Buried Secrets

Catherine follows the trails at the back of the Malibu Canyon Ranch. As season three comes to an end, we reflect on a tumultuous year in Los Angeles and what could have happened to Mitrice.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans, just waiting for Brandon, hoping he makes
it back. We were on the horse trail. We followed
that to the end and got to a pretty steep
drop off. Oh yeah, here he comes. This is like
the beginning of every horror movie where the people go
into the woods, so I'm very aware of that even

(00:30):
though we are being safe. We've been trying to get
onto Malibu Canyon Ranch because over the years, a lot
of people have said that there was direct access from
the back of that property to Dark Canyon, where my
TRACE's remains were found, so we're trying to figure out
if that's true. The ranch is a thirty acre property

(00:52):
with horses. They also do a lot of photo shoots
and productions, and it's also private property. But I found
a listing on Airbnb for the guest house. We booked
it for two nights. My producer Brandon got there first.
He met Sus Randall, the owner. She rode up to

(01:12):
meet him on a horse. She also introduced us to
her big black dog, Pickles. We both love dogs, so
we ended up tagging along as we looked around the property.
What did you tell me? What? Okay? So, Pickles the
dog is very happy because he likes to play fetch
and he just brought something back to me and I
thought it was a stick, but upon closer inspection, it's
a deerfoot. So we're finally here in the place that

(01:38):
a lot of people have been trying to get access
to since the night my terse went missing. We're hoping
to find a way to Dark Creek. I'm Catherine Townsend.
This is Helen Gone. So we're just as you can see,

(02:24):
we're walking to the back of the property. Here. When
you approach Malibu Canyon Ranch, you can see the Spanish
style main house. You can see horses in a little paddock,
and as you drive around you see a small guesthouse.
This side is just basically a wall of dirt and rock.

(02:46):
On the right to the left there of the properties.
In the background the Santa Monica Mountains, which is where
the Backbone Trail is. There's a saltwater pool and there
are views in every direction of the canyon and the
Santa Monica Mountains. We're going to continue down this road
and when you walk out of the guest house you

(03:06):
see a dirt road which they call the fire Road.
It leads to an incredibly steep drop down to the canyon.
That's down the canyon. That's the canyon. I'd say that's
probably a one hundred foot drop. Seventy five foot drops. Yeah,
see now and again, if you told me like the
remains were here, I'd be like, Okay, you drop it

(03:30):
off right that makes sense. Someone dropped it or she
fell or whatever. Is this right here? Yeah, if you
took one wrong step, especially if it was darker night,
or if you're so tired. When you look at a map,
the remains are point two miles from the fire road
where we're standing. But what you don't see on those
maps is this giant drop off. It's so steep they've

(03:54):
put up barriers, so although the remains are close, there's
no way to get there without hiking down and around
this drop off. We did find this little sort of
depression that seems to lead toward the canyon. We just
back up a little. We both talked to Susan Randall,

(04:15):
and she told us about the other trails at the
back of the property. We're just trying to figure out
where all of these trails lead. We started to hike.
Pickles followed us around and let us down. Some horse trails. Well,
he's walking down there. I was about pickles is cause
you Okay, buddy, come on back through. So if you're

(04:39):
a if you're a two foot black lamb, you can
you can get through this brush. Well it looks like
it drops right there. Though, see like I can't I
can't tell how stupid it is. Well, it's I think
down here there's another overking, so maybe we can get
a sense of that. So we followed every single horse

(05:02):
trail that led from the back of that property. We
went down in some areas that weren't actual trails the
other way. Let's go on here, look just to like
be threough. I'm gonna check the map from here. Okay,
I'm gonna walk down the bottom. Brandon and I split
up to look around. Anything interesting. It's real, it's real steep,

(05:24):
and it's again it's this loamy soil. Yeah. I think
if you started down that path that we saw that
my thought might be impossible. You'd started slipping and you'd
fall the hole. Yeah, you'd fall just one wrong step
up here, and let me look at this on the right. God,
I tell you, like for someone who did not like
the woods, a girl after my own heart. I can

(05:46):
only imagine how scary this would be. And I was
saying too when you were up there. I was like,
you know, the other thing that's strange is it's extremely
hard to figure out what time of day it is
right now. There are so many the sun disappears behind
the mountains, and I can't tell what time. I have
no idea what time of day it is right now.
It's partly class and it could be ten o'clock in
the morning, could be seven o'clock at night. After following

(06:11):
all these trails at the back of the property, it
really seems that there's no way down. There is no
shortcut between the back of that property and the area
where my Trees's remains were found in Dark Canyon. After
we exhausted all the possibilities that way, we then went
back toward the Backbone trail, which took us right back
to the same routes we had taken before. But I'm

(06:35):
gone this way, yeah, I'm probably can regret this. We
decided to hike back to the coordinates where my trees
was found. Again. It was the hardest hike I've ever done.
We say we went hiking, but it's not a hike.
It's a climb. It's climbing sheer rock face and trying

(06:55):
not to slip and fall down the sides of the canyon.
The soil is very loose. It's almost like trying to
climb a sand dune. It is easier that it's cooler.
I'll tell you that it's much easier because it's cooler.
That was what was kind of killing us. But I'm
glad we did it twice when we hike this route.

(07:16):
The first time it was around the same time of
year when my trees went missing mid September. We were
seeing dark canyon as she had been experiencing it. It
was hot and dry, and there was a thick curtain
of trees and it was almost impossible to get through
because there were so many trees covering the rock face

(07:37):
on both sides. It was really hard to tell how
steep it was at any point. But this time, hiking
in December, a lot of those leaves have dropped. It
was cooler and easier to take a thorough look at
the sides of the canyon. It's so much easier because
all of these were in full bloom, like they were
like cutting. This was all like impassable almost yeah, you

(08:03):
can actually see what's going on. This time, we saw
that there did seem to be a few spots that
were less steep where you could climb up, but those
points were still far from the remains. We also saw
something else, a lot more trash, soda cans, deflated balloons, plastic,

(08:25):
and other debris. We saw some areas where branches have
been organized, and pseudo huts seemed to have been built.
It was really creepy because we know that cartel people
have used this area to grow cannabis, and the grow
season is from April to November. It gives me chills
to think that while we were hiking through there, people

(08:46):
could have been hiding behind those leaves. We also found
an oven. So we're now at the point let's see
if I get this, this would be the equivalent point
in the creek bed of when we walked to the
end of the fire road, which is like the furthest tip,
the point where we're saying, hey, we're point two miles
from theirs, and from this point we've seen a lot

(09:09):
of Basically, we saw something. We see some debris down here,
and it looks like that might be an oven or
mini fridge got some more pictures of that. But there's
definitely signs that there have been people down here, and
it looks like if before the fence was put up,
It's very plausible that this could have been somewhere that
someone could have pulled up and dumped something down. However,

(09:31):
because we've still got a ways to go, that makes
this less likely because the road doesn't continue that far.
We also found more hoses. Remember my Treesa's body was
found not during a police search, but because park rangers
were looking for an illegal marijuana grow. They found irrigation hoses.
When we did our first hike, we also saw hoses

(09:54):
that looked old, but on this hike we found other hoses,
different types of hoses that looked pretty new. There was
also a thin layer of water flowing in the creek
at this time, and that's where the hoses seemed to
be connected. I'm starting to think that it's more likely
than not that my Trees did walk up on the

(10:14):
wrong people. There's a lot of evidence of people hiding
in the woods and camping. This is not an area
where you would hike to and set up camp unless
you were trying to hide from someone. This is a
tough case because there's so much that was either not
done at the scene the first time or done incorrectly.

(10:37):
It's hard to have definitive answers. So doing the height
twice was extremely important because unless you go in there,
it's hard to put yourself on my Teresa's shoes. For example,
when we started our investigation, there were a lot of
people talking about the fact that the area where the
remains were found is close to the ranch property. It

(11:00):
is close, but if you have to drop off a cliff,
that distance is meaningless. The bottom line is, any way
we tried to go, we still ended up having to
go around and hike the long way, But we wouldn't
know that if we hadn't gone out there. And once
you get to Dark Creek, you get a sense of
how treacherous it was, and we found so much with

(11:23):
the new hoses an oven, it just seems clear to
me that even though this area seems extremely remote and dangerous,
there are people out there living in those woods, and
if she encountered those people, it's likely that they would
have done something bad to her. We had also heard
a lot of theories about someone driving out there and

(11:43):
dumping a body. Now, there have been cases in this
area where that happened with gang members and serial killers,
for example, But in all of those cases, the bodies
were dumped in places where you can pull a car
up near a road, for example, in my Teresa's case,
that would be impossible. So from the road you see

(12:04):
the no TRESSPA sign, you see the fire road. It's
a dirt road, but a car could drive down that
part of it. So there is this so I can
understand why people might have asked the question. You know,
could someone have driven some way, maybe with an ATV
even or something, and gotten close to where the body
was dumped and then dumped it there. But that's impossible.
It's there's no road up here, there's no way unless

(12:27):
the car could fly, there's no way to get to
that spot. So either she walked back there herself or
someone carried her there. Like everywhere else in the world,

(12:52):
twenty twenty has been an apocalyptic year. In Los Angeles.
There's been a global pandemic, massive protests, super spreader events,
and a fire season that turned the La sky red
days at a time. Then in September, a black man
named Dejon Kizzy was riding his bicycle on the wrong

(13:13):
side of the street in South la When police tried
to stop Kizzy, he fled and when they caught up
to him, there was a scuffle. Police say that Kizzy
struck a deputy in the face and then dropped and
picked up a handgun, which ended with police firing at
him multiple times. After his death, protesters took to the streets,

(13:37):
and a few days later, two young police deputies, one
male and one female, were sitting in their squad car
outside of Metro station in Compton when a single shooter
walked right up to their car window and shot them
both multiple times at point blank range. Both deputies survived
the execution attempt, but the shooting and the protest that

(14:00):
followed sent shock waves through a community where tension was
already at breaking point. The deputies were taken to a
local hospital and a small number of protesters were gathered outside.
A few of them started to chant let them die.
Then a KPCC reporter named Josie y Wog was covering
the protest when she was thrown to the ground by deputies.

(14:24):
Sheriff Alex Villanueva first said that Wang had interfered with
the arrest and that she did not have press credentials,
but video captured on cell phones showed that she was
wearing a lanyard identifying herself as a member of the media.
She said that she complied with the deputy's orders, but
was arrested and detained for five hours for obstructing a

(14:46):
peace officer. Sheriff Alex Villanueva was sworn in in December
twenty eighteen on a promise to reform, rebuild, and restore
the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, and he has made

(15:07):
some reforms, but he's also seen his share of controversy.
In twenty nineteen, the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, who
had enthusiastically endorsed him, issued a statement criticizing Sheriff l
Nueva for what it called numerous complaints of abuse of
his office. It said that these alleged abuses had eroded

(15:28):
the trust of the public. Among other things, they criticized
his decision to reinstate deputies who had previously been fired
for misconduct, including allegations of domestic violence, and some critics
have also questioned the current administration's transparency. In October, a
civil complaint was filed by deputies who claimed that they

(15:49):
were assaulted at the East LA Station by a group
of older officers who were allegedly members of a gang.
They called themselves Bandidos and had tattoos of a skeleton,
wearing a sombrero and carrying guns. The complaint alleges that
the Bandidos controlled the East LA station like inmates running
a prison yard. My Teresa's disappearance happened in two thousand

(16:13):
and nine, years before the Black Lives Matter movement, but
during the protests in La, her name was being added
to hashtag Say her Name, along with Breonna Taylor, who
was killed by police at her home during a raid.
We had to scream and fight every inch of the
way for like the resources from the Sheriff's department, for

(16:38):
the local mainstream television drive by media to cover it.
Like we had a fight for everything. This is Jasmine Caannic.
She's a journalist who's been involved with my Teresa's case
since the beginning. You know, nobody should be disappearing like that.
No one should disappear like that, Like that was crazy

(17:00):
and that could have been anyone, Yeah, right, that could
have been And that was one of the things that
resonated with me a lot. It was just like that
could have been me, that could have been anyone. She
says that some cases strike you hard, and she decided
to get even more involved with the case after she
met with my Teresa's dad, Michael, ten years ago. She's

(17:23):
remained close to Michael ever since. We all met at
Starbucks and had like a really long conversation. That's when
I started writing about it. And as is the case
with some of the stories that I choose to take on,

(17:43):
I get a little more involved than I do in others,
and the Matrise one was one of them because it
was being ignored. This girl just, you know, disappeared, and
it was not giving the attention that you know, a
blonde hair, blue eyed girl who would go missing in
Malibu would have gotten the trees, you know, did not

(18:13):
get the benefit of Black Lives Matter. And it's unfortunate
because I feel like her case should have been one
of the proposter children for Black Lives Matter. I mean,
if you have this, you know, young black woman who
was clearly having mental health crisis. So it's tragic on

(18:35):
all these different levels to me because had it just
been a few years later, I think more people would
have been screaming about it. I think had it been
a few years later, maybe she wouldn't have been taken
into custody in the first place, because the little anybody
anse of weed is not anything that can be criminally charged.

(19:10):
Some people believe that one or more of the officers
on duty that night could have played a more direct
role in my Teresa's death. The deputies who were identified
by multiple sources as being the ones who appeared on
video have never spoken out. But however you look at it,
Jasmine says that the Lost Hill Sheriff's Department clearly failed

(19:32):
in their duty of care to my trees on the
night she went missing. Well, it's clear the sheriffs had
something to do with her death, I mean, just for
the simple fact that they released her, you know, after
saying they wouldn't in the middle of the night without anything, right,
So they had something to do with her death because
after that, you know, as we all know now, she

(19:53):
ended up dead. But many of us do believe that,
you know, the Sheriff's had one or two of the
deputies over there had more to do with it than
you know, we've ever really been able to prove but
for me, all fingers point back to the Sheriff's apartment
because at the end of the day, they told her mother,

(20:17):
her grandmother, that they weren't going to release her, and
then they did. And that's a common problem in La County,
which is, you know, they like to let women go
at these odd you know, hours of the night when
it's dangerous. It's beyond me why they did that, like

(20:42):
after they told her family, with Teresa's family, that they
were not going to do that, and then they did it. Anyway,
My Teresa's case was given to the Office of Independent Review,
a civilian oversight group that was supposed to ensure that
allegations of LASD officer misconduct were investigated fairly. The Office

(21:03):
of Independent Review produced the report hundreds of pages with
almost zero proper names. The Office of Independent Review was
disbanded in twenty fourteen. Most police departments around the country
have no type of civilian oversight. Jasmine says that my

(21:23):
trease was the inspiration behind her work with the reform
La Jail's ballot measure. The measure passed in March twenty twenty.
Jasmine has been advocating for years for the creation of
the La County Sheriff's Department Civilian Oversight Commission, She wants
to make sure that it's a truly independent organization and

(21:44):
that it has the tools necessary to do its job.
The ballot measure gave the commission subpoena power to effectively
and independently investigate misconduct, and it requires the attendance of
witnesses and production of evidence connected to their investigations and oversight.
When my trease disappeared in two thousand and nine, there

(22:06):
was no Oversight Commission on that night. If people hear
about this and they're outraged and they want to do something,
because we always like to sort of have a call
to action on what people can actually do, what's the
best way to put your energy for it and try
to help with us. I mean, at this point in time,
you know, people need to pay attention to more than

(22:30):
what's going on in Washington, d C. What happens in
your backyard affects you way more than anything going on
in Washington, d C. But voters don't tend to pay
attention to what's going on at city hall, what's going
on with their county Board of supervisors. Most voters don't
even know who represents them. At the local level. Everyone

(22:51):
in this country, no matter where they are. They live
in some county, they live in some city, they live
in some state, and at each of those levels there
is a body of government that governs them, and they
should be engaged. Believe it or not, most law enforcement
agencies do not have civilian oversight. There's a really big

(23:12):
push now, especially in the wake of you know, Breonna
Taylor and George Floyd and all of these other names.
So I could go on and on and on, and
I always call out Matries's name too. I never let
people forget about Matris, you know, because now people are
paying attention. And so that's what I tell people, like,

(23:34):
they have to get engaged at the local level. They
have to push for these changes. They have to unseat
people who aren't willing to do the changes and put
people in the office who are willing to make the changes.
Because in this country, we only get changed real systemic change,
real institutional change, two ways court rulings or legislation. It

(23:56):
just is what it is. That's how we get changed.
You can protest in the street all you want, but
if the people who are in power aren't moved by
your protests to change the law. You're just protesting in
the street. Sheriff Lee Baca is currently in federal prison.
He has reportedly been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Jasmine is convinced

(24:20):
that Sheriff Bacca knows more about my Teres's case. I mean,
he may end up dying with that secret unless one
of the other deputies involved want to come forward. Ismail
Rodriguez and Lazara Sanchez, the deputies who were identified as
possibly being on camera walking out of the station shortly

(24:42):
after my Trees, have both been transferred from Lost Hill station.
Both still work for the LASD. Neither have ever spoken
publicly about the night my Trees went missing. Officially, my

(25:09):
Teres's case is still classified as an open investigation, but
because her death has not officially been rolled a homicide,
the case, like so many others in Los Angeles and
around the country, seems to be in limbo. Police have
described it as a clue driven investigation, which basically means
if someone comes to them with a lead, they will

(25:30):
investigate it, but they aren't out knocking on doors. I
still believe that someone knows something and that there could
be more clues. Still buried somewhere in dark Canyon. Again,
part of being a thorough investigator is doing a Sherlock
Home style process of investigation. Let's take a look at

(25:51):
the main theories of what could have happened in My Trees. One,
someone killed her, put her in their car, and dumped
her body. Now this was a theory that depended on
the fire road or some access road behind the Malibu
Canyon ranch or in that general area leading down to
a point where a body could have been dropped in

(26:13):
the spot where her remains were found. But now we
know that that road doesn't exist. The fire road just
leads to some horse trails, all of them and at
a very steep drop that puts you almost a mile
from where the remains were found. And as part of
checking out this theory, we've also looked at other past

(26:33):
crimes that involve dumping a body in that area. Some
were serial killers, others were gang members, but they all
chose dump sites that were near a road or a turnoff.
They had a way to drive there. This wasn't the
case with My Trees. Another theory is that My Trees,
suffering from some kind of mental breakdown, could have walked

(26:55):
to the area herself, and then somehow succumbed to the elements.
Now we can't roll this out completely because hypothermia does
cause people to take their clothes off, but it's very
unlikely this was Malibu in late summer. High as in
the day hit the nineties and the nightly lows only
went down to the sixties. If she was outside for

(27:16):
more than a day, she would have been dehydrated and exhausted.
But it's still very unlikely that this could have led
to her death that quickly because of the fact that
it would be difficult, if not impossible, to carry a
body through Dark Creek the way that we hiked. Some
people suggested that someone could have killed my trees and

(27:38):
moved her body to Dark Creek later, but the forensics
don't really support this. A lot of people mention mummification
and the fact that the body wouldn't have only been
partially mummified if it had been out there for a year,
but forensic experts tell us that this is not the case.
She wasn't out in the direct sunlight. She was in
a canyon, and the part of the body where there

(28:00):
was flesh visible had been buried in the soil. I
agree with Sheriff fill in a way. I think that
the evidence supports the theory that my Trees died shortly
after she went missing, and that her body was not moved.
Police suggested suicide in the beginning, I would say that's
absolutely not a possibility in my mind. There's no real

(28:23):
ledge where she could have leaped to her death and
had her remains end up at that point. Also, there
are no broken bones that would have suggested that kind
of a fall. There's no way that she could have
committed suicide out there. Another possibility my Trees dehydrated, confused
and scared, started wandering around, cutting through backyards, and somehow

(28:46):
ended up near that area, and then at that point
saw something that she shouldn't have seen. This seems like
a likelier possibility. We know that cartels were operating marijuana
grows in this area, that's why the police were there
in the first place, and we've found evidence on every
one of our hikes that they still could be out there.

(29:12):
So how do we move forward from here? We know
from Rebecca's case and others that getting answers and justice
can take a long time. The end of the podcast
season does not mean the end of the investigation. Once again,
it's a waiting game. A lot of us grew up
watching shows like CSI. We were taught that the criminal

(29:35):
justice system worked, that there's a three act structure. The
case is presented, investigated, and in the end, for the
most part, the bad guys get caught. In the final act,
the bad guy goes to jail, and all the loose
ends are neatly tied up. Now we know better. We
know that making progress and cases can take years, and

(29:56):
that there are often frustrating setbacks along the way, and
sometimes it's not clear who the good guys and the
bad guys are. As Jasmine pointed out ten years ago,
the idea that police officers would have their actions dissected
on the nightly news was unthinkable. Would my teres have
gone missing in today's climate with the knowledge that we

(30:17):
have now. Sadly we'll never know the answer to that,
but we can help make it part of my Teresa's
legacy to make sure that what happened to her never
happens to anyone again. We know that law enforcement are
watching us, and we have to make sure that we're
watching them. It can take a long time for people

(30:40):
to come forward and for new clues and new evidence
to come to light. It's our role as podcasters to
get my Teresa's story out there, to put pressure on
law enforcement and people who have answers, and then wait,
this may be the end of the podcast season, but
it's not the end of the investigation. We're going to

(31:01):
keep searching for answers, whether they come in the form
of evidence, new people coming forward, or other secrets that
may be still buried somewhere in dark Canyon. I'm Katherine
Townsend and this is Helen Gone. Helen Gone is the
production of School of Humans and iHeartRadio. It's written and

(31:23):
narrated by me, Katherine Townsend. Our producers are Gabby Watts,
Taylor Church, and James Morrison. Music is by Ben Sale.
Mixed is by Tunewelders. Our executive producers are Brandon barr,
Els Crowley and Brian Lavin. Special thanks to Chipcroft for
use of footage from his documentary Boss Compassion, School of Humans.

(32:06):
School of Humans