April 27, 2021 • 48 mins
Two hikers who stumbled on Rauda’s camp before the Beaudette murder lament a missed opportunity to stop the crime before it happened.
Sgt. Wright and Lt. Royal file whistleblower lawsuits against the sheriff’s department, and Sgt. Wright shares damaging information.
Erica Wu prepares to move, and, after nearly three years, scatters some of Tristan Beaudette’s ashes.
With Anthony Rauda in custody, will peace return to Malibu?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin, you know, rolling to the call, I didn't know
(00:40):
what the circumstances were. Your train is a cop to
kind of envision what you're going to deal with when
you get there. This is Phil Reeves. He's a retired
deputy who serves as a chaplain for Lost Hills Sheriff Station.
So I figured on the way over there, this is
probably like a domestic violence thing or something that happened
in a big house, you know, in one of these
(01:00):
mansions or whatever. And it turned out to be in
the park, and that the folks there are not from here,
so they had no place, you know, they were local.
We're at his house in a nice suburban neighborhood not
far from the station. We're talking about that day June
twenty second, twenty eighteen, when he responded to a shooting
(01:23):
at Malibu Creek State Park. One of our deput female
deputy was close by and was there. No. I don't
know whether there was a ranger there prior or not,
but it was still dark and crazy in there. When
Pastor Phil got to the station, he found Tristan Boudette's
family totally distraught. You know, you can imagine what state
(01:47):
of mind that they were in. He started talking to
Scott McCurdy, Tristan's brother in law, who'd been sleeping in
the next tent over. He was actually the one who
discovered Tristan's body. Erica Wu, Tristan's wife, had been at
home in Orange County getting ready to take a medical
board exam when she got the news that her husband
(02:07):
had been killed. Now she was inside the station, Erica
was still being interviewed by the homicide guys. Eventually Erica
came out. She was focused on one thing only. Erica
was adamant about it, and she wanted to see the body.
She wanted to see Tristan's body. And I knew it
(02:30):
was probably going to be like hours and hours and hours.
Pastor Phil brought everyone back here to his house to wait.
Erica is you know? She went up and just kind
of curled up in the fetal position on the bad upstairs.
On some level, he says, she didn't believe that Tristan
(02:51):
had died. She needed to make it real. Five or
six o'clock, I forget when it was. We got a call.
I got a call from the homicide guys. Hey, the
corner's done. You gotta get over here right away. Everyone
piled into his car, and the press was there. They
were all gathered around the gate. And then I got
(03:11):
a call saying the corner doesn't want them to see
the body. I got that call just as a corner's
van was coming out of the park and Erica said,
is that him? Is he in there? They jumped out
of the car and they ran over and to intercept
the van as it was leaving, and I'm like, oh
my gosh, and it was getting to be a cluster,
(03:33):
I mean, you know, and they were really upset obviously,
you know, wailing and sobbing, and they stopped the van.
And the Corners assistant was this young lady and she
had already she was already affected by this whole thing.
She was just in tears driving the Corners van, you know,
and there the family saying open the game van. You
(03:56):
got to open the van and let us look at him.
And she said, I can't do that, you know. I was,
you know, the corner said I can't. They've got to go.
I was able to kind of say, hey, look we can't,
we can't see him now, let's get back in the car.
And the corner and the homicide guys came out and
they did something unusual, which they said, come on, let's
go in the park so that the family could ask
(04:19):
the corner and the homicide people. You know what was
questions about what they knew at that point. So I
felt there was at least some closure there for them.
I sense that maybe they have a different opinion. When
I started investigating this murder, everything about it seemed completely random.
(04:41):
But then I found out about Anthony Rowda and his
long history with law enforcement, with the Lost Hills cops,
and the violence he says they did to him, which
might have set him on his path, you know. And
these things, these things are these affect lifetimes, these are generational.
(05:01):
Pastor Phil is a pastor, so he's been going to
the Bible, to the first murder to try to understand
how violence reverberates, like what seems to have happened to Routa,
like what happened to Tristan Boudette. I just read about
Cane and Abel, and after Cane slew Abel, God says,
(05:24):
I can hear your brother's blood from the ground, but
the Hebrew for blood is plural bloods. I can hear
your brother's bloods from the ground and why is that? Why?
Why plural? And the implication is that when you take
(05:46):
somebody's life, you affect all their potentiality, all the things
that they could be, you know, you affect the children
that they might have had, the grandchildren that they might
have had. I mean, it's just you just can't even
(06:07):
begin to measure. He's saying that Tristan Bodette's murder will
affect his children, and his children's children and their children too.
I know that Erica, in her own way, has arrived
at this same idea. When I call her to check
in and ask about the girls, she says, they're amazing, happy,
(06:29):
resilient little people, but they're not the people they would
have been. Then she adds, I guess neither am I anymore.
Cain and Abel are the first two sons of Adam
(06:50):
and Eve. In the Caine Enabel story, Caine is jealous
of Able and murders him, so God exiles Caine, sending
him east to the land of Nod, a place of wandering,
a place for fugitives. How could I not think about Rauda,
(07:11):
his restless wandering, and also his camp in the desolate
hills at the edge of Malibu and how this story,
which is about violence and its echoes, is also about knowledge,
How just a little bit of knowledge could have changed everything.
(07:36):
I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, EPI, so
(08:09):
to eight east of Eden. Several months before Tristan Bodatt
was killed, a couple of hikers found route as camp.
My name is Hunter Smith, my name's Kara Hartley. They'd
followed a deer trail up into the hills north of
the Hairpin turn on Mulholland Highway. When they realized they'd
(08:33):
stumbled into someone's home, it didn't look very habitable or
like it had been habitable for a while. It seemed abandoned,
with trash spilling down the steep slopes. They looked around
for stuff to scavenge. They liked bringing souvenirs home from
their hikes. I found this hot pink machete and it
(08:58):
did have a carving on the side like somebody had
scratched into the blade, and it said queues machette on it,
see you apostrophea. It became a part of you know,
just my camping box that we would take camping and
we used to make funny stories up about this mythological
(09:20):
character that owned this machete. They were there for ten
minutes at the most. I did start feeling a little
creeped out, like, hey, this definitely was like where somebody
was living or whatever, And we both kind of felt
the same way at the same time and felt an
(09:41):
urgency to leave. Before they left, Kara grabbed one more souvenir.
The other thing that caught our eye was this like
a small box of what we're unfired twelve gage shotgun shells.
The box was caked in mud with only a few
(10:03):
shells left. We just stuffed that in her backpack. Too
months passed, the Tesla got shot, Tristan Bodett was killed,
and Malibu went crazy trying to figure out who had
done it. Kara and Hunter broke up, and they forgot
(10:24):
all about the hike to the abandoned camp. In fact,
I don't think we really thought about it until I
drove by one day on Mahornd and saw a bunch
of cop cars on that turn. When he saw that,
Hunter immediately called Kara and he was like, Kara, do
you think that possibly that camp that we found back
(10:48):
in January February, like could be the same guy. They
couldn't find the box of shotgun shells, but they decided
to turn qu'es machete in at Lost Hill station. They
brought it in in a paper trader Joe's bag, and
the detectives flipped out. I mean it was intimidating because
(11:09):
we were just immediately kind of surrounded by a bunch
of cops wanting to get like us, repeat the facts
over and over. They even wanted us to hike them
to the camp immediately, even though it was like dark outside.
And they even asked us if we were homeless and
living in our car in the canyon, and maybe I
(11:33):
just shouldn't warn my birken Stocks in that day or something.
But the deputies were intent on finding the shotgun shells.
They asked over and over what type of shells they were,
how big, what collar were they? Solid slugs, bird shop what?
They probably called me like every other day for that
(11:54):
whole two weeks, and I just kind of was at
a loss of what to do. So I did a
really good clean out of my truck and I had
found one of the twelve gage shotgun shells rolling around
in my car, you know, So I had immediately went
down to the station at that point, and I had
(12:14):
it in a little pouch and came in like, hey,
I just so you know, I did find one of
those shells in my car. Like Kara's evidence turned out
to be so important that the prosecutor asked her to
testify before the grand jury. Still she's not entirely comfortable
with the CoP's narrative or her role in it. I mean,
(12:37):
that's kind of like been the problem the whole time,
is just like there just has been such a lack
of transparency and information being released to the public or
alerting to the public about any of these things happening.
Had Karen Hunter known that there were unsolved shootings when
(12:59):
they came across an abandoned camp and found a box
of shotgun shells, it's easy to imagine that they would
have turned those in, you know. And I think that's
where PEP the communities, like distrust in that system is
spawning too, because it wasn't like widely known information that
(13:20):
there was a so called sniper in the hills. And
had Hunter and I know that we might have been
more apt to alert the authorities about the camp back
in February, and if they turned in the shotgun shells
back then, it's easy to imagine that the Sheriff's department
(13:42):
might have searched the camp and found something, or maybe
they would have put up some cameras, and then when
Router returned with a carbing they could have arrested him.
All before Tristan Boudette even planned his camping trip to
Malibu Creek State Park. Had they known, they think they
(14:08):
could have saved Death's life. For a long time, I
(14:33):
couldn't figure out what happened at Lost Hills Station. No
one would tell me what Sergeant Right and Lieutenant Royal
had done wrong in the route investigation, why they've been disciplined.
I still haven't seen the confidential internal affairs reports into
their police work on the Routa case. There's only one
person I can think of who definitely knows what happened
(14:56):
and can talk about it. In fact, she has to.
It's the prosecutor seeking to convict Routa. She's obligated to
tell the grand jury anything that could potentially be exculpatory
help to the defense. So she had to tell the
grand jury about the two dirty cops, the homicide detective
(15:17):
Daniel Morris and the Major Crimes Detective ty Berry. She
didn't call them to testify, citing their histories of misconduct.
She also talked to the grand jury at length about
Sergeant Wright and Lieutenant Royal. The reason the Sheriff's Department
disciplined them, she said, is that they conducted unauthorized investigations
(15:39):
and reenactments. When Sergeant Wright used a dowel to estimate
the trajectory of the bullet that hit Ian Kincaid's tesla,
and that time he went to the campground and pointed
a laser at Bodet's campsite to figure out where the
other bullet had gone. So what if he found a
nine millimeter bullet? It wasn't his job, she said, and
(16:00):
he didn't do it right. And Royal, she sums up
his work as a quote personal investigation into the Charged
Times ouch, it seems like Captain Bassah was right. Tweedledee
and Tweedledum gave the defense a defense. But what if
(16:23):
going rogue isn't the real reason Sergeant Right and Lieutenant
Royal were disciplined. A few weeks ago, I had a
conversation that changed my view of the whole story. My
name is Jeremy Lippmann. I am a reserve Sheriff's deputy
and a member of the Malibu Search and Rescue Team.
Lippmann is part of Sergeant Wright's old team. He's been
(16:46):
disturbed to see what his old boss has been going
through and he wants to set the record straight. He says,
what happened to Sergeant Right and Lieutenant Royal is about jealousy,
ego and wounded pride. It has nothing to do with
right and wrong or facts. Just has to do with
politics and my perception. And I've said this before, is
(17:12):
no good deed goes unpunished, so he says. The detectives
from Homicide and Major Crimes elite free ranging units that
tackle the most serious crimes, were upstaged by the local
Lost Hills detectives and the volunteers from Sergeant Right Search
and Rescue Team. It started with the nine millimeters shell
casings at the murder scene. After Bodette was killed. Homicide
(17:36):
searched the campground and didn't come up with anything. Homicide,
having not located any shell casings in their search, Malbou
Fish and Rescue was tasked and the team was tasked
to go and conduct a secondary search, which we did.
Sergeant Wright, he says, told the team to look in
the grass to the east of Bodette's tent. He had
(17:59):
a hunch that that's where the shooter had fired from.
Very quickly, Search and Rescue found five nine millimeter shell casings.
Sergeant Wright called Hamis side. Do you remember what Homicide's
reaction was when they arrived. I think they were a
little surprised that we found the shell casings. It was awkward,
(18:20):
But the next thing that happened was worse. It involved
the Major Crimes Bureau. In the fall of twenty eighteen,
they took over the investigation into the armed burglaries. The
lead investigator was ty Berry, mister ship Kickers himself. The
attitude towards Lost Hills station was very, very negative and
(18:42):
in fact derogatory, that deputies were leaking information, that deputies
didn't know what they were doing. Then what I mean
by that was this is all your guy's fault and
now we have to clean up your mess. Whitman says.
It all came to a head on the day of
Routis capture. Sergeant Wright had followed that trail of bootprints
(19:05):
from the site of the last break in into the
hills behind the Sheriff's station. He argued with ty Berry,
now one of the official leads on the case, to
go back and search the hills again, and that's what
precipitated what became a pretty heated conversation between Sergeant Wright
and ty Berry, as well as Lieutenant Royal and another
(19:26):
Major Crimes detective who I don't know. So Barry didn't
want to go look there. He didn't want to go
look there. He had to be convinced. Royal was trying
to make the argument. Chargeant Wright was trying to make
the argument. They did have a pretty heated exchange about
whether there was any reason to go back there, and
ultimately ty Berry capitulated and said, fine, let's just go.
(19:51):
It turned out that Sergeant Wright and Lieutenant Royal were right.
The team arrested Router with a car being a nine
millimeter ammunition, exactly where Sergeant Wright thought he would be
and the Lost Hills. Captain bought everyone Denno to celebrate.
My impression of Tye Berry and the other detectives from
Major Crimes who were eating dinner with us downstairs, was
(20:14):
they weren't very happy about things that had gone down
that day. I think it was unset that they were
embarrassed that Lieutenant Royal and Sergeant Wright had been correct
about the area of where the suspect might be found,
and that the suspect was found. Sergeant Right's position was,
(20:37):
We're just going to keep our head down. We're going
to do everything that we're supposed to do, and we're
going to do it by the book, and we're not
going to play any games, and just whatever happens happens.
After the capture, he says, the tensions between Sergeant Right
and Detective Barry intensified, and suddenly Sergeant Wright's work on
(20:58):
the router A case was falling under suspicion. This is
where I believe, and I don't know how quickly, that
they attempted to create a narrative that he was acting rogue,
which in my opinion would be a falsehood. I asked
(21:18):
Littman what he thought when Sergeant Wright and Lieutenant Royal
were transferred out of Lastel station and ultimately disciplined for
their work on the case. This is payback to me.
It was just just sheerly punitive to punish them for succeeding. Yes,
and by extension. I'll make the extension, in my personal opinion,
(21:42):
by making major crimes look bad. This is more than
just office politics, and it's more than straightforward retaliation. There's
another layer to it. It could serve a larger purpose
for the Sheriff's department. Sergeant Wright tells me to meet
(22:11):
him at an old stucco house with a drained swimming
pool across from some box stores in the valley. It's
his lawyer's office. Do you want to get you guys
to get the real reason the department punished him and
Lieutenant Royal, he says, is that they saw a pattern
in the shootings and they tried to do something about it.
(22:33):
They begged their bosses to warn the public before Tristan
Bodatt was killed, and the department said no. It was
my opinion and Lieutenant Royal's opinion, that there was a
clear pattern and a clear m to indicate that we
had a serial shooter and that the public should be warned.
(22:55):
There was no reason not to warn the public. We
could shall investigate the crime, but by warning the public,
people could choose to stay away. Sergeant Wright says he
and Lieutenant Royal first asked the then captain of Lost
Hill Station to issue a public warning, but he turned
them down. So Lieutenant Royal took his concerns downtown. That
(23:19):
was in the summer of twenty seventeen, after the fifth
near miss the teenagers in the BMW, he met with
his division chief and his commander. That's as high up
in the command structure as you can go without meeting
the actual sheriff or his cabinet. Lieutenant Royal asked for
help and again requested that the department issue a warning,
(23:41):
but Sergeant Wright says Royal was turned down again. Sergeant
Wright was baffled. The bosses said they didn't have enough
to go on. What were they not seeing? It just
seemed like the most obvious common sense thing to me.
I mean, you hear about law enforcement all the time
warning the public when there's a Syro rapist in a
(24:02):
particular neighborhood. It comes out on the news, they put
out flyers, they have sometimes town hall meetings about it.
The bottom line is people that were driving through Malibu
Canyon in our eyes, were at risk being shot at
or camping in the campground. And it's quite simple. If
we had done a public safety message telling people what
(24:23):
was going on. People could have chosen not to drive
by there or not to go camping there, and basically
saw I was a taking time bomb. Someone was going
to get killed. Absolutely wasn't worn Royland I both agreed
to that this was a very bad call. That the
Sheriff's department chose to ignore our request to provide a
(24:47):
public safety message because Tristan Boudette didn't know about the
history of shootings in the park, he decided to go
camping there and he got killed. Can you talk about
how you felt when you got that call and I
know you responded to the scene. Yes, Lieutenant Roll called
me in and we both felt second because we talked
(25:12):
about this happening. We'd talked about that, we thought, we
both agreed that at some point, if you shoot it
enough tents or cars or campsite's chances are somebody, some
person inside of a car or a tent, it's going
to be had. And when he called me and told me,
it was surreal because again we wanted to warn the
(25:36):
public to prevent this, that was shut down and now
it was happening. He says that if the Sheriff's department
had listened to him and Lieutenant Royal and made a
public safety announcement. Tristan Boudette would still be alive. So
whatever the prosecutor or the Sheriff's Department says about Sergeant
(25:56):
Right and Lieutenant Royal's police work, it doesn't really matter.
It seems like they're the heroes here, or at least
they tried to be. We worked for a great law
enforcement agency and I never experienced anything like this before,
where it seemed things seemed to be out of control
(26:17):
at higher levels as far as common sense. None of
this stuff happened under Alex Vieneueva's leadership of the Sheriff's Department,
but it also didn't go away when he was elected.
(26:38):
Far from it. Six weeks after Vienneueva, one Erica WU
filed her ninety million dollar claim citing law enforcements failure
to warn about a series of shootings in the park,
and the whole thing became vien Aueva's problem. Then Sergeant
Wright and Lieutenant Royal sued the department as whistleblowers. In
(26:59):
his suit, Sergeant Wright says the department smeared him and
Lieutenant Royal, placing them under investigation and working up false
internal affairs reports. Why to discredit them before they can
take the stand for Erica Wu and the alleged source
of those reports, Ty Berry, the detective with the history
(27:21):
of lying and a grudge against Sergeant Wright and Lieutenant
Royal for solving the case. Sergeant Wright settled his suit
so he can't talk to me anymore. Lieutenant Royals may
be heading to trial, but it doesn't stop there. There
may be one other potential victim of all this maneuvering
(27:44):
the criminal case against Anthony Rowda by making Sergeant Right
and Lieutenant Royal look bad, two figures so deeply entwined
in the case, the Sheriff's department risks damaging the prosecution.
Rowda's lawyers have already seized on this, So maybe it's
(28:04):
not Tweedledee and Tweedledum but the Sheriff's depart that's given
the defense a defense. Finally, I make a plan to
(28:31):
hike to route his camp with Lou Johnson. He's the
guy I met with his landlady's son on the Planet
of the Ape's tour at Malibu Creek State Park. He
sent me those pictures of Route his camp right before
it burned, and that suspicious piece of wood I think
could be part of a zip gun. He promised to
(28:53):
show me the way. It's in a forgotten wild patch
of the park. I've seen it from the air on
that helicopter ride with Sergeant Wright, but didn't be impossible
to find it on foot without a guide, Lue said,
is to meet him and Hudson at the hairpin turn,
the sharp bend in Mulholland Highway. See that point right there.
(29:16):
It's that hill right over there and round the side.
The sky is overcast and moody, but the hills are lush,
a supersaturated storybook spring green, and they're covered with patches
of orange poppies and purple wildflowers. You've probably seen some
of the orange California poppies up there. They're popping out
(29:40):
where we've never seen them before. I don't remember. We
follow a dry creek bed to a deer trail, which
turns sharply uphill and takes us into a small grove
of oak trees. Their trunks are burned, ink black stark
against the green grass, still healing from the fire that
passed through here back in the fall of twenty eighteen.
(30:04):
It was right here This is it the place that
Rahda spent so many nights alone in a tarp covered
dugout on a forty five degree pitch, hidden in a
crease in the hills, where he watched the fog rise
off Mulholland and listened to the whale of the Sheriff's
(30:27):
patrol cars as they sped through the canyon. Yeah, yeah,
I recognize this, and this is the tree that used
to be standing that it was hollow and there was
like stuff in their head. I asked lou about the
day he took those pictures he sent me. He says
(30:48):
he was looking for clues he could turn into the
Lost Hills Deputies, a real life Hardy Boys adventure for Hudson.
You know, we had thoughts that if we found anything, Hudson,
I said, well, we'll take pictures of where it is,
market get a GPS. We won't touch anything. We'll just
get it to the sheriff and they can come out
(31:09):
and get it. And it'd be kind of cool to
maybe help out a little bit if they missed something.
I'm thinking about that carved up piece of wood with
the grip and the notches and the place where a
barrel made from pipe could go. The cops and their
metal detectors left it behind. Loose spotted it and took
a picture of it, but it doesn't seem to have
(31:30):
recognized it for what it was, potentially part of a
zip gun. You know, it's such a strange thing to
descend on a community. It's like out of a fiction story,
some crazy living up in the mountains shooting at people.
You know, that's just movies, it's not off in real life.
(31:52):
We sit awkwardly on the steep slope looking at the
canyon road where the three white cars were shot. The
road is easily visible from here. To my left, a
couple ridges away is Lost Hill Station. It's kind of
the perfect hiding place. This is it, And if you
sit here for long enough you realize two things. You
(32:14):
can see people coming from all directions. You can hear
people talking because this is shaped like a megaphone, so
you will be able to hear people coming long before
you can see them even And I think that's probably
why he picked this position. This, I guess was rout
as personal eden, or his private hell. The fire that
(32:39):
tore through here made it an actual hell, a fiery inferno.
It burned everything. Then the rains came and everything's exploded,
and it's green again, and it's more beautiful than I
remember it. Actually, it's been like this rebirth, like this phoenix.
(33:00):
Like as much as we might even want to come
back and visit this site and show you where this was,
nature has moved on. It's like we're not allowed to
visit that anymore. Move on, you know. When we leave,
(33:25):
it feels settled, like peace has been restored to this place.
(33:50):
I don't think I'll ever understand why the Sheriff's Department
in the Parks Department didn't issue a warning after a
bunch of shootings in the area. Image protection denial laziness
rangers at Malibu Creek State Park repeatedly told victims in
their families things like this don't happen out here. When
I asked California State Parks one last time for comment,
(34:14):
they called it quote a terrible tragedy without precedent in
the state parks system. In other words, things like this
don't happen out here. They directed me to the Sheriff's Department,
who sent me two sentences quote. At this time, many
of these assertions are unsupported and appear to have been
made by a retired employee who is not part of
(34:36):
the investigative team. This is an act of criminal investigation
with pending litigation, and we cannot provide further comment. So
all I can do is guess. Maybe they didn't want
to start a panic in Malibu that didn't go so well.
Maybe they wanted to protect the reputation of this mythically
(34:58):
beautiful safe place that didn't go so well either. So
how did Malibu turn into the killing zone? Shooting started
in a state park and park officials hushed the problem up.
The shooting spread to the nearby canyon Road, and the
Sheriff's department ignored the local deputies, who said the public
(35:22):
needed to be warned. Then a man was killed. A
suspect was taken into custody, but the public no longer
trusted the authorities. The case was full of holes and
missed opportunities. Potential evidence was overlooked, burned up. The crime's
route is accused of have a random quality, but once
(35:45):
they started, they were also highly predictable, like the wild
fires that ravage Malibou every several years and the mountain
lions that once in a while prey upon a household pet.
The sheriff's department chose not to issue a warning, but
they did send a clear message to the public. The
(36:06):
message was, Malibou is full of mysteries. The roads are dark,
cell phones never work, sound echoes in the canyon. It's
a mountain lion, not a woman screaming for her life.
To their deputies, the message was if you do your job,
if you try to stop a murder, you'll get punished,
(36:29):
run out of the department, smeared to the criminals out here,
some things don't get solved, so if you want to
commit a crime, you might get away with it. And
to Erica Wu, we didn't owe you a warning before
your husband died, and we still don't owe you anything.
(37:43):
When I first met Erica, she told me something about
her husband. He had a really sort of keen sense
about what he could control and what he couldn't. When
I would get upset about things, like when I would
have a bad day at work or something and I'd
be dwelling on something or some interaction I had, you know,
(38:05):
he would always listen to me talk about it, and
he would he would be like, right, Erica, you get
you know, he'd look at his watch and would be like,
you get two more hours to be upset about this.
You know, you can be as upset as you want
to be, you know, for that amount of time, and
then after that we're going to figure out, you know,
what you're gonna do differently next time or whatever, and
(38:27):
we're just gonna move on. I asked her if she
could still hear that voice in her ear, Um, yeah,
for sure, because you know, I feel like if you
were here, if you could see us now, he would
be like, Yeah, that's you know, unbelievably awful and tragic
(38:51):
and horrible would happened. But you have to you have
to move on, you know. So that's what I'm trying
to do. At the end of February twenty twenty one,
(39:22):
I have a surprising call with Erica. Surprising because she
sounds lighter, more optimistic than I've ever heard her. She
tells me she is moving on to another place, a
bigger unit in the same complex. The girls are excited,
you know, any kind of change like that is exciting
(39:43):
for them. So they're trying to decide right now whether
or not they're going to be in the same room
still or still be in a bunk bed or have
separate beds, but we haven't quite figured that out yet.
Her own feelings, she says, are more complicated. When I
sort of was starting to think about moving and packing
(40:03):
everything up again, it's sort of brought up a lot
from our last move, which was, you know, right after
Tristan died, and that was really you know, I remember
very little of it because it was such a big fog.
You know. It's bringing up a lot of that, and
then also the feeling that it is a change. You know.
That was the first time that I'm actually doing a
move on my own and setting up, you know, a
(40:25):
new place on my own, which I haven't done without Tristan.
Sort of ever, she's been confronting the past, all the
stuff she shoved into boxes in the garage when her
sisters moved her up here right after Tristan died. Over
the weekend, I finally opened these boxes from Tristan's like office,
(40:45):
and it was all of his like textbooks and papers
that he had written, and like notebooks where he had
jotted down notes, and I was just flipping through it
and just just to read things that he had written,
you know, like with his hands, or thoughts that he
was having that day, or you know, putting jotting down
(41:05):
notes about his next project, and I mean things like that.
I just I don't know, you can't throw those away yet.
Erica says that she tries hard to keep Tristan present
for the girls. You know, they were so young when
he died, you know, he was only two. She wasn't
even talking, I think for a long time, just because
of what happened, Clara had a really hard time with it.
(41:28):
You know, she draws, she does a lot of art,
and I noticed that in the past, like six months
or so, when she draws pictures of the family, he's
back in the pictures again. And for a long time
he wasn't. And then just sort of one day, and
I can't remember what holiday it was, she was drawing something.
Either it was like a birthday card for her sister,
or maybe it was like around Christmas time that she
(41:51):
was she was doing it, and suddenly he was just yeah,
just like back in the pictures, and it's sort of
I don't know, it seemed very like, you know, I
could have was like, oh, you drew everybody, and she
was like, yeah, you know, it's just sort of a
natural thing for her. Tristan's birthday was in November. There
(42:14):
have been three already since he died. It's a day
Erica says that she and the girls always spend together
doing things Tristan loved. The week leading up to it,
we'll sort of talk about the fact that his birthday
is coming up and go, you know, make a list
sort of like what would what would he want us
(42:34):
to do, you know, since he's not here, and what
were the things that he loved to do. It could
be like, you know, drink coffee, eat broccoli, go hiking,
be in nature, be kind, be with each other, read
a book, you know, like just anything that comes to mind.
I would make this. I made this huge list, and
(42:57):
then on that day we would like pick one or
two of them or whatever we thought was manageable. So
this last time, we went up to you know, north
of the city, there's a Redwood State Park that actually
Tristan and I used to go hiking out a lot
and that we loved. So I took them there and
we went on a unintentionally we went on like a
(43:18):
six and a half mile hike. I got kind of lost.
They got lost, but they found their way back, and
then on the way home they stopped at the beach.
She had Tristan's ashes with her. I mean, that's been
another thing that I've sort of struggled with ever since
(43:39):
he passed, was what what to do with the ashes
and where to spread them where it hadn't really nothing
has sort of felt right to me until that day.
I actually felt, you know, like it just felt right
to bring some of them with us to a place
(44:00):
that he loved and would have loved to be there
with them, And we took them and spread them on
the beach. And now when Tristan's daughters play on the beach,
running in and out of the waves, they'll be remembering
(44:21):
their father, and he'll still be the one chasing after them.
(44:55):
Lost Hills is reported, written, and hosted by me Dana Goodyear.
It was edited by Ben Adair Hailey. Fox produced the
show and also contributed a ton of additional reporting. Dan
Leone is our comp poser and sound designer. Alex McGinnis
is our mix engineer. Additional producers are Cameron Kell, Laurie Gallaretta,
(45:16):
Annette Renhell, and Sabrina Fang. Mica Hauser is our fact checker.
Anthony Rowda's writings were performed by Nick brain Our cover
art was made by Francesca Gabiani. Executive producers are Ben
Adair for Western Sound and Jacob Weisberg and Leetal Malad
for Pushkin Industries. Thanks also to the Pushkin team, Mia Lobell,
(45:39):
Heather Fain, John Schnars, Carly Mgliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,
and Daniello Lacan Special thanks to Julia Barton and Kate
Parkinson Morgan. Lost Hills is a production of Western Sound
and Pushkin Industries. Follow at Lost Hills pod on social
media to find out about bonus episodes and stay up
(46:01):
to date as Anthony Rowda heads to trial. To find
more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio, rapp, Apple podcast US,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. Season two of Lost
Hills is coming soon. N One, What is your emergency?
(46:23):
I'm just a shot fired in how many shots did
you hear? Just one? Huge loud one. I was not
a bad fire because I hear those from the highway.
It was so it seemed to be in Are you
familiar with what a gun sounds like? Oh? Yeah? On
what street. It's not in the street, it's sin the
(46:43):
canyon in the wilderness. Okay, did it sound like a pistol? Shotgun? Shotgun?
Like a rifle of Since Anthony rout is arrest, I
haven't heard any new reports of pre dawn sniper style
shootings in the area, but there are still shots in
the night, and very likely this will be a plank
(47:04):
of his defense when his trial finally begins. You know,
it's like there's a lot of mystery still in there.
That's Kara Hartley again, the hiker who found a box
of shotgun shells at Rowda's camp. And there's been a
lot of unexplained oddities that have happened up here in
(47:25):
the Hills, in several murders and several bodies found that
are really that are unsolved, people that are still missing
that haven't been found, very odd accounts of their disappearances,
and so I mean, this just kind of is one
(47:46):
of them and one of many. To her, the six
year misses and the Bodete murder don't feel like an aberration.
They represent the real Malibu, the Malibu No one talks
about Anthony Rowda maybe in custody, but Malibu is still
the killing Zone, and what happened out there in that
(48:09):
no man's land could easily happen again. I'm ding a
good year and this is Lost Hills
Pushkin, you know, rolling to the call, I didn't know
(00:40):
what the circumstances were. Your train is a cop to
kind of envision what you're going to deal with when
you get there. This is Phil Reeves. He's a retired
deputy who serves as a chaplain for Lost Hills Sheriff Station.
So I figured on the way over there, this is
probably like a domestic violence thing or something that happened
in a big house, you know, in one of these
(01:00):
mansions or whatever. And it turned out to be in
the park, and that the folks there are not from here,
so they had no place, you know, they were local.
We're at his house in a nice suburban neighborhood not
far from the station. We're talking about that day June
twenty second, twenty eighteen, when he responded to a shooting
(01:23):
at Malibu Creek State Park. One of our deput female
deputy was close by and was there. No. I don't
know whether there was a ranger there prior or not,
but it was still dark and crazy in there. When
Pastor Phil got to the station, he found Tristan Boudette's
family totally distraught. You know, you can imagine what state
(01:47):
of mind that they were in. He started talking to
Scott McCurdy, Tristan's brother in law, who'd been sleeping in
the next tent over. He was actually the one who
discovered Tristan's body. Erica Wu, Tristan's wife, had been at
home in Orange County getting ready to take a medical
board exam when she got the news that her husband
(02:07):
had been killed. Now she was inside the station, Erica
was still being interviewed by the homicide guys. Eventually Erica
came out. She was focused on one thing only. Erica
was adamant about it, and she wanted to see the body.
She wanted to see Tristan's body. And I knew it
(02:30):
was probably going to be like hours and hours and hours.
Pastor Phil brought everyone back here to his house to wait.
Erica is you know? She went up and just kind
of curled up in the fetal position on the bad upstairs.
On some level, he says, she didn't believe that Tristan
(02:51):
had died. She needed to make it real. Five or
six o'clock, I forget when it was. We got a call.
I got a call from the homicide guys. Hey, the
corner's done. You gotta get over here right away. Everyone
piled into his car, and the press was there. They
were all gathered around the gate. And then I got
(03:11):
a call saying the corner doesn't want them to see
the body. I got that call just as a corner's
van was coming out of the park and Erica said,
is that him? Is he in there? They jumped out
of the car and they ran over and to intercept
the van as it was leaving, and I'm like, oh
my gosh, and it was getting to be a cluster,
(03:33):
I mean, you know, and they were really upset obviously,
you know, wailing and sobbing, and they stopped the van.
And the Corners assistant was this young lady and she
had already she was already affected by this whole thing.
She was just in tears driving the Corners van, you know,
and there the family saying open the game van. You
(03:56):
got to open the van and let us look at him.
And she said, I can't do that, you know. I was,
you know, the corner said I can't. They've got to go.
I was able to kind of say, hey, look we can't,
we can't see him now, let's get back in the car.
And the corner and the homicide guys came out and
they did something unusual, which they said, come on, let's
go in the park so that the family could ask
(04:19):
the corner and the homicide people. You know what was
questions about what they knew at that point. So I
felt there was at least some closure there for them.
I sense that maybe they have a different opinion. When
I started investigating this murder, everything about it seemed completely random.
(04:41):
But then I found out about Anthony Rowda and his
long history with law enforcement, with the Lost Hills cops,
and the violence he says they did to him, which
might have set him on his path, you know. And
these things, these things are these affect lifetimes, these are generational.
(05:01):
Pastor Phil is a pastor, so he's been going to
the Bible, to the first murder to try to understand
how violence reverberates, like what seems to have happened to Routa,
like what happened to Tristan Boudette. I just read about
Cane and Abel, and after Cane slew Abel, God says,
(05:24):
I can hear your brother's blood from the ground, but
the Hebrew for blood is plural bloods. I can hear
your brother's bloods from the ground and why is that? Why?
Why plural? And the implication is that when you take
(05:46):
somebody's life, you affect all their potentiality, all the things
that they could be, you know, you affect the children
that they might have had, the grandchildren that they might
have had. I mean, it's just you just can't even
(06:07):
begin to measure. He's saying that Tristan Bodette's murder will
affect his children, and his children's children and their children too.
I know that Erica, in her own way, has arrived
at this same idea. When I call her to check
in and ask about the girls, she says, they're amazing, happy,
(06:29):
resilient little people, but they're not the people they would
have been. Then she adds, I guess neither am I anymore.
Cain and Abel are the first two sons of Adam
(06:50):
and Eve. In the Caine Enabel story, Caine is jealous
of Able and murders him, so God exiles Caine, sending
him east to the land of Nod, a place of wandering,
a place for fugitives. How could I not think about Rauda,
(07:11):
his restless wandering, and also his camp in the desolate
hills at the edge of Malibu and how this story,
which is about violence and its echoes, is also about knowledge,
How just a little bit of knowledge could have changed everything.
(07:36):
I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, EPI, so
(08:09):
to eight east of Eden. Several months before Tristan Bodatt
was killed, a couple of hikers found route as camp.
My name is Hunter Smith, my name's Kara Hartley. They'd
followed a deer trail up into the hills north of
the Hairpin turn on Mulholland Highway. When they realized they'd
(08:33):
stumbled into someone's home, it didn't look very habitable or
like it had been habitable for a while. It seemed abandoned,
with trash spilling down the steep slopes. They looked around
for stuff to scavenge. They liked bringing souvenirs home from
their hikes. I found this hot pink machete and it
(08:58):
did have a carving on the side like somebody had
scratched into the blade, and it said queues machette on it,
see you apostrophea. It became a part of you know,
just my camping box that we would take camping and
we used to make funny stories up about this mythological
(09:20):
character that owned this machete. They were there for ten
minutes at the most. I did start feeling a little
creeped out, like, hey, this definitely was like where somebody
was living or whatever, And we both kind of felt
the same way at the same time and felt an
(09:41):
urgency to leave. Before they left, Kara grabbed one more souvenir.
The other thing that caught our eye was this like
a small box of what we're unfired twelve gage shotgun shells.
The box was caked in mud with only a few
(10:03):
shells left. We just stuffed that in her backpack. Too
months passed, the Tesla got shot, Tristan Bodett was killed,
and Malibu went crazy trying to figure out who had
done it. Kara and Hunter broke up, and they forgot
(10:24):
all about the hike to the abandoned camp. In fact,
I don't think we really thought about it until I
drove by one day on Mahornd and saw a bunch
of cop cars on that turn. When he saw that,
Hunter immediately called Kara and he was like, Kara, do
you think that possibly that camp that we found back
(10:48):
in January February, like could be the same guy. They
couldn't find the box of shotgun shells, but they decided
to turn qu'es machete in at Lost Hill station. They
brought it in in a paper trader Joe's bag, and
the detectives flipped out. I mean it was intimidating because
(11:09):
we were just immediately kind of surrounded by a bunch
of cops wanting to get like us, repeat the facts
over and over. They even wanted us to hike them
to the camp immediately, even though it was like dark outside.
And they even asked us if we were homeless and
living in our car in the canyon, and maybe I
(11:33):
just shouldn't warn my birken Stocks in that day or something.
But the deputies were intent on finding the shotgun shells.
They asked over and over what type of shells they were,
how big, what collar were they? Solid slugs, bird shop what?
They probably called me like every other day for that
(11:54):
whole two weeks, and I just kind of was at
a loss of what to do. So I did a
really good clean out of my truck and I had
found one of the twelve gage shotgun shells rolling around
in my car, you know, So I had immediately went
down to the station at that point, and I had
(12:14):
it in a little pouch and came in like, hey,
I just so you know, I did find one of
those shells in my car. Like Kara's evidence turned out
to be so important that the prosecutor asked her to
testify before the grand jury. Still she's not entirely comfortable
with the CoP's narrative or her role in it. I mean,
(12:37):
that's kind of like been the problem the whole time,
is just like there just has been such a lack
of transparency and information being released to the public or
alerting to the public about any of these things happening.
Had Karen Hunter known that there were unsolved shootings when
(12:59):
they came across an abandoned camp and found a box
of shotgun shells, it's easy to imagine that they would
have turned those in, you know. And I think that's
where PEP the communities, like distrust in that system is
spawning too, because it wasn't like widely known information that
(13:20):
there was a so called sniper in the hills. And
had Hunter and I know that we might have been
more apt to alert the authorities about the camp back
in February, and if they turned in the shotgun shells
back then, it's easy to imagine that the Sheriff's department
(13:42):
might have searched the camp and found something, or maybe
they would have put up some cameras, and then when
Router returned with a carbing they could have arrested him.
All before Tristan Boudette even planned his camping trip to
Malibu Creek State Park. Had they known, they think they
(14:08):
could have saved Death's life. For a long time, I
(14:33):
couldn't figure out what happened at Lost Hills Station. No
one would tell me what Sergeant Right and Lieutenant Royal
had done wrong in the route investigation, why they've been disciplined.
I still haven't seen the confidential internal affairs reports into
their police work on the Routa case. There's only one
person I can think of who definitely knows what happened
(14:56):
and can talk about it. In fact, she has to.
It's the prosecutor seeking to convict Routa. She's obligated to
tell the grand jury anything that could potentially be exculpatory
help to the defense. So she had to tell the
grand jury about the two dirty cops, the homicide detective
(15:17):
Daniel Morris and the Major Crimes Detective ty Berry. She
didn't call them to testify, citing their histories of misconduct.
She also talked to the grand jury at length about
Sergeant Wright and Lieutenant Royal. The reason the Sheriff's Department
disciplined them, she said, is that they conducted unauthorized investigations
(15:39):
and reenactments. When Sergeant Wright used a dowel to estimate
the trajectory of the bullet that hit Ian Kincaid's tesla,
and that time he went to the campground and pointed
a laser at Bodet's campsite to figure out where the
other bullet had gone. So what if he found a
nine millimeter bullet? It wasn't his job, she said, and
(16:00):
he didn't do it right. And Royal, she sums up
his work as a quote personal investigation into the Charged
Times ouch, it seems like Captain Bassah was right. Tweedledee
and Tweedledum gave the defense a defense. But what if
(16:23):
going rogue isn't the real reason Sergeant Right and Lieutenant
Royal were disciplined. A few weeks ago, I had a
conversation that changed my view of the whole story. My
name is Jeremy Lippmann. I am a reserve Sheriff's deputy
and a member of the Malibu Search and Rescue Team.
Lippmann is part of Sergeant Wright's old team. He's been
(16:46):
disturbed to see what his old boss has been going
through and he wants to set the record straight. He says,
what happened to Sergeant Right and Lieutenant Royal is about jealousy,
ego and wounded pride. It has nothing to do with
right and wrong or facts. Just has to do with
politics and my perception. And I've said this before, is
(17:12):
no good deed goes unpunished, so he says. The detectives
from Homicide and Major Crimes elite free ranging units that
tackle the most serious crimes, were upstaged by the local
Lost Hills detectives and the volunteers from Sergeant Right Search
and Rescue Team. It started with the nine millimeters shell
casings at the murder scene. After Bodette was killed. Homicide
(17:36):
searched the campground and didn't come up with anything. Homicide,
having not located any shell casings in their search, Malbou
Fish and Rescue was tasked and the team was tasked
to go and conduct a secondary search, which we did.
Sergeant Wright, he says, told the team to look in
the grass to the east of Bodette's tent. He had
(17:59):
a hunch that that's where the shooter had fired from.
Very quickly, Search and Rescue found five nine millimeter shell casings.
Sergeant Wright called Hamis side. Do you remember what Homicide's
reaction was when they arrived. I think they were a
little surprised that we found the shell casings. It was awkward,
(18:20):
But the next thing that happened was worse. It involved
the Major Crimes Bureau. In the fall of twenty eighteen,
they took over the investigation into the armed burglaries. The
lead investigator was ty Berry, mister ship Kickers himself. The
attitude towards Lost Hills station was very, very negative and
(18:42):
in fact derogatory, that deputies were leaking information, that deputies
didn't know what they were doing. Then what I mean
by that was this is all your guy's fault and
now we have to clean up your mess. Whitman says.
It all came to a head on the day of
Routis capture. Sergeant Wright had followed that trail of bootprints
(19:05):
from the site of the last break in into the
hills behind the Sheriff's station. He argued with ty Berry,
now one of the official leads on the case, to
go back and search the hills again, and that's what
precipitated what became a pretty heated conversation between Sergeant Wright
and ty Berry, as well as Lieutenant Royal and another
(19:26):
Major Crimes detective who I don't know. So Barry didn't
want to go look there. He didn't want to go
look there. He had to be convinced. Royal was trying
to make the argument. Chargeant Wright was trying to make
the argument. They did have a pretty heated exchange about
whether there was any reason to go back there, and
ultimately ty Berry capitulated and said, fine, let's just go.
(19:51):
It turned out that Sergeant Wright and Lieutenant Royal were right.
The team arrested Router with a car being a nine
millimeter ammunition, exactly where Sergeant Wright thought he would be
and the Lost Hills. Captain bought everyone Denno to celebrate.
My impression of Tye Berry and the other detectives from
Major Crimes who were eating dinner with us downstairs, was
(20:14):
they weren't very happy about things that had gone down
that day. I think it was unset that they were
embarrassed that Lieutenant Royal and Sergeant Wright had been correct
about the area of where the suspect might be found,
and that the suspect was found. Sergeant Right's position was,
(20:37):
We're just going to keep our head down. We're going
to do everything that we're supposed to do, and we're
going to do it by the book, and we're not
going to play any games, and just whatever happens happens.
After the capture, he says, the tensions between Sergeant Right
and Detective Barry intensified, and suddenly Sergeant Wright's work on
(20:58):
the router A case was falling under suspicion. This is
where I believe, and I don't know how quickly, that
they attempted to create a narrative that he was acting rogue,
which in my opinion would be a falsehood. I asked
(21:18):
Littman what he thought when Sergeant Wright and Lieutenant Royal
were transferred out of Lastel station and ultimately disciplined for
their work on the case. This is payback to me.
It was just just sheerly punitive to punish them for succeeding. Yes,
and by extension. I'll make the extension, in my personal opinion,
(21:42):
by making major crimes look bad. This is more than
just office politics, and it's more than straightforward retaliation. There's
another layer to it. It could serve a larger purpose
for the Sheriff's department. Sergeant Wright tells me to meet
(22:11):
him at an old stucco house with a drained swimming
pool across from some box stores in the valley. It's
his lawyer's office. Do you want to get you guys
to get the real reason the department punished him and
Lieutenant Royal, he says, is that they saw a pattern
in the shootings and they tried to do something about it.
(22:33):
They begged their bosses to warn the public before Tristan
Bodatt was killed, and the department said no. It was
my opinion and Lieutenant Royal's opinion, that there was a
clear pattern and a clear m to indicate that we
had a serial shooter and that the public should be warned.
(22:55):
There was no reason not to warn the public. We
could shall investigate the crime, but by warning the public,
people could choose to stay away. Sergeant Wright says he
and Lieutenant Royal first asked the then captain of Lost
Hill Station to issue a public warning, but he turned
them down. So Lieutenant Royal took his concerns downtown. That
(23:19):
was in the summer of twenty seventeen, after the fifth
near miss the teenagers in the BMW, he met with
his division chief and his commander. That's as high up
in the command structure as you can go without meeting
the actual sheriff or his cabinet. Lieutenant Royal asked for
help and again requested that the department issue a warning,
(23:41):
but Sergeant Wright says Royal was turned down again. Sergeant
Wright was baffled. The bosses said they didn't have enough
to go on. What were they not seeing? It just
seemed like the most obvious common sense thing to me.
I mean, you hear about law enforcement all the time
warning the public when there's a Syro rapist in a
(24:02):
particular neighborhood. It comes out on the news, they put
out flyers, they have sometimes town hall meetings about it.
The bottom line is people that were driving through Malibu
Canyon in our eyes, were at risk being shot at
or camping in the campground. And it's quite simple. If
we had done a public safety message telling people what
(24:23):
was going on. People could have chosen not to drive
by there or not to go camping there, and basically
saw I was a taking time bomb. Someone was going
to get killed. Absolutely wasn't worn Royland I both agreed
to that this was a very bad call. That the
Sheriff's department chose to ignore our request to provide a
(24:47):
public safety message because Tristan Boudette didn't know about the
history of shootings in the park, he decided to go
camping there and he got killed. Can you talk about
how you felt when you got that call and I
know you responded to the scene. Yes, Lieutenant Roll called
me in and we both felt second because we talked
(25:12):
about this happening. We'd talked about that, we thought, we
both agreed that at some point, if you shoot it
enough tents or cars or campsite's chances are somebody, some
person inside of a car or a tent, it's going
to be had. And when he called me and told me,
it was surreal because again we wanted to warn the
(25:36):
public to prevent this, that was shut down and now
it was happening. He says that if the Sheriff's department
had listened to him and Lieutenant Royal and made a
public safety announcement. Tristan Boudette would still be alive. So
whatever the prosecutor or the Sheriff's Department says about Sergeant
(25:56):
Right and Lieutenant Royal's police work, it doesn't really matter.
It seems like they're the heroes here, or at least
they tried to be. We worked for a great law
enforcement agency and I never experienced anything like this before,
where it seemed things seemed to be out of control
(26:17):
at higher levels as far as common sense. None of
this stuff happened under Alex Vieneueva's leadership of the Sheriff's Department,
but it also didn't go away when he was elected.
(26:38):
Far from it. Six weeks after Vienneueva, one Erica WU
filed her ninety million dollar claim citing law enforcements failure
to warn about a series of shootings in the park,
and the whole thing became vien Aueva's problem. Then Sergeant
Wright and Lieutenant Royal sued the department as whistleblowers. In
(26:59):
his suit, Sergeant Wright says the department smeared him and
Lieutenant Royal, placing them under investigation and working up false
internal affairs reports. Why to discredit them before they can
take the stand for Erica Wu and the alleged source
of those reports, Ty Berry, the detective with the history
(27:21):
of lying and a grudge against Sergeant Wright and Lieutenant
Royal for solving the case. Sergeant Wright settled his suit
so he can't talk to me anymore. Lieutenant Royals may
be heading to trial, but it doesn't stop there. There
may be one other potential victim of all this maneuvering
(27:44):
the criminal case against Anthony Rowda by making Sergeant Right
and Lieutenant Royal look bad, two figures so deeply entwined
in the case, the Sheriff's department risks damaging the prosecution.
Rowda's lawyers have already seized on this, So maybe it's
(28:04):
not Tweedledee and Tweedledum but the Sheriff's depart that's given
the defense a defense. Finally, I make a plan to
(28:31):
hike to route his camp with Lou Johnson. He's the
guy I met with his landlady's son on the Planet
of the Ape's tour at Malibu Creek State Park. He
sent me those pictures of Route his camp right before
it burned, and that suspicious piece of wood I think
could be part of a zip gun. He promised to
(28:53):
show me the way. It's in a forgotten wild patch
of the park. I've seen it from the air on
that helicopter ride with Sergeant Wright, but didn't be impossible
to find it on foot without a guide, Lue said,
is to meet him and Hudson at the hairpin turn,
the sharp bend in Mulholland Highway. See that point right there.
(29:16):
It's that hill right over there and round the side.
The sky is overcast and moody, but the hills are lush,
a supersaturated storybook spring green, and they're covered with patches
of orange poppies and purple wildflowers. You've probably seen some
of the orange California poppies up there. They're popping out
(29:40):
where we've never seen them before. I don't remember. We
follow a dry creek bed to a deer trail, which
turns sharply uphill and takes us into a small grove
of oak trees. Their trunks are burned, ink black stark
against the green grass, still healing from the fire that
passed through here back in the fall of twenty eighteen.
(30:04):
It was right here This is it the place that
Rahda spent so many nights alone in a tarp covered
dugout on a forty five degree pitch, hidden in a
crease in the hills, where he watched the fog rise
off Mulholland and listened to the whale of the Sheriff's
(30:27):
patrol cars as they sped through the canyon. Yeah, yeah,
I recognize this, and this is the tree that used
to be standing that it was hollow and there was
like stuff in their head. I asked lou about the
day he took those pictures he sent me. He says
(30:48):
he was looking for clues he could turn into the
Lost Hills Deputies, a real life Hardy Boys adventure for Hudson.
You know, we had thoughts that if we found anything, Hudson,
I said, well, we'll take pictures of where it is,
market get a GPS. We won't touch anything. We'll just
get it to the sheriff and they can come out
(31:09):
and get it. And it'd be kind of cool to
maybe help out a little bit if they missed something.
I'm thinking about that carved up piece of wood with
the grip and the notches and the place where a
barrel made from pipe could go. The cops and their
metal detectors left it behind. Loose spotted it and took
a picture of it, but it doesn't seem to have
(31:30):
recognized it for what it was, potentially part of a
zip gun. You know, it's such a strange thing to
descend on a community. It's like out of a fiction story,
some crazy living up in the mountains shooting at people.
You know, that's just movies, it's not off in real life.
(31:52):
We sit awkwardly on the steep slope looking at the
canyon road where the three white cars were shot. The
road is easily visible from here. To my left, a
couple ridges away is Lost Hill Station. It's kind of
the perfect hiding place. This is it, And if you
sit here for long enough you realize two things. You
(32:14):
can see people coming from all directions. You can hear
people talking because this is shaped like a megaphone, so
you will be able to hear people coming long before
you can see them even And I think that's probably
why he picked this position. This, I guess was rout
as personal eden, or his private hell. The fire that
(32:39):
tore through here made it an actual hell, a fiery inferno.
It burned everything. Then the rains came and everything's exploded,
and it's green again, and it's more beautiful than I
remember it. Actually, it's been like this rebirth, like this phoenix.
(33:00):
Like as much as we might even want to come
back and visit this site and show you where this was,
nature has moved on. It's like we're not allowed to
visit that anymore. Move on, you know. When we leave,
(33:25):
it feels settled, like peace has been restored to this place.
(33:50):
I don't think I'll ever understand why the Sheriff's Department
in the Parks Department didn't issue a warning after a
bunch of shootings in the area. Image protection denial laziness
rangers at Malibu Creek State Park repeatedly told victims in
their families things like this don't happen out here. When
I asked California State Parks one last time for comment,
(34:14):
they called it quote a terrible tragedy without precedent in
the state parks system. In other words, things like this
don't happen out here. They directed me to the Sheriff's Department,
who sent me two sentences quote. At this time, many
of these assertions are unsupported and appear to have been
made by a retired employee who is not part of
(34:36):
the investigative team. This is an act of criminal investigation
with pending litigation, and we cannot provide further comment. So
all I can do is guess. Maybe they didn't want
to start a panic in Malibu that didn't go so well.
Maybe they wanted to protect the reputation of this mythically
(34:58):
beautiful safe place that didn't go so well either. So
how did Malibu turn into the killing zone? Shooting started
in a state park and park officials hushed the problem up.
The shooting spread to the nearby canyon Road, and the
Sheriff's department ignored the local deputies, who said the public
(35:22):
needed to be warned. Then a man was killed. A
suspect was taken into custody, but the public no longer
trusted the authorities. The case was full of holes and
missed opportunities. Potential evidence was overlooked, burned up. The crime's
route is accused of have a random quality, but once
(35:45):
they started, they were also highly predictable, like the wild
fires that ravage Malibou every several years and the mountain
lions that once in a while prey upon a household pet.
The sheriff's department chose not to issue a warning, but
they did send a clear message to the public. The
(36:06):
message was, Malibou is full of mysteries. The roads are dark,
cell phones never work, sound echoes in the canyon. It's
a mountain lion, not a woman screaming for her life.
To their deputies, the message was if you do your job,
if you try to stop a murder, you'll get punished,
(36:29):
run out of the department, smeared to the criminals out here,
some things don't get solved, so if you want to
commit a crime, you might get away with it. And
to Erica Wu, we didn't owe you a warning before
your husband died, and we still don't owe you anything.
(37:43):
When I first met Erica, she told me something about
her husband. He had a really sort of keen sense
about what he could control and what he couldn't. When
I would get upset about things, like when I would
have a bad day at work or something and I'd
be dwelling on something or some interaction I had, you know,
(38:05):
he would always listen to me talk about it, and
he would he would be like, right, Erica, you get
you know, he'd look at his watch and would be like,
you get two more hours to be upset about this.
You know, you can be as upset as you want
to be, you know, for that amount of time, and
then after that we're going to figure out, you know,
what you're gonna do differently next time or whatever, and
(38:27):
we're just gonna move on. I asked her if she
could still hear that voice in her ear, Um, yeah,
for sure, because you know, I feel like if you
were here, if you could see us now, he would
be like, Yeah, that's you know, unbelievably awful and tragic
(38:51):
and horrible would happened. But you have to you have
to move on, you know. So that's what I'm trying
to do. At the end of February twenty twenty one,
(39:22):
I have a surprising call with Erica. Surprising because she
sounds lighter, more optimistic than I've ever heard her. She
tells me she is moving on to another place, a
bigger unit in the same complex. The girls are excited,
you know, any kind of change like that is exciting
(39:43):
for them. So they're trying to decide right now whether
or not they're going to be in the same room
still or still be in a bunk bed or have
separate beds, but we haven't quite figured that out yet.
Her own feelings, she says, are more complicated. When I
sort of was starting to think about moving and packing
(40:03):
everything up again, it's sort of brought up a lot
from our last move, which was, you know, right after
Tristan died, and that was really you know, I remember
very little of it because it was such a big fog.
You know. It's bringing up a lot of that, and
then also the feeling that it is a change. You know.
That was the first time that I'm actually doing a
move on my own and setting up, you know, a
(40:25):
new place on my own, which I haven't done without Tristan.
Sort of ever, she's been confronting the past, all the
stuff she shoved into boxes in the garage when her
sisters moved her up here right after Tristan died. Over
the weekend, I finally opened these boxes from Tristan's like office,
(40:45):
and it was all of his like textbooks and papers
that he had written, and like notebooks where he had
jotted down notes, and I was just flipping through it
and just just to read things that he had written,
you know, like with his hands, or thoughts that he
was having that day, or you know, putting jotting down
(41:05):
notes about his next project, and I mean things like that.
I just I don't know, you can't throw those away yet.
Erica says that she tries hard to keep Tristan present
for the girls. You know, they were so young when
he died, you know, he was only two. She wasn't
even talking, I think for a long time, just because
of what happened, Clara had a really hard time with it.
(41:28):
You know, she draws, she does a lot of art,
and I noticed that in the past, like six months
or so, when she draws pictures of the family, he's
back in the pictures again. And for a long time
he wasn't. And then just sort of one day, and
I can't remember what holiday it was, she was drawing something.
Either it was like a birthday card for her sister,
or maybe it was like around Christmas time that she
(41:51):
was she was doing it, and suddenly he was just yeah,
just like back in the pictures, and it's sort of
I don't know, it seemed very like, you know, I
could have was like, oh, you drew everybody, and she
was like, yeah, you know, it's just sort of a
natural thing for her. Tristan's birthday was in November. There
(42:14):
have been three already since he died. It's a day
Erica says that she and the girls always spend together
doing things Tristan loved. The week leading up to it,
we'll sort of talk about the fact that his birthday
is coming up and go, you know, make a list
sort of like what would what would he want us
(42:34):
to do, you know, since he's not here, and what
were the things that he loved to do. It could
be like, you know, drink coffee, eat broccoli, go hiking,
be in nature, be kind, be with each other, read
a book, you know, like just anything that comes to mind.
I would make this. I made this huge list, and
(42:57):
then on that day we would like pick one or
two of them or whatever we thought was manageable. So
this last time, we went up to you know, north
of the city, there's a Redwood State Park that actually
Tristan and I used to go hiking out a lot
and that we loved. So I took them there and
we went on a unintentionally we went on like a
(43:18):
six and a half mile hike. I got kind of lost.
They got lost, but they found their way back, and
then on the way home they stopped at the beach.
She had Tristan's ashes with her. I mean, that's been
another thing that I've sort of struggled with ever since
(43:39):
he passed, was what what to do with the ashes
and where to spread them where it hadn't really nothing
has sort of felt right to me until that day.
I actually felt, you know, like it just felt right
to bring some of them with us to a place
(44:00):
that he loved and would have loved to be there
with them, And we took them and spread them on
the beach. And now when Tristan's daughters play on the beach,
running in and out of the waves, they'll be remembering
(44:21):
their father, and he'll still be the one chasing after them.
(44:55):
Lost Hills is reported, written, and hosted by me Dana Goodyear.
It was edited by Ben Adair Hailey. Fox produced the
show and also contributed a ton of additional reporting. Dan
Leone is our comp poser and sound designer. Alex McGinnis
is our mix engineer. Additional producers are Cameron Kell, Laurie Gallaretta,
(45:16):
Annette Renhell, and Sabrina Fang. Mica Hauser is our fact checker.
Anthony Rowda's writings were performed by Nick brain Our cover
art was made by Francesca Gabiani. Executive producers are Ben
Adair for Western Sound and Jacob Weisberg and Leetal Malad
for Pushkin Industries. Thanks also to the Pushkin team, Mia Lobell,
(45:39):
Heather Fain, John Schnars, Carly Mgliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,
and Daniello Lacan Special thanks to Julia Barton and Kate
Parkinson Morgan. Lost Hills is a production of Western Sound
and Pushkin Industries. Follow at Lost Hills pod on social
media to find out about bonus episodes and stay up
(46:01):
to date as Anthony Rowda heads to trial. To find
more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio, rapp, Apple podcast US,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. Season two of Lost
Hills is coming soon. N One, What is your emergency?
(46:23):
I'm just a shot fired in how many shots did
you hear? Just one? Huge loud one. I was not
a bad fire because I hear those from the highway.
It was so it seemed to be in Are you
familiar with what a gun sounds like? Oh? Yeah? On
what street. It's not in the street, it's sin the
(46:43):
canyon in the wilderness. Okay, did it sound like a pistol? Shotgun? Shotgun?
Like a rifle of Since Anthony rout is arrest, I
haven't heard any new reports of pre dawn sniper style
shootings in the area, but there are still shots in
the night, and very likely this will be a plank
(47:04):
of his defense when his trial finally begins. You know,
it's like there's a lot of mystery still in there.
That's Kara Hartley again, the hiker who found a box
of shotgun shells at Rowda's camp. And there's been a
lot of unexplained oddities that have happened up here in
(47:25):
the Hills, in several murders and several bodies found that
are really that are unsolved, people that are still missing
that haven't been found, very odd accounts of their disappearances,
and so I mean, this just kind of is one
(47:46):
of them and one of many. To her, the six
year misses and the Bodete murder don't feel like an aberration.
They represent the real Malibu, the Malibu No one talks
about Anthony Rowda maybe in custody, but Malibu is still
the killing Zone, and what happened out there in that
(48:09):
no man's land could easily happen again. I'm ding a
good year and this is Lost Hills
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