs Malibu Creek State Park, and for
months they've been totally stonewalling. Hi Dan, Now, this is
Gloria Sandoval from the firm California State Parks, returning your
phone call. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing investigation, we can't
make anybody available for your interview at this time. But
(15:23):
I ask for anything and everything, crime data, staffing levels,
staff lists, occupancy data, incident reports, anything that might shed
even a little light on what happened. Months go by
between my emails and calls and their responses. After a
long wait, I do get some data from State Parks,
(15:43):
but it's incomplete and inconclusive, they tell me repeatedly, in
every way you can think of. No, no, we will
not explain what happened Malibu Creek State Park between twenty
sixteen and twenty eighteen. The parks have their own police force.
Those are the rangers, sworn peace officers with badges and guns.
(16:05):
They could have investigated the shootings. I know from talking
to Sergeant Right that at least one person fairly high
up at the park knew they needed Lostell's help. But
what were they doing over there? It's impossible to find out.
The Only thing I do find out. I learned from court.
It's pretty damning. The tent that Tristan Bodett was killed
(16:26):
in the crime scene itself. It was never booked into evidence,
it was never properly examined. It couldn't be because State
Parks threw it away. If the craziest thing I've learned
about the park is that they left a campground to
open after there'd been multiple shootings there, then this is
(16:49):
the second craziest thing. Someone was murdered in his tent
in that same campground and you throw it in the trash.
No wonder. No one wants to talk to me. The
only thing I can do is keep going back to
the park. One day, I join a walking tour led
(17:11):
by a former ranger to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of
Planet of the Apes, which was filmed in Malibu Creek
State Park. So many people refer to this as the
Jewel of Santa Monica Mounds. That's how desperate I am.
It's roughly a three mile round trip from here. We
will just go up the road a little bit to
see our first scene location. Then we'll come back and
(17:35):
we'll head down into the heart of the park. It's
a motley crew of film buffs and science fiction fans
and people looking to fill as Sunday with a hike
in Malibu Creek State Park. We're about thirty minutes in
when someone brings up the Boudette murder. Oh oh, that
was in the campground. Unsurprisingly, the ranger doesn't want to
talk about it, but I think it's possible they got
(17:56):
the tire. Yeah. Well him, until we got the evidence,
I guess. He does say that the killing has significantly
depressed attendance at the park, and sifting through the data
that state Parks gave me, I've learned that the financial
impact was significant. Revenue fell by fifty percent, a loss
of seven hundred thousand dollars compared to the year before. Ye,
(18:18):
it's all I mean. I'm not the park spokesman. No,
that's for sure. I don't know really any more than
I read in the newspapers or here on the news.
And he says he thinks the element of danger has
been eliminated, but also that there's still a lot that
hasn't been released, which I don't know. But there were
one day that the hills were covered with sheriff's deputies
(18:40):
and they're just you know, following all these various social trails,
and I'm I'm sure this guy went off trail as well, right,
So the more evidence the better, that's, you know, how
you approve the case. During the tour, I've been keeping
my eye on one of the other hikers, a guy
wearing camouflage and to make America Great Again hat. He
(19:01):
seems very interested in the murder talk. I introduced myself
and he tells me his name is Lou Johnson, and
he's here with a boy named Huts and his landlady's son.
We just stopped going anywhere. He tells me that before
the murder, he and Hudson spent their weekends hiking all
over this area. That changed. Just the randomness of it
(19:23):
was very troubling, I think, because it didn't matters like
if you were if you were in the wrong place
at the wrong time and moving in the wilderness, and
this guy saw you, you know, you immortal danger there.
As we fill up our water bottles, he tells me
that one day, as he was driving to work, he
saw that the hills were swarming with deputies collecting evidence
(19:44):
from Rounds campsite. One morning, I came around one of
the last hairpine curves there, and there were police cars,
sheriff's cars everywhere, ranger cars, some sheriffs, a group of
sheriff deputies were coming up the road and I said, Hey,
is this have to do with the investigation wrapping it up?
And said yeah, we're just up here, you know, doing
(20:07):
cleanup and stuff like that. You know, he said a
few years earlier he tried to take Hudson hiking right
there in that exact spot, start hiking up there. There
were animal trails and I remember remarking, Wow, these are
He's really good with animal trails, and this was the
trail in the grass was pretty well trodden. I thought, oh,
maybe some hikers go up here. And it sort of
(20:29):
follows a little canyon rise and there's a lot of
big oak trees there with big canopies, and I remember
we sat up underneath one and he was sort of
just sort of not maybe he didn't feel good. I
don't know what it was, but he just didn't want
to hike. And it was strange, lu says, really out
of character for Hudson. But he couldn't make him go on,
(20:50):
so they turned back, and you know, the thing that
strikes me is now knowing that you know that was
where route as camp was, that that's kind of a
scary thing we could have if we had gone hiking
up in there. Would he have felt threatened? You know,
he would kind of hiding out. I read, you know,
(21:10):
he just didn't like people who knows We don't know.
And it just was now looking back and I was like, wow,
that felt like a close call for us safety wise.
And again, had we known that these other things had
happened at that time, we didn't know about We'd never
heard about any problems. And it just is it's not
(21:31):
kind of frustrating, it's very frustrating. It's infuriating because this
transparency that these guys all take an oath for it.
I support the police. I'm a real supporter of law
enforcement and all that, but when they pull stuff like
this it seems political or for whatever reason, it really
pisses me off. Lu says, the trail to Routa's camp
is not too far from where we are now. He
(21:53):
can show me if I want to meet him out
there when the tour ends. We trade email addresses and
he tells me he'll be in touch after my visits
to the park. I keep thinking about Routa, sleeping night
after night in the wild. With his first letter, he
enclosed a careful pencil drawing of two mountain lion cubs snuggling.
(22:15):
I want to know more about his life outdoors. In
his next letter, he writes, I was hardly ever scared.
I did a lot of hiking, starving and freezing. I
seen little baby bears, foxes, bobcats, eagles. There's a spot
on the Tapanga Mountains where you can see the ocean.
There's a spot on the Pacific Palisades where you can
(22:36):
see to pass a robelus. Those words stop me cold.
I just moved to the Palisades, but he couldn't know
that I've been using a different mailing address. It's right
(22:58):
around that time I start having nightmares about Anthony Rowda Mhore.
(24:13):
So like when I woke up, I woke up like
I almost you could imagine if an explosion went off
by your head, like really suddenly. And I don't really
know why I woke up like that, because there was
no pain or anything. So like the bottom of me,
this is Jimmy Rogers near Miss number one. He was
(24:34):
attacked twenty months before Tristan Bodett was killed. He's agreed
to meet up in this shady grove in Tapia Park,
which is part of Malibu Creek State Park. So like,
I woke up and then I was just like what
happened in all Jimmy's a serious outdoorsman, a trained wildlife
biologist who's worked for the Forest Service. He's telling me
about the morning of November third, twenty sixteen. He was
(24:56):
sleeping in a hammock in the park. He was on
a solo backpacking trip, trying to complete all sixty seven
miles of the Backbone Trail in three days. Between three
and four in the morning, he was startled awake, and
then I felt something was on my arm or something
was like clawing at my arm, which was my initial
thought because my hammock was somewhat low to the ground.
(25:17):
He tumbled out of his hammock, which had split in half.
He stood there listening as his arm began to sting.
His jacket was torn, and when he took it off,
he saw holes in his arm, a lot of them.
It looked like a small animal had been gnawing on him.
Because then I was like, well, if it was an animal.
It had to have been rabbit or something. But I
(25:38):
determined like any animal could have been, whether it was
a rabbit, coyote, or fox, or just dog or skunk
or anything. Even of rats, like they're pretty easy to find,
especially in this oak leaf litter, because they can't move
very fast, and especially he tells me that he ventured
very carefully into the woods. So I walked without a
(26:03):
light down there because I really it's really about hearing
the sounds. To me, I did hear one like that.
It was just a one sudden movement in leaf litter,
so it could have been a very small animal moving
its whole body, or it could have been a person
moving afoot. So I stopped and I just stared at
(26:23):
where that sound was. I wanted to keep going, but
I didn't because I literally thought, I don't want to
get shot in the face. I kind of literally thought
somebody was looking at me, and they probably with that
movement or getting ready to do something. So I sat
there for a couple of minutes. I just said, I'm
just gonna pack up all my stuff and leave. He
(26:46):
gathered up his stuff, walked out of the park and
along the canyon road, till his phone had a signal.
He called his girlfriend and asked her to pick him up.
She took one look at his open wound, dozens of
tiny punctures, and drove him straight to the emergency room
for weeks. Afterward, he says he tried to rationalize the experience,
(27:06):
so just none of the scenarios I kept painting made
any sense. I literally just started thinking about every single
animal that lives out here and it could possibly live
out here. And I kind of ended it on a
crazy thought and I literally determined it was vampire bats.
Vampire bats because when they bite, they secrete this numbing
(27:28):
sensation so you can't feel it. And then they lapped
your blood and it seemed like a superficial wound and
the but then one day something unexpected happened. A round
metal pellet fell out of his arm, then another and another,
and it just popped out and it didn't feel like anything,
(27:49):
and it was just a perfect shallow circle that it left.
And then I found it and it was metal biting
your teeth. You drop it on glass, and like, did
my body just make that? I don't think so. And
then um, and then eventually we just a few of
the wounds were still kind of open, so I go.
(28:09):
Friend started like squeezing at it, so he took that
one out and then we were like, all right, we
need to get X ray and they found four There
were four more embedded in there pretty deep, So then
I went and got surgery. He hadn't been bitten by
a rabbit animal or by a vampire bat good. He'd
been shot with bird shot, small shotgun pellets used to
(28:30):
kill birds in flight. Jimmy shows me the scar. It's
about three and a half inches across on the underside
of his right arm, between the elbow and the shoulder.
It's a big, scary looking wound. If you just look
at the pattern of my arm, like, it looks like
they are pretty close, but it's hard to say. But
within five feet is what the police officers actually told
(28:53):
me it was most likely. But the wound isn't even
the most disturbing part. The most disturbing part is how
Jimmy sleeps. How he was sleeping when he was shot,
bundled up in his down jacket and sleeping bag, wrapped
up in his hammock, with his right arm draped over
his head. It seemed to Jimmy that the person who
(29:15):
shot him was aiming for his head. After the pellets
fell out of his arm, Jimmy went back to the
park and tried to find someone to talk to, someone
he could tell this bizarre story too and maybe get answers.
So I just came out here and I was just
looking around, and I found a state park employee and
just told them what happened. And he told me that
(29:38):
somebody's vehicle was shot with the same bird shot, and
so they were really concerned about it, and so he
gave me the number for the sheriff. I tried to
contact them a few times, but they pretty much never
revealed much information, and so probably after like a couple
of emails and a couple of phone calls, I just stopped.
(30:00):
I asked Jimmy, if he'll indulge me go on a walk.
I want to see how long it takes to get
from where he was shot over to the campground. He's game.
It's not far, but it takes us an hour on
dusty trails through the foothills out a run fifteen minutes max.
(30:22):
So we're going under a little sort of riparian area.
We're in a ripe Parian area. From the campground, we
walked to the entrance of the park out onto the
canyon road where all those cars were shot near misses four, five,
and six. And while we walk, it hits me how
(30:43):
small this area really is. I just want to say
one thing, because we may not be here again. Up
and down this stretch of road is where the tree
dawn shootings at cars were concentrated. Wow, I didn't know that.
That's crazy. It seems so obvious. It is all right here.
(31:09):
Jimmy's right, it is all right here. How could the
Sheriff's department in state parks not have seen that? How
could they think or say they believed these were isolated incidents.
Why wouldn't they have warned the public? The authorities, Jimmy says,
(31:30):
we're pretty unhelpful throughout his ordeal. After taking his report,
they never followed up. They didn't seem to care. But
they did say something odd. Well, they didn't really tell
me much because they said that you can actually kind
of manufacture different weapons. So like the officer actually said,
they could have made something to fire this type around,
(31:53):
like even something really small that you just hit from
the back. It could have been a handheld thing or anything.
This is about the so called missing shotgun, The gun
that was used in near misses one through five, the
one that was fired at Jimmy while he slept in
his hammock, The gun that has never been found. From
(32:15):
what the cops told Jimmy, it sounds like that gun
wasn't a gun at all.
Host
Dana Goodyear
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