April 6, 2021 • 41 mins
Who is Anthony Rauda?
He’s more than a drifter. He’s an aspiring musician and a writer, with a long history of mental-health struggles and an extensive criminal record. He's a committed survivalist, attempting to live completely off the grid and without assistance. He’s been arrested repeatedly with antique firearms and gunpowder.
And he hates the Lost Hills cops.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin or sick cr zero season nine seven six six
zero five Shift. Thank you very much. You're welcome to
I'd like to speak. I sit in court and watch
Anthony Rowda a lot. No, you'd denied. This is the
(00:40):
tape from that first time I saw him, when he
threw himself up against the walls of his plexiglass cage,
shouting at the judge, his own lawyer, the bailiff, the world.
So I don't give a shit. I'm want to speak.
You don't have a right speak. I'm speak, but you
speaking through your return. No, I'm not gonna speak. I'm
not gonna cooperate with the pup defenders oppose anymore. So
(01:01):
that's that's the case. And on that one piece of ship,
you're a piece of ship, bitch sharks that motherfucker, fucking
your mama. I think my client is a little over.
I haven't been accustomed to him. The murder case is
(01:24):
dragging through pre trial hearings. Routa is a frequent miss out.
I never know if he'll even show up, or which
router will show up. He can seem calm and lucid.
Other times he's out of it. He appears to be
smiling or laughing, but I can never tell it who
or at what he stretches, pulls his cheek, yawns. It's
(01:47):
like watching someone watch a sitcom. I can't see. Then,
without warning, Hilly rupped his lawyer, a new one every
several months. Is quote a little punk ass motherfucker, and
Rotta wants to go proper represent himself. I've wondered a
lot about his mental state and about his guilt. Could
(02:10):
this person really have killed Tristan Bodet? What would have
been his motivation? I've been sending rout of letters in jail,
googling every name I can find that connects to him,
trying to find out as much as I can about
this man who seems to have wanted so badly to disappear.
And I keep coming back to the same questions. What
(02:32):
kind of loaner camps out in the hills behind the
Sheriff's station and why would a hermit wander into a
campground with a gun? I'm Dana Goodyear and this is
Lost Hills, episode five, Crazy Horse. All Right, we're ready
(03:24):
to do this. I'm just gonna go for it. I'm
standing outside a large complex of attached houses in the
middle of the sprawling San Fernando Valley. I'm not too
far from Malibu, just on the other side of the mountains.
But it's a different world, fast food places and low
slung housing, the stucco jungle. It's six o'clock at night,
(03:47):
ninety five degrees. I'm about to knock on the door
to the unit where I think Lisa Rouda Cook lives.
Lisa Rouda as in Anthony's sister. Hello, Hi, are you Jerry? No?
Hold on a second, okay, ye all, Actually I'm trying
(04:08):
to find Lisa. Okay, one second, Thank you very much.
I know that Lisa is married to a man named
Jerry Cook, and they've lived at this address for quite
some time. She has a good job at a bank,
and I have a feeling that Anthony and Lisa are
or were close. At one point, he carried around letters
from Lisa in his backpack. I found that in some
(04:29):
old court documents he filed petitioning to get the letters back.
That detail kills me. So here I am knocking on
her door. Hi are you Jerry? Please? Okay? Can I
just tell you who I am? No, I don't need
to know. I've got Jerry Cook's number, so I try
(04:51):
calling him from the car, just as a guy with
a leaflower walks by. Oh, hi is this Jerry, Jerry,
This is Dana Goodyear. I just was at your door.
I'm really sorry to have disturbed you. I just I'm
trying to explain what I'm doing. I've been course sponding
with Anthony. I've been talking to Oswald and I'm trying
(05:14):
to learn more about him and his background and his childhood,
and that's why I'm trying to reach out to you
and Lisa. Jerry is pretty down on the idea, but
if Anthony wants him to talk to me, he will.
I'll just need to get written permission, he says from Anthony.
That tells me something. Even if these people never show
(05:37):
up in court or associate publicly with Routa in any way,
they're still supporting him. But I'm just saying, if Anthony
tells me in writing, then I'll take a snapshot of
that and texted to you at this number, and then
we can talk. They still care what he thinks. Okay,
thank you very much. And Jerry tells me they all
(05:59):
think this is a frame job. Ozzie Anthony Rowda's dad
shows up for almost every hearing. I check his face
for signs of fatigue. The days when his cheeks are sallow,
helled not a quick hillo and then hurry off to
work afterward. But when he's in a good mood, we
(06:20):
talked for long stretches and I ask him about the
Anthony Routa. He knows his kid, not the alleged Malibu killer.
He tells me that Anthony was born at the Big
Kaiser Hospital in Hollywood. He grew up on the East
side of Los Angeles in Highland Park before it was gentrified.
Anthony's the youngest of three kids. Ozzie remembers him as
(06:43):
shy and neat and meticulously clean. He didn't even get
dirty playing baseball. He loved cats. These details are so undescriptive.
I feel like I'm looking at the back of someone's minivan. Anthony,
his parents and siblings are like those stick figure drawings.
Is Ozzie withholding or does he just not know? It's
(07:06):
almost like his youngest son barely registered for him, and
none of it even begins to explain how Anthony finds
himself in jail on murder charges. Ozzie says that he
and Anthony's mom divorced in the late eighties. Then she
moved the kids to Florida when Anthony was ten or twelve.
(07:28):
At that point, Ozzie lost track of him completely. When
Anthony showed up in la again years later, Ozzie says
he was different, friendless, joyless, sleepless, laughing weirdly all the time.
His son, but not Hello, Dana. I'm writing in response
(07:50):
to your letters. I would have written you earlier, but
the jail staff has been sending back stamps, envelopes, etc.
In June twenty nineteen, I got my first letter from
Anthony Rawda. He's careful, always playing close with information about
his time in Malibu, but he's generous with itineraries accounts
of a vagabond life. It's kind of a Kerouac hobotale.
(08:12):
In his telling about twenty years ago, I decided to
leave my life due to threats on me and my
family's life. Rata's letters are being read by an actor.
They've been lately edited for clarity. I packed a backpack
with no money, and I traveled on foot and car
rides from Florida to Niagara Falls. After that, he's been
(08:32):
drifting around for two decades, spending time with homeless and
transient communities up and down the West Coast. Malibu and
the nearby San Fernando Valley were a home base. The
terrain he kept returning to. I did this three times
and got tired and decided to stop traveling and settle
in Los Angeles. I did not want to work and
could not adjust to a stable life, so I decided
(08:54):
to be homeless. I spent many days and nights on beaches, mountains, etc.
I have hike parts of the Pacific Crest Trail, traveled
to Texas and Arizona. I've been in various parts of
the Santa Monica Mountains. In his first letter, he also
starts to tell me about his history with law enforcement.
It goes back years. He has a special hatred for
(09:17):
the Lost Hills cops. I have a history of being
assaulted by sheriff's deputies inside jail and by the Lost
Hills Department. I've tried to sue the sheriffs. I have
written internal affairs in the past, including the ACLU and
Amnesty International, but no one helped or even investigated. I
wrote the county ombuntsmen many times. They usually investigated, but
(09:41):
the officers protect each other with lies. They're lying now,
over the course of nine months, I get a total
of five letters. It's a bumpy correspondence. He accuses me
of ignoring letters I never received, and letters of mine
come back unopened. From the erratic rhythm, it seems like
(10:02):
the Sheriff's department is interfering with the mail. He says
they're messing with him in other ways, too outraged, for instance,
that they put him in with the general population. His
name and face have been all over the news as
an attempted murderer of two little girls. As far as treatment,
they refused me a phone call at arrest and tried
(10:24):
to question me after I asked for an attorney. They
put me in general population after arrest, even though my
face was on television. Deputies try to question me about
my case. They sent back mail with stamps and envelopes.
They have refused me visits. They sometimes try to smut
my name among the inmates. I don't want the wrong
image to be conveyed to people that I am a
(10:44):
monster benefiting from the hardship of the victims of the case.
He writes that he's being stonewalled and railroaded, maybe even
by his own lawyers. I have been wronged by the
system and other people. I am not a violent person,
and I would never want to be known as someone
who would hurt innocent people or children. I try to
(11:06):
draw him out on other subjects. Tell me about your art,
I say. He often includes a sketch with his letters.
I've been writing and sketching since i was eleven or
twelve years old, and have been complimented over them since then.
I've been interested in rap hip hop since my teens,
and it was always a dream to make an album.
He cites his creative inspirations Elvis, the Three Stooges, Tupac, Edgar,
(11:32):
Allan Poe, and now me. He sends me a poem.
It's called lies. It's all about lies, lies surrounding him,
pain killing him, living a lie for his enemies. One
pair of line sticks out quote when I opened my
hands and see blood instead of sweat and dirt. That
(11:56):
gets me thinking. It's not to be taken literal, he writes.
He tells me he wanted to be a DJ. That
didn't work out. Then he submitted a headshot to Central
Casting in Burbank. He says, he cast in something, but
the role was canceled. That's as close as I came
to success. I met Will Chamberlain as a kid, and
(12:18):
also Richard Pryor in Canada. I did a little looking
into the television industry there. Once I tried to get
to the set of Dark Angel just to see Jessica Elba,
but I don't think it was the right time. I
didn't see anyone the weird stuff I'd do. He signed
up for Social Security and got a driver's license. He
(12:40):
rented a car and drove up to Big Bear and camped.
He says he reads a lot of anarchist books, Illuminati conspiracies,
handbooks for outdoor survival, manuals on how to disappear. He
once made himself a fake press pass. I could make
birth certificate state ID, which led to the city News
ID to convince someone I was who I was and
(13:03):
maybe go to shows and concerts free. His life was
lonely by design, especially in Malado. I've seen a lot
of places. The Santa Monica Mountains are beautiful and I
have a lot of pictures. The fog in the morning
off Mulholland is very thick. At night. I would take
(13:24):
pictures with my phone of the colorful flowers. Baby lizards
used to crawl on me when I was sitting in
the sun. He did a lot of weird stuff on
his own, tripping out in nature. I did do some meditation,
but not a lot. Once I think I had a vision,
but I don't know. There were no drugs involved. I
(13:45):
was trying astral projection at the time. It was not
breathing exercises, but a total relaxation of the body. To me,
it worked. I've never had a similar experience again. Sometimes
he was scared, like in the summer of twenty eighteen.
I heard a lot of gunshots around the time of
the Boudette killing. I thought I got shot at one night,
(14:06):
but not sure if it was intentional. I just heard
the bullets fly by. That's interesting he's claiming he was
nearly a victim of the Canyon shooter. Is this guy
messing with me? Or is this some kind of clue
into his psyche. They closed down the park. I heard
the sheriff's cruiser sirens a lot during the summer. It
(14:28):
felt like I was being followed when I was hiking
because I've seen the same automobiles more than once, so
I don't know the family had a reward for information,
yet no one had information leading to my arrest. Well
that's all for now. I hope I've given you some
confidence in me and something to build on. I don't
(14:49):
know about confidence, but there is definitely a lot to
build on. In his letters, a timeline emerges, and with
it the beginnings of a narrative. A little flash on
the stick figures bones. He dropped out of school in
Tampa in twelfth grade and then spent a couple of
months in the army. The army turned into a bad experience.
(15:10):
I joined to get away from personal matters, but when
I got there for basic training, I could not leave
my personal behind me and I could not adjust mentally.
I did complete basic training with good grades and returned
back to Tampa Bay to worse problems. So he hit
the road. He didn't really work. The only thing he
(15:30):
says he did was some kind of private eye work
called skip tracing, essentially looking for people who don't want
to be found. I am beginning to think he was
his own hardest case. He left only the faintest impression
on the world. That is, until Tristan Boudette was killed.
I didn't meet a lot of people in the mountains
(15:51):
where I was arrested, and definitely not in my spot.
The po boxes he lists as addresses on court documents,
they don't exist, or there's no record that router rented them.
The library where he says he spent time. When I
go there, the librarians just look concerned and shake their heads.
Where I got arrested, there was no tent. I have
(16:14):
not used tents in years one, so I can travel
anytime lightly too, so I can learn to survive outdoors
with as little as possible. As stated, I do not
know everything that was there, as I traveled and hiked
when I wanted. I was in that area less than
a year. The McDonald's, the grocery store, the other places
(16:35):
with dumpsters he might have picked through. No one's seen him,
No one except the owner of the sandwich shop, who
swears Ratto was hanging around last week. Only he's been
in jail for a year. In my letters, I plead
with him to come up with just one name. A cousin,
a teacher, a childhood friend. He does not comply. My
(16:57):
family has nothing to do with the crimes I'm charged with.
And know nothing of the things I'd do. But he
does give me permission to talk to his sister Lisa
and her husband Jerry, if you do not floyd them.
I don't mind you talking to them if they want
to talk to you. But when I tell Jerry that,
he declines the interview. Anyway. I find a page on
(17:20):
Facebook devoted to the high school in Tampa that Rawdah
attended for a while in the nineties. Someone remembers him.
It's a guy who says he was friends with Rautah
in eighth, ninth, and tenth grade. I think I'm finally
going to get it, that one story that crystallizes who
Anthony Rawda is and makes sense of everything. So I'm
(17:41):
all excited, and I ask Tony Tucker, the friend, if
he has any strong memories of Rauta. To be completely honest,
I mean, I really don't. Hey was normal. Our group
of friends were very much kind of the sports kids.
We didn't mind getting dirty, so we were always there
early in the morning playing basketball before the bell rang.
(18:03):
And did he party know, have a girlfriend, a nickname,
a hard time in school? Not really, no, no more
than anyone else. But he didn't. I mean seemed like
a normal every day kid to me. Tony lost track
of him, and he doesn't even really know why Pooh
Woosh gone. One day after a hearing, Ozzy comes back
(18:29):
to the office with me and I walk him through
some documents that have recently been unsealed. He promises me
that next time he'll do the recorded interview, but that
court date comes and he ghosts me. A few days later,
I opened my last letter from Anthony Rowda. I have
returned from court and I wish to reply to your
letter out of courtesy. I no longer trust talking to
(18:52):
you or other media. I cannot condone or forgive you
or anyone who personally tries to help law enforcement build
a case against me or harass me. The letter is short,
just two pages, a bitter, self pitying rant. I'm no
help to him, actually probably the opposite, So he's not
going to help me. God, he's the best judge and
(19:15):
my only friend, the only one I have to answer to.
Anthony Rawda is done telling me about himself. Another way
(19:40):
into the mind of Anthony Rowda is through his music.
Rowda has cut an EP and two full length albums.
You can find them on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music
search up his pen names crazy Horse and crazy Horse
(20:00):
to one that's Crazy with a K. This is a
song called kill a Pig from his album The Great
White Liar. Get Ready to get get ready, get set,
get going. Let's go kill a fucking cop. Liars, sadus, pedophiles, motherfuckers.
(20:21):
He's going to get them with his nine millimeter. People up, millimeter,
put the heater straight, typic dome to see him. If
they don't yet see that, mother fucking eyes from out
of the head, now they dead behind in the floor
of blood. To kill a cop must beat the greatest
feeling in the world. I want to enjoy it over
and over again. Year. To kill a cop must be
the greatest feeling in the world. I want to enjoy
(20:43):
it over and over again. On his album Covers, Routa
draws a long haired warrior with high cheekbones emaciated, almost skeletal.
I'm guessing it's Roudah's idea of a Native American. He
wears a headband that says crazy horse with a K.
The original Crazy Horse with a C was an Oglala
(21:06):
Lakota warrior. He painted his cheek with a lightning bolt
and wore a hawk feather in his hair. People say
that whenever someone asked to take his picture, crazy Horse
would respond, would you imprison my shadow? Also this is
(21:27):
the song fall Guy from Rouda's first album Sometimes They
Come Back, which he made in twenty thirteen Satellites. As
best I can make out, the lyrics are paranoia, conspiracy, theory,
cia Manchurian candidacy, my anxiety, something something on database, satellite
(21:50):
in space, something something they want to make me the
fall guy, lise or assholes. Then later look at my
middle finger. I'm the fall guy middle finger up in
the sky the same. In one of his letters, Rada
(22:10):
says he taught himself to use recording software and wrote
both albums on a laptop. Each one took him about
a month. I used hotels and sometimes the library, Calabasas
and any mall with Wi Fi and electrical outlets. The
themes of both albums center around police and harassment, drinking
and getting fucked up, and violence, a fair amount of violence,
(22:33):
avenging himself on cops, women and undefined others out to
get him. He almost seems to be psyching himself up
for a confrontation. His music hits on all the gangs
to rap cliches. But there's something else in there too,
a worldview, maybe even a cosmology. This is the opening
track from his album The Great White Liar. He'll be
(23:00):
others in slaveries, a freedom, a freeze, put the eight
that grows in the unrooted in justice. He's saying, I'm
rooted in justice. I murdered the serpent. He grew wings
like a phoenix. I shot him from the sky, pulled
out his spine, his true, fake mind. So he found
it a nation built on lies. It's a glimpse into
(23:20):
a chaotic mind, the mind of a paranoid, self righteous,
pissed off mystic. I've been trying to find rowda trace
(23:42):
his ghostly presence in the world. Didn't anyone know him,
hadn't anyone seen him? Thinking about the case, it occurs
to me that there are some people around Malibu who
do think they saw him on security cameras while he
was allegedly committing armed burglaries. Which is how I find
(24:05):
myself with Jim Corcus and Mike McNutt, who worked for
the local water district. I'll give you my theory. That's Jim.
We're driving over to the Tapia Water Reclamation facility. It's
right next to Tapia Park, not far from where Jimmy
Rogers was shot. So I think he'd been living off
(24:28):
the coolers in the campsite for all these years, and
once he shot Tristan, they closed the park and his
basically his lunchbox was empty at that point because he
had no source of food, and that's when he got
desperate to look around. It's here that in the fall
of twenty eighteen, a man in black was caught on
(24:51):
camera in the middle of the night. What would you
normally be looking at on these camerasbcat and pumas. We'll
say that we did have we did have a We
do have another patrol in the area. We call it
the Puma Patrol, or a P fifty four. So we
had a Mountain Lion and that was like hanging out
and checking things out, tagged and everything like that. So
(25:14):
but P. Fifty four is off on those evenings that
he was here. So they tell me that strange things
had been happening around the plant. There had been other
times where employees were noticing that some of their food
is missing, and so a lot of the employees is saying, Oh,
it's just somebody eating my lunch or whatever. Right, the
(25:37):
first break in, he was pretty good. How he got in.
It was undetected, really, and so he got in and
he was like stealing chicken sandwiches and everything he took
was protein based. One of the other things that I
was told that he was taking a stuff that he
didn't need to cook. I know for sure. One of
his favorites was Jimmy Dean's breakfast sausage sandwiches. They reviewed
(26:03):
the footage from the security camera and that's when they
saw the man. He looked for battle. Yeah. So he
had like almost like black camo attire on and tactical gear. Right,
his boots, you know, his pants were bloused. In his boots,
he had high you know, boots at half you know,
halfway up his calf. This is Brett Dingman, a manager
(26:25):
at the plant. Everything was black. He had a backpack,
he had a what you called balajava a mask. You know.
He just looked like almost like military. Jim scrolls through
his phone and finds the video. It shows a man
with a headlamp stealthily making his way to the door
of the plant. It's a creepy video. A few seconds
(26:49):
that loop over and over, and it's totally captivating. If
this is Rauta on the tape, it's the closest I'll
ever get to seeing him in his element, Rauta alone
in the night, surrounded by woods, scavenging, hunting, surviving, Rauda
(27:13):
in the wild. Jim slows the video down so I
can clearly see something sticking out from behind the man.
So it was it was around slung around his waist
here with the barrel pointing backwards, okay, And you can
see that it had a clip in it, which it
was a nine millimeter. Everybody at the plant knew about
(27:36):
the murder in the campground and the news of the
other shootings was spreading. He started going, what's going on.
There's some nut with a gun out there, and we
thought about that. But right about you, soon after those
reports came out, it's when the break in happened here.
And at first like, oh, something broke in. Then we thought, whoall,
he's dressed a full stranger breaking in and you see
the rifle, Oh, this might be the guy, And that
was right then that's the one that clicked. It clicked
(27:59):
for law enforcement too. Shortly after this footage was taken.
The Sheriff's department searched the hills and eventually found Routa
at his camp. That narrative shootings to murder, to break ins,
to capture. It follows a certain kind of logic. But
is it just me? Or is there something contradictory about
(28:21):
the idea of a person stealing food in the middle
of the night and also shooting people at random. It's
a crime of survival versus totally gratuitous violence, calculated opportunism
right up against outright depravity. Anthony Rowda's music is really visceral.
(29:10):
Take kill a pig. It talks about wanting to creep
up on him with a nine millimeter put the heater
straight to the dome, see the CoP's eyes pop out
of his head, and watch him die in a pool
of blood. It's strong stuff. You can't condemn someone on
their lyrics. But I've got to wonder what was going
(29:32):
on with Rowda and the cops. So I turned to
the court documents, old cases with hundreds and hundreds of
pages of handwritten filings by Anthony Rowda. He seems to
prefer to represent himself. There are also many, many pages
of case narratives, evidence logs, statements from law enforcement, witness testimony,
(29:53):
a lot to wade through. I learned that Rowdah's trouble
with the law started in his teens, back when he
was in Florida, but his problems really begin in the
early two thousands, when he started hanging out in and
around Malibu. First, it was pretty small time, unambitious. Two
thousand and three, he breaks into a high school ten
(30:16):
miles from Alubuqreek State Park, just outside Lost Hill's jurisdiction.
He sets a fire. The break in is a felony,
and he gets one hundred and eighty days in jail,
three years probation and counseling. He's ordered to pay three
thousand dollars in restitution to the Coca Cola company, which
sounds to me like he busted a vending machine. That
(30:39):
reminds me of the burglaries he's charged with now. That
vending machine he allegedly smashed open with a rock. The
next case is a bigger deal. This time Rod is
arrested during a warrant sweep at a sleazy motel in
North Hollywood. In his motel room, the arresting officer's notice
a fuse like for explosives sticking out of his black backpack.
(31:03):
The bomb squad searches Ozzie's house and the house in
the valley where Anthony's sister Lisa and her husban when
Jerry live. They find a bunch of contraband. Routa apparently
has ordered three shipments of gunpowder. One of the shipments
is four pounds. They also confiscate two old fashioned guns,
(31:24):
a forty four black powder revolver and a four to
fifty one double barrel derringer handgun. I have to dig
into this a little more black powdered guns. It seems
like an odd choice for a guy with gangs to
wrap aspirations. I call up Greg Block, a firearms trainer,
(31:49):
an expert witness who testifies in court about guns all
the time. So these are guns that were used during
the Civil War and the Revolution where we didn't have
cartridge firing guns. They're muzzle loaders, which means you pour
gunpowder directly into the guns mouth, hence the four plus
(32:11):
pounds of it. They're basically what John Wilkes Booth used
to assassinate President Lincoln. They're often referred to as antique guns.
But really they're replicas of obsolete technology. Well, you know,
they make toy guns, they make prop guns, and then
they have replicas which are exact copies of the original firearms.
(32:33):
Those are a couple hundred dollars. I want to know
who the audience is for weapons like these. Maybe it'll
give me some insight into Rauta. Well, people that feel
that they were born in the wrong century. I mean
they will dress up in period costumes and they'll have
competitions and matches and shoot this. Other people that like
(32:55):
the Old West or the seventeen hundreds. Because these replicas
are so inexpensive, they'll buy him and we call them
wall hangers. They'll hang them on the wall above the fireplace.
They look kind of cool. That doesn't sound like Routa
to me. He wasn't decorating his fishing cabin or re
enacting shootouts at the OK Corral. But Gregg tells me
(33:17):
there's another category of antique gun buyer, people who buy
them because they're easier to get than other guns. That
sounds like Routa, a convicted felon, someone who couldn't pass
a background check. You can order them on the internet
and they can ship them to your house because they're
antique firearms. The black Petter guns, the explosives, and the
(33:40):
fuse land route. In prison, he parols out and in
twenty twelve, he gets arrested by a Lost Hills deputy
in the parking lot of an upscale suburban mall. It's
a DUI, which doesn't sound like that big a deal,
but in the trunk of the car there's a box
of ammunition, the kind that fits an R fifteen. I
(34:00):
track down the deputy. I ask if he remembers Routa. Oh,
he remembers him. The guy threatened his life. Routa represents
himself in court and is sentenced to sixteen months in
county jail for the ammunition. He's supposed to complete an
alcohol rehab program, but doesn't. When a judge leader asks
(34:21):
him about that, he says, I'm going to go. I
was making a date for my therapy. This is from
a court transcript. I'm just going to go through counseling
and try to get a residence and you know, try
to get my health better. That's really what I'm trying
to do. I should have went to the classes, but
they were a little rough for me. I can't stand
being around people. I didn't tell you that last time
(34:42):
because it's irrelevant. But basically, I'm going to try and
do counseling and stay on SSI if they'll have me,
try to get a residence and get my health back up.
The incident that sends Routa back to prison in twenty
fourteen is a weird one. It takes place outside of
high school, about a ten minute drive from Malibu Creek
(35:03):
State Park. A jogger sees someone passed out in the
bushes by the school. It's rout Up, dressed head to
toe in black. Inside his backpack deputies fine gloves, a
camouflage mask and a headlamp. There's a post it containing
bank account information and routing numbers, also some forty four
(35:23):
ball ammunition and wrapped in a bandana, a wood handled
black powder gun. What exactly was he up to? Was
he planning burglaries, identity theft? Dressing up as a bad
guy for Halloween. He spends another two years in prison,
and when he gets out, he makes a vow to
(35:44):
change his life. When I got released from prison in
twenty sixteen, I made a promise to live without welfare
SSI or handouts. This is from one of Router's letters
to me. I wanted to do solely on my own
knowledge of survival, to prove something to myself and maybe
right about it. He says. Avoiding people, a specially law enforcement,
(36:07):
became his number one priority. In another letter, he wrote,
I worried every time I left the wilderness, as the
sheriffs would usually try to stop and question me and
my being around such exclusive neighborhoods. I did not want
to get questioned as to my probation. When I was
alone in the wilderness, I did not have a lot
(36:28):
of contact with people, news, etc. I did not want
any contact, and I do not enjoy any current television, movies, music, etc.
The most important thing out there was to have shelter
and a two week weather forecast. In October twenty sixteen,
Routa makes his last contact with his probation officer, and
(36:50):
a couple weeks later, allegedly he shoots Jimmy Rogers as
he sleeps in a hammock in Malibu Creek State Park.
The charges route is facing now murder and attempted murder
mark a break with everything I learned about his criminal past.
(37:11):
He's been troublesome, antisocial, volatile, messed up, He went down
some creepy roads, got into some obscure weapons. He was
potentially but not actually violent. Shooting Jimmy Rogers is the
first time that I know of that Route has been
accused of physically hurting a stranger out of the blue.
(37:38):
The accusation is that he intended to kill Jimmy Rogers,
and that after shooting him, he tried over and over
to inflict deadly harm, and that in the case of
Tristan Bodet, he succeeded. It doesn't really make sense, does it.
But reading back through Routah's court filings, I realize there's
(37:59):
an incident he refers to repeatedly with a lot of bitterness.
He's been trying to get someone to pay attention to
this for years. It was a run in with some
Lost Hills cops. Way back in two thousand and four,
Lost Hills Sheriff deputies responded to a public disturbance call
at Padre's restaurant at Agra Road and Cornell Road. This
(38:24):
is what Rowda says in a filing he made about
the incident. I was stopped on a dark street as
a suspect, though I am innocent. When I attempted to
plead with the deputy, others arrived surrounding me, while one
higher ranked deputy attempted to choke me till the arresting
officer asked him to halt. This could be the thing
(38:47):
that propels the whole bizarre machinery of Routah's criminal life
takes it to the next level. This incident, Rowda says,
caused him to get a gun for self protection against
the Lost Hills cops. It might even explain how Rowda
(39:14):
got to be where he is right now, facing by
far the most serious charges of his life. It's not
a straight line by any stretch, from that alleged assault
to where he is today, but I can see a connection.
It's like a process got set in motion. Rouda in trouble.
(39:35):
Rowdah uncooperative, imprisoned, hurt, deteriorating, and possibly wanting some kind
of revenge. He isn't too good with authority, his dad
told me, and his experiences in custody and in court,
it seems like they just drove the splinter deeper. Anthony
(40:00):
Rowda didn't know Tristan Bodat or any of the near
miss victims, but everyone knows who would respond to a
murder in the park Are the Lost Hills cops? Somehow
part of this could it, on some level be about them?
(40:22):
If only I could get inside Lost Hills Station, I
could figure all this out. Lost Hills is written and
(40:58):
hosted by me Dana Goodyear. It's produced by Western Sound
and Pushkin Industries. For more information about my investigation, follow
at Lost Hills Pod on social media. Up next episode six,
Another Day in Paradise,
Pushkin or sick cr zero season nine seven six six
zero five Shift. Thank you very much. You're welcome to
I'd like to speak. I sit in court and watch
Anthony Rowda a lot. No, you'd denied. This is the
(00:40):
tape from that first time I saw him, when he
threw himself up against the walls of his plexiglass cage,
shouting at the judge, his own lawyer, the bailiff, the world.
So I don't give a shit. I'm want to speak.
You don't have a right speak. I'm speak, but you
speaking through your return. No, I'm not gonna speak. I'm
not gonna cooperate with the pup defenders oppose anymore. So
(01:01):
that's that's the case. And on that one piece of ship,
you're a piece of ship, bitch sharks that motherfucker, fucking
your mama. I think my client is a little over.
I haven't been accustomed to him. The murder case is
(01:24):
dragging through pre trial hearings. Routa is a frequent miss out.
I never know if he'll even show up, or which
router will show up. He can seem calm and lucid.
Other times he's out of it. He appears to be
smiling or laughing, but I can never tell it who
or at what he stretches, pulls his cheek, yawns. It's
(01:47):
like watching someone watch a sitcom. I can't see. Then,
without warning, Hilly rupped his lawyer, a new one every
several months. Is quote a little punk ass motherfucker, and
Rotta wants to go proper represent himself. I've wondered a
lot about his mental state and about his guilt. Could
(02:10):
this person really have killed Tristan Bodet? What would have
been his motivation? I've been sending rout of letters in jail,
googling every name I can find that connects to him,
trying to find out as much as I can about
this man who seems to have wanted so badly to disappear.
And I keep coming back to the same questions. What
(02:32):
kind of loaner camps out in the hills behind the
Sheriff's station and why would a hermit wander into a
campground with a gun? I'm Dana Goodyear and this is
Lost Hills, episode five, Crazy Horse. All Right, we're ready
(03:24):
to do this. I'm just gonna go for it. I'm
standing outside a large complex of attached houses in the
middle of the sprawling San Fernando Valley. I'm not too
far from Malibu, just on the other side of the mountains.
But it's a different world, fast food places and low
slung housing, the stucco jungle. It's six o'clock at night,
(03:47):
ninety five degrees. I'm about to knock on the door
to the unit where I think Lisa Rouda Cook lives.
Lisa Rouda as in Anthony's sister. Hello, Hi, are you Jerry? No?
Hold on a second, okay, ye all, Actually I'm trying
(04:08):
to find Lisa. Okay, one second, Thank you very much.
I know that Lisa is married to a man named
Jerry Cook, and they've lived at this address for quite
some time. She has a good job at a bank,
and I have a feeling that Anthony and Lisa are
or were close. At one point, he carried around letters
from Lisa in his backpack. I found that in some
(04:29):
old court documents he filed petitioning to get the letters back.
That detail kills me. So here I am knocking on
her door. Hi are you Jerry? Please? Okay? Can I
just tell you who I am? No, I don't need
to know. I've got Jerry Cook's number, so I try
(04:51):
calling him from the car, just as a guy with
a leaflower walks by. Oh, hi is this Jerry, Jerry,
This is Dana Goodyear. I just was at your door.
I'm really sorry to have disturbed you. I just I'm
trying to explain what I'm doing. I've been course sponding
with Anthony. I've been talking to Oswald and I'm trying
(05:14):
to learn more about him and his background and his childhood,
and that's why I'm trying to reach out to you
and Lisa. Jerry is pretty down on the idea, but
if Anthony wants him to talk to me, he will.
I'll just need to get written permission, he says from Anthony.
That tells me something. Even if these people never show
(05:37):
up in court or associate publicly with Routa in any way,
they're still supporting him. But I'm just saying, if Anthony
tells me in writing, then I'll take a snapshot of
that and texted to you at this number, and then
we can talk. They still care what he thinks. Okay,
thank you very much. And Jerry tells me they all
(05:59):
think this is a frame job. Ozzie Anthony Rowda's dad
shows up for almost every hearing. I check his face
for signs of fatigue. The days when his cheeks are sallow,
helled not a quick hillo and then hurry off to
work afterward. But when he's in a good mood, we
(06:20):
talked for long stretches and I ask him about the
Anthony Routa. He knows his kid, not the alleged Malibu killer.
He tells me that Anthony was born at the Big
Kaiser Hospital in Hollywood. He grew up on the East
side of Los Angeles in Highland Park before it was gentrified.
Anthony's the youngest of three kids. Ozzie remembers him as
(06:43):
shy and neat and meticulously clean. He didn't even get
dirty playing baseball. He loved cats. These details are so undescriptive.
I feel like I'm looking at the back of someone's minivan. Anthony,
his parents and siblings are like those stick figure drawings.
Is Ozzie withholding or does he just not know? It's
(07:06):
almost like his youngest son barely registered for him, and
none of it even begins to explain how Anthony finds
himself in jail on murder charges. Ozzie says that he
and Anthony's mom divorced in the late eighties. Then she
moved the kids to Florida when Anthony was ten or twelve.
(07:28):
At that point, Ozzie lost track of him completely. When
Anthony showed up in la again years later, Ozzie says
he was different, friendless, joyless, sleepless, laughing weirdly all the time.
His son, but not Hello, Dana. I'm writing in response
(07:50):
to your letters. I would have written you earlier, but
the jail staff has been sending back stamps, envelopes, etc.
In June twenty nineteen, I got my first letter from
Anthony Rawda. He's careful, always playing close with information about
his time in Malibu, but he's generous with itineraries accounts
of a vagabond life. It's kind of a Kerouac hobotale.
(08:12):
In his telling about twenty years ago, I decided to
leave my life due to threats on me and my
family's life. Rata's letters are being read by an actor.
They've been lately edited for clarity. I packed a backpack
with no money, and I traveled on foot and car
rides from Florida to Niagara Falls. After that, he's been
(08:32):
drifting around for two decades, spending time with homeless and
transient communities up and down the West Coast. Malibu and
the nearby San Fernando Valley were a home base. The
terrain he kept returning to. I did this three times
and got tired and decided to stop traveling and settle
in Los Angeles. I did not want to work and
could not adjust to a stable life, so I decided
(08:54):
to be homeless. I spent many days and nights on beaches, mountains, etc.
I have hike parts of the Pacific Crest Trail, traveled
to Texas and Arizona. I've been in various parts of
the Santa Monica Mountains. In his first letter, he also
starts to tell me about his history with law enforcement.
It goes back years. He has a special hatred for
(09:17):
the Lost Hills cops. I have a history of being
assaulted by sheriff's deputies inside jail and by the Lost
Hills Department. I've tried to sue the sheriffs. I have
written internal affairs in the past, including the ACLU and
Amnesty International, but no one helped or even investigated. I
wrote the county ombuntsmen many times. They usually investigated, but
(09:41):
the officers protect each other with lies. They're lying now,
over the course of nine months, I get a total
of five letters. It's a bumpy correspondence. He accuses me
of ignoring letters I never received, and letters of mine
come back unopened. From the erratic rhythm, it seems like
(10:02):
the Sheriff's department is interfering with the mail. He says
they're messing with him in other ways, too outraged, for instance,
that they put him in with the general population. His
name and face have been all over the news as
an attempted murderer of two little girls. As far as treatment,
they refused me a phone call at arrest and tried
(10:24):
to question me after I asked for an attorney. They
put me in general population after arrest, even though my
face was on television. Deputies try to question me about
my case. They sent back mail with stamps and envelopes.
They have refused me visits. They sometimes try to smut
my name among the inmates. I don't want the wrong
image to be conveyed to people that I am a
(10:44):
monster benefiting from the hardship of the victims of the case.
He writes that he's being stonewalled and railroaded, maybe even
by his own lawyers. I have been wronged by the
system and other people. I am not a violent person,
and I would never want to be known as someone
who would hurt innocent people or children. I try to
(11:06):
draw him out on other subjects. Tell me about your art,
I say. He often includes a sketch with his letters.
I've been writing and sketching since i was eleven or
twelve years old, and have been complimented over them since then.
I've been interested in rap hip hop since my teens,
and it was always a dream to make an album.
He cites his creative inspirations Elvis, the Three Stooges, Tupac, Edgar,
(11:32):
Allan Poe, and now me. He sends me a poem.
It's called lies. It's all about lies, lies surrounding him,
pain killing him, living a lie for his enemies. One
pair of line sticks out quote when I opened my
hands and see blood instead of sweat and dirt. That
(11:56):
gets me thinking. It's not to be taken literal, he writes.
He tells me he wanted to be a DJ. That
didn't work out. Then he submitted a headshot to Central
Casting in Burbank. He says, he cast in something, but
the role was canceled. That's as close as I came
to success. I met Will Chamberlain as a kid, and
(12:18):
also Richard Pryor in Canada. I did a little looking
into the television industry there. Once I tried to get
to the set of Dark Angel just to see Jessica Elba,
but I don't think it was the right time. I
didn't see anyone the weird stuff I'd do. He signed
up for Social Security and got a driver's license. He
(12:40):
rented a car and drove up to Big Bear and camped.
He says he reads a lot of anarchist books, Illuminati conspiracies,
handbooks for outdoor survival, manuals on how to disappear. He
once made himself a fake press pass. I could make
birth certificate state ID, which led to the city News
ID to convince someone I was who I was and
(13:03):
maybe go to shows and concerts free. His life was
lonely by design, especially in Malado. I've seen a lot
of places. The Santa Monica Mountains are beautiful and I
have a lot of pictures. The fog in the morning
off Mulholland is very thick. At night. I would take
(13:24):
pictures with my phone of the colorful flowers. Baby lizards
used to crawl on me when I was sitting in
the sun. He did a lot of weird stuff on
his own, tripping out in nature. I did do some meditation,
but not a lot. Once I think I had a vision,
but I don't know. There were no drugs involved. I
(13:45):
was trying astral projection at the time. It was not
breathing exercises, but a total relaxation of the body. To me,
it worked. I've never had a similar experience again. Sometimes
he was scared, like in the summer of twenty eighteen.
I heard a lot of gunshots around the time of
the Boudette killing. I thought I got shot at one night,
(14:06):
but not sure if it was intentional. I just heard
the bullets fly by. That's interesting he's claiming he was
nearly a victim of the Canyon shooter. Is this guy
messing with me? Or is this some kind of clue
into his psyche. They closed down the park. I heard
the sheriff's cruiser sirens a lot during the summer. It
(14:28):
felt like I was being followed when I was hiking
because I've seen the same automobiles more than once, so
I don't know the family had a reward for information,
yet no one had information leading to my arrest. Well
that's all for now. I hope I've given you some
confidence in me and something to build on. I don't
(14:49):
know about confidence, but there is definitely a lot to
build on. In his letters, a timeline emerges, and with
it the beginnings of a narrative. A little flash on
the stick figures bones. He dropped out of school in
Tampa in twelfth grade and then spent a couple of
months in the army. The army turned into a bad experience.
(15:10):
I joined to get away from personal matters, but when
I got there for basic training, I could not leave
my personal behind me and I could not adjust mentally.
I did complete basic training with good grades and returned
back to Tampa Bay to worse problems. So he hit
the road. He didn't really work. The only thing he
(15:30):
says he did was some kind of private eye work
called skip tracing, essentially looking for people who don't want
to be found. I am beginning to think he was
his own hardest case. He left only the faintest impression
on the world. That is, until Tristan Boudette was killed.
I didn't meet a lot of people in the mountains
(15:51):
where I was arrested, and definitely not in my spot.
The po boxes he lists as addresses on court documents,
they don't exist, or there's no record that router rented them.
The library where he says he spent time. When I
go there, the librarians just look concerned and shake their heads.
Where I got arrested, there was no tent. I have
(16:14):
not used tents in years one, so I can travel
anytime lightly too, so I can learn to survive outdoors
with as little as possible. As stated, I do not
know everything that was there, as I traveled and hiked
when I wanted. I was in that area less than
a year. The McDonald's, the grocery store, the other places
(16:35):
with dumpsters he might have picked through. No one's seen him,
No one except the owner of the sandwich shop, who
swears Ratto was hanging around last week. Only he's been
in jail for a year. In my letters, I plead
with him to come up with just one name. A cousin,
a teacher, a childhood friend. He does not comply. My
(16:57):
family has nothing to do with the crimes I'm charged with.
And know nothing of the things I'd do. But he
does give me permission to talk to his sister Lisa
and her husband Jerry, if you do not floyd them.
I don't mind you talking to them if they want
to talk to you. But when I tell Jerry that,
he declines the interview. Anyway. I find a page on
(17:20):
Facebook devoted to the high school in Tampa that Rawdah
attended for a while in the nineties. Someone remembers him.
It's a guy who says he was friends with Rautah
in eighth, ninth, and tenth grade. I think I'm finally
going to get it, that one story that crystallizes who
Anthony Rawda is and makes sense of everything. So I'm
(17:41):
all excited, and I ask Tony Tucker, the friend, if
he has any strong memories of Rauta. To be completely honest,
I mean, I really don't. Hey was normal. Our group
of friends were very much kind of the sports kids.
We didn't mind getting dirty, so we were always there
early in the morning playing basketball before the bell rang.
(18:03):
And did he party know, have a girlfriend, a nickname,
a hard time in school? Not really, no, no more
than anyone else. But he didn't. I mean seemed like
a normal every day kid to me. Tony lost track
of him, and he doesn't even really know why Pooh
Woosh gone. One day after a hearing, Ozzy comes back
(18:29):
to the office with me and I walk him through
some documents that have recently been unsealed. He promises me
that next time he'll do the recorded interview, but that
court date comes and he ghosts me. A few days later,
I opened my last letter from Anthony Rowda. I have
returned from court and I wish to reply to your
letter out of courtesy. I no longer trust talking to
(18:52):
you or other media. I cannot condone or forgive you
or anyone who personally tries to help law enforcement build
a case against me or harass me. The letter is short,
just two pages, a bitter, self pitying rant. I'm no
help to him, actually probably the opposite, So he's not
going to help me. God, he's the best judge and
(19:15):
my only friend, the only one I have to answer to.
Anthony Rawda is done telling me about himself. Another way
(19:40):
into the mind of Anthony Rowda is through his music.
Rowda has cut an EP and two full length albums.
You can find them on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music
search up his pen names crazy Horse and crazy Horse
(20:00):
to one that's Crazy with a K. This is a
song called kill a Pig from his album The Great
White Liar. Get Ready to get get ready, get set,
get going. Let's go kill a fucking cop. Liars, sadus, pedophiles, motherfuckers.
(20:21):
He's going to get them with his nine millimeter. People up, millimeter,
put the heater straight, typic dome to see him. If
they don't yet see that, mother fucking eyes from out
of the head, now they dead behind in the floor
of blood. To kill a cop must beat the greatest
feeling in the world. I want to enjoy it over
and over again. Year. To kill a cop must be
the greatest feeling in the world. I want to enjoy
(20:43):
it over and over again. On his album Covers, Routa
draws a long haired warrior with high cheekbones emaciated, almost skeletal.
I'm guessing it's Roudah's idea of a Native American. He
wears a headband that says crazy horse with a K.
The original Crazy Horse with a C was an Oglala
(21:06):
Lakota warrior. He painted his cheek with a lightning bolt
and wore a hawk feather in his hair. People say
that whenever someone asked to take his picture, crazy Horse
would respond, would you imprison my shadow? Also this is
(21:27):
the song fall Guy from Rouda's first album Sometimes They
Come Back, which he made in twenty thirteen Satellites. As
best I can make out, the lyrics are paranoia, conspiracy, theory,
cia Manchurian candidacy, my anxiety, something something on database, satellite
(21:50):
in space, something something they want to make me the
fall guy, lise or assholes. Then later look at my
middle finger. I'm the fall guy middle finger up in
the sky the same. In one of his letters, Rada
(22:10):
says he taught himself to use recording software and wrote
both albums on a laptop. Each one took him about
a month. I used hotels and sometimes the library, Calabasas
and any mall with Wi Fi and electrical outlets. The
themes of both albums center around police and harassment, drinking
and getting fucked up, and violence, a fair amount of violence,
(22:33):
avenging himself on cops, women and undefined others out to
get him. He almost seems to be psyching himself up
for a confrontation. His music hits on all the gangs
to rap cliches. But there's something else in there too,
a worldview, maybe even a cosmology. This is the opening
track from his album The Great White Liar. He'll be
(23:00):
others in slaveries, a freedom, a freeze, put the eight
that grows in the unrooted in justice. He's saying, I'm
rooted in justice. I murdered the serpent. He grew wings
like a phoenix. I shot him from the sky, pulled
out his spine, his true, fake mind. So he found
it a nation built on lies. It's a glimpse into
(23:20):
a chaotic mind, the mind of a paranoid, self righteous,
pissed off mystic. I've been trying to find rowda trace
(23:42):
his ghostly presence in the world. Didn't anyone know him,
hadn't anyone seen him? Thinking about the case, it occurs
to me that there are some people around Malibu who
do think they saw him on security cameras while he
was allegedly committing armed burglaries. Which is how I find
(24:05):
myself with Jim Corcus and Mike McNutt, who worked for
the local water district. I'll give you my theory. That's Jim.
We're driving over to the Tapia Water Reclamation facility. It's
right next to Tapia Park, not far from where Jimmy
Rogers was shot. So I think he'd been living off
(24:28):
the coolers in the campsite for all these years, and
once he shot Tristan, they closed the park and his
basically his lunchbox was empty at that point because he
had no source of food, and that's when he got
desperate to look around. It's here that in the fall
of twenty eighteen, a man in black was caught on
(24:51):
camera in the middle of the night. What would you
normally be looking at on these camerasbcat and pumas. We'll
say that we did have we did have a We
do have another patrol in the area. We call it
the Puma Patrol, or a P fifty four. So we
had a Mountain Lion and that was like hanging out
and checking things out, tagged and everything like that. So
(25:14):
but P. Fifty four is off on those evenings that
he was here. So they tell me that strange things
had been happening around the plant. There had been other
times where employees were noticing that some of their food
is missing, and so a lot of the employees is saying, Oh,
it's just somebody eating my lunch or whatever. Right, the
(25:37):
first break in, he was pretty good. How he got in.
It was undetected, really, and so he got in and
he was like stealing chicken sandwiches and everything he took
was protein based. One of the other things that I
was told that he was taking a stuff that he
didn't need to cook. I know for sure. One of
his favorites was Jimmy Dean's breakfast sausage sandwiches. They reviewed
(26:03):
the footage from the security camera and that's when they
saw the man. He looked for battle. Yeah. So he
had like almost like black camo attire on and tactical gear. Right,
his boots, you know, his pants were bloused. In his boots,
he had high you know, boots at half you know,
halfway up his calf. This is Brett Dingman, a manager
(26:25):
at the plant. Everything was black. He had a backpack,
he had a what you called balajava a mask. You know.
He just looked like almost like military. Jim scrolls through
his phone and finds the video. It shows a man
with a headlamp stealthily making his way to the door
of the plant. It's a creepy video. A few seconds
(26:49):
that loop over and over, and it's totally captivating. If
this is Rauta on the tape, it's the closest I'll
ever get to seeing him in his element, Rauta alone
in the night, surrounded by woods, scavenging, hunting, surviving, Rauda
(27:13):
in the wild. Jim slows the video down so I
can clearly see something sticking out from behind the man.
So it was it was around slung around his waist
here with the barrel pointing backwards, okay, And you can
see that it had a clip in it, which it
was a nine millimeter. Everybody at the plant knew about
(27:36):
the murder in the campground and the news of the
other shootings was spreading. He started going, what's going on.
There's some nut with a gun out there, and we
thought about that. But right about you, soon after those
reports came out, it's when the break in happened here.
And at first like, oh, something broke in. Then we thought, whoall,
he's dressed a full stranger breaking in and you see
the rifle, Oh, this might be the guy, And that
was right then that's the one that clicked. It clicked
(27:59):
for law enforcement too. Shortly after this footage was taken.
The Sheriff's department searched the hills and eventually found Routa
at his camp. That narrative shootings to murder, to break ins,
to capture. It follows a certain kind of logic. But
is it just me? Or is there something contradictory about
(28:21):
the idea of a person stealing food in the middle
of the night and also shooting people at random. It's
a crime of survival versus totally gratuitous violence, calculated opportunism
right up against outright depravity. Anthony Rowda's music is really visceral.
(29:10):
Take kill a pig. It talks about wanting to creep
up on him with a nine millimeter put the heater
straight to the dome, see the CoP's eyes pop out
of his head, and watch him die in a pool
of blood. It's strong stuff. You can't condemn someone on
their lyrics. But I've got to wonder what was going
(29:32):
on with Rowda and the cops. So I turned to
the court documents, old cases with hundreds and hundreds of
pages of handwritten filings by Anthony Rowda. He seems to
prefer to represent himself. There are also many, many pages
of case narratives, evidence logs, statements from law enforcement, witness testimony,
(29:53):
a lot to wade through. I learned that Rowdah's trouble
with the law started in his teens, back when he
was in Florida, but his problems really begin in the
early two thousands, when he started hanging out in and
around Malibu. First, it was pretty small time, unambitious. Two
thousand and three, he breaks into a high school ten
(30:16):
miles from Alubuqreek State Park, just outside Lost Hill's jurisdiction.
He sets a fire. The break in is a felony,
and he gets one hundred and eighty days in jail,
three years probation and counseling. He's ordered to pay three
thousand dollars in restitution to the Coca Cola company, which
sounds to me like he busted a vending machine. That
(30:39):
reminds me of the burglaries he's charged with now. That
vending machine he allegedly smashed open with a rock. The
next case is a bigger deal. This time Rod is
arrested during a warrant sweep at a sleazy motel in
North Hollywood. In his motel room, the arresting officer's notice
a fuse like for explosives sticking out of his black backpack.
(31:03):
The bomb squad searches Ozzie's house and the house in
the valley where Anthony's sister Lisa and her husban when
Jerry live. They find a bunch of contraband. Routa apparently
has ordered three shipments of gunpowder. One of the shipments
is four pounds. They also confiscate two old fashioned guns,
(31:24):
a forty four black powder revolver and a four to
fifty one double barrel derringer handgun. I have to dig
into this a little more black powdered guns. It seems
like an odd choice for a guy with gangs to
wrap aspirations. I call up Greg Block, a firearms trainer,
(31:49):
an expert witness who testifies in court about guns all
the time. So these are guns that were used during
the Civil War and the Revolution where we didn't have
cartridge firing guns. They're muzzle loaders, which means you pour
gunpowder directly into the guns mouth, hence the four plus
(32:11):
pounds of it. They're basically what John Wilkes Booth used
to assassinate President Lincoln. They're often referred to as antique guns.
But really they're replicas of obsolete technology. Well, you know,
they make toy guns, they make prop guns, and then
they have replicas which are exact copies of the original firearms.
(32:33):
Those are a couple hundred dollars. I want to know
who the audience is for weapons like these. Maybe it'll
give me some insight into Rauta. Well, people that feel
that they were born in the wrong century. I mean
they will dress up in period costumes and they'll have
competitions and matches and shoot this. Other people that like
(32:55):
the Old West or the seventeen hundreds. Because these replicas
are so inexpensive, they'll buy him and we call them
wall hangers. They'll hang them on the wall above the fireplace.
They look kind of cool. That doesn't sound like Routa
to me. He wasn't decorating his fishing cabin or re
enacting shootouts at the OK Corral. But Gregg tells me
(33:17):
there's another category of antique gun buyer, people who buy
them because they're easier to get than other guns. That
sounds like Routa, a convicted felon, someone who couldn't pass
a background check. You can order them on the internet
and they can ship them to your house because they're
antique firearms. The black Petter guns, the explosives, and the
(33:40):
fuse land route. In prison, he parols out and in
twenty twelve, he gets arrested by a Lost Hills deputy
in the parking lot of an upscale suburban mall. It's
a DUI, which doesn't sound like that big a deal,
but in the trunk of the car there's a box
of ammunition, the kind that fits an R fifteen. I
(34:00):
track down the deputy. I ask if he remembers Routa. Oh,
he remembers him. The guy threatened his life. Routa represents
himself in court and is sentenced to sixteen months in
county jail for the ammunition. He's supposed to complete an
alcohol rehab program, but doesn't. When a judge leader asks
(34:21):
him about that, he says, I'm going to go. I
was making a date for my therapy. This is from
a court transcript. I'm just going to go through counseling
and try to get a residence and you know, try
to get my health better. That's really what I'm trying
to do. I should have went to the classes, but
they were a little rough for me. I can't stand
being around people. I didn't tell you that last time
(34:42):
because it's irrelevant. But basically, I'm going to try and
do counseling and stay on SSI if they'll have me,
try to get a residence and get my health back up.
The incident that sends Routa back to prison in twenty
fourteen is a weird one. It takes place outside of
high school, about a ten minute drive from Malibu Creek
(35:03):
State Park. A jogger sees someone passed out in the
bushes by the school. It's rout Up, dressed head to
toe in black. Inside his backpack deputies fine gloves, a
camouflage mask and a headlamp. There's a post it containing
bank account information and routing numbers, also some forty four
(35:23):
ball ammunition and wrapped in a bandana, a wood handled
black powder gun. What exactly was he up to? Was
he planning burglaries, identity theft? Dressing up as a bad
guy for Halloween. He spends another two years in prison,
and when he gets out, he makes a vow to
(35:44):
change his life. When I got released from prison in
twenty sixteen, I made a promise to live without welfare
SSI or handouts. This is from one of Router's letters
to me. I wanted to do solely on my own
knowledge of survival, to prove something to myself and maybe
right about it. He says. Avoiding people, a specially law enforcement,
(36:07):
became his number one priority. In another letter, he wrote,
I worried every time I left the wilderness, as the
sheriffs would usually try to stop and question me and
my being around such exclusive neighborhoods. I did not want
to get questioned as to my probation. When I was
alone in the wilderness, I did not have a lot
(36:28):
of contact with people, news, etc. I did not want
any contact, and I do not enjoy any current television, movies, music, etc.
The most important thing out there was to have shelter
and a two week weather forecast. In October twenty sixteen,
Routa makes his last contact with his probation officer, and
(36:50):
a couple weeks later, allegedly he shoots Jimmy Rogers as
he sleeps in a hammock in Malibu Creek State Park.
The charges route is facing now murder and attempted murder
mark a break with everything I learned about his criminal past.
(37:11):
He's been troublesome, antisocial, volatile, messed up, He went down
some creepy roads, got into some obscure weapons. He was
potentially but not actually violent. Shooting Jimmy Rogers is the
first time that I know of that Route has been
accused of physically hurting a stranger out of the blue.
(37:38):
The accusation is that he intended to kill Jimmy Rogers,
and that after shooting him, he tried over and over
to inflict deadly harm, and that in the case of
Tristan Bodet, he succeeded. It doesn't really make sense, does it.
But reading back through Routah's court filings, I realize there's
(37:59):
an incident he refers to repeatedly with a lot of bitterness.
He's been trying to get someone to pay attention to
this for years. It was a run in with some
Lost Hills cops. Way back in two thousand and four,
Lost Hills Sheriff deputies responded to a public disturbance call
at Padre's restaurant at Agra Road and Cornell Road. This
(38:24):
is what Rowda says in a filing he made about
the incident. I was stopped on a dark street as
a suspect, though I am innocent. When I attempted to
plead with the deputy, others arrived surrounding me, while one
higher ranked deputy attempted to choke me till the arresting
officer asked him to halt. This could be the thing
(38:47):
that propels the whole bizarre machinery of Routah's criminal life
takes it to the next level. This incident, Rowda says,
caused him to get a gun for self protection against
the Lost Hills cops. It might even explain how Rowda
(39:14):
got to be where he is right now, facing by
far the most serious charges of his life. It's not
a straight line by any stretch, from that alleged assault
to where he is today, but I can see a connection.
It's like a process got set in motion. Rouda in trouble.
(39:35):
Rowdah uncooperative, imprisoned, hurt, deteriorating, and possibly wanting some kind
of revenge. He isn't too good with authority, his dad
told me, and his experiences in custody and in court,
it seems like they just drove the splinter deeper. Anthony
(40:00):
Rowda didn't know Tristan Bodat or any of the near
miss victims, but everyone knows who would respond to a
murder in the park Are the Lost Hills cops? Somehow
part of this could it, on some level be about them?
(40:22):
If only I could get inside Lost Hills Station, I
could figure all this out. Lost Hills is written and
(40:58):
hosted by me Dana Goodyear. It's produced by Western Sound
and Pushkin Industries. For more information about my investigation, follow
at Lost Hills Pod on social media. Up next episode six,
Another Day in Paradise,
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