Vultures from Lost Hills: Dark Canyon

Pushkin.

Deep in the metadata behind the 404 error codes. In it, a young Black woman is questioning a middle-aged white guy who's sitting on the edge of his bed drinking a beer.

Did you hear banging on the door?

Talking at the door, like, they just shut it on her or something.

The person they're talking about is Patrice Richardson, a 24-year-old Black woman who disappeared in Malibu in 2009 and whose remains were discovered there 11 months later. They're talking about the day of her disappearance.

I was up above when I first heard a voice, and by the time I got down below, then kind of curiosity kind of dragged me closer to the fence.

The interview is being shot vertical, seemingly on a cell phone, with the guy taking up the whole frame. He looks like an aging California golden boy, with graying blonde hair, a tan and a barrel chest. He's relaxed, wearing a sky-blue henley shirt tucked into a pair of camouflage shorts.

So I really couldn't see her face, but I could see her shadow like this.

While he says this, he gestures broadly, waving his big paws around in the air.

In the light of the night, you know, with the light on the front porch. And she was screaming at something, you know, and it was pretty loud. And I'm thinking, God damn, it's 4.30 in the morning.

What was she saying?

She was saying, God damn buddy, yo, we've struggled yo, and she was pissed or something, you know, something? I think it was the people at the house. Mm-hmm. She was angry. Maybe they told her she had to leave or call the police, or she was telling them, you son of a, you know, whatever.

He got curious. The scene was so out of place. In this quiet neighborhood, a young woman alone in the early morning hours, shouting she might be in trouble.

Because I'm thinking, well, if there's some dude there, I'm not going to let some dude hit her, you know?

Right?

You know, I wouldn't have hesitated to walk on that property, but since I wasn't, you know, and I couldn't see anybody else except for her. Or not really even her, just her stupid. She was angry or something. I mean, I'm the kind of guy that would have been right there, I would have been down there protecting her.

The interviewer, her name's Raven Masterson. She made the video sometime after Mitrice's remains were found. Like so many people, she wanted to figure out what happened to Mitrice. Because the death of Mitrice Richardson is Malibu's most horrifying, notorious and scandalous, unsolved case. For 15 years, Mitrice's story has been shrouded in mystery. The scant clues have been worked over a thousand times to no end.

The mystery unraveled on a September night in 2009, right where the Pacific greets the shores of Malibu.

It all started when Mitrice tried to leave Joffrey's, a pricey restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway, without paying her bill. She was arrested and taken to Lost Hill Station, about 13 miles away.

They contacted her mother, who said that she will pick her up in the morning. If you will keep her there, deputy said. We will.

But instead of staying at the station, Mitrice walked out into the Malibu night. Her car was at a tow yard near P.C.H. with her belongings inside.

She was released at 12.

She was gorgeous and charismatic, and, as would later come out, she was in the midst of a mental health crisis. A beauty contestant, an honor student and now a missing person. According to her mom, she had no street savvy whatsoever, and she didn't know Malibu at all. Mitrice Richardson walked out of a Los Angeles County sheriff's office and into a mystery that continues to baffle investigators, and then the mystery became a horror.

Eleven months later, the 24-year-old college graduate's remains were found here in dark canyon. She was naked and partially mummified.

They discovered a skull, they discovered a pelvis, and they discovered a leg, just bones, they determined. Officially, unequivocally, and unfortunately, it was Mitrice Richardson. Coroner's officials haven't determined the cause of death, and they say Richardson's body was in the canyon for more than six months.

Whatever happened in Dark Canyon remains, for the moment, a dark secret.

It's been 15 years since Mitrice disappeared, 14 years since her remains were found, and there's been no progress on her case. There's no sign that law enforcement is actively working on it, but it's not a cold case. It's a quote active criminal investigation, which means the sheriff's department doesn't have to share information. And, believe me, they take that very seriously, they do not like to talk about this case.

Welcome to another episode of murder mystery makeup Monday. Today's story is about Mitrice Richardson. It kind of feels like that they were hiding something. The police work in this case was awful. Is this incompetence or a cover-up?

The previous captain was in on it and promoted for his cover-up job.

I believe that Mitrice Richardson was murdered and it was covered up by the L.

We know the cops took Mitrice to the station and the cops let her go in the dark. This part is true, undisputed fact. And then what?

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States since it was established in 1861. There have been 3,517 people awarded with the medal. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. And our new podcast from Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor Stories of Courage wherever you get your podcasts.

Mitrice Richardson's death is not officially a homicide.

Hello.

Hi, how are you? I'm Dana.

Dana Hi, nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you too. I'm at the home of Lisa Scheinen. She's the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy of Mitrice's remains. She's also one of the world's foremost authorities on roller coasters.

That is my big hobby, that, and collecting butterflies.

Her house, a normal-looking suburban house in Redondo Beach, is basically a natural history museum. So do you capture them in a net and then take a look? Shadow box frames filled with specimens are stacked in every corner.

There's something called a killing jar, which you can make, it's a jar that has a plaster of Paris base and then you pour in. You can use cyanide when you screw the cap on. It's a closed environment and it makes fumes that kill the butterfly. Basically put it to sleep in seconds.

Dr. Scheinen worked for the L..A. County Coroner's Office for 24 years.

I was a deputy medical examiner at the L.

She worked on a lot of high-profile cases, she did the autopsies on the musicians Elliot Smith and notorious B.I.G.

I autopsied Steve Allen, Dr. Knorr from the Killing Fields, Brittany Murphy, Brian Keith.

But Mitrice's case stands out.

There are over the years some cases that do stick with me. Because of the circumstances of the case, there were so many unknowns. I mean, every time I've been near Malibu, I'd start thinking, Well, geez, this is where Mitrice was. And this is just such a tragic case.

What she knew at the start was very basic. A few scattered pieces of clothing and a human skeleton had been found in an inaccessible canyon in Malibu. The autopsy report details the pieces of Mitrice's clothing that were recovered from the remains. Site 1. Navy, blue or black padded bra.

I had the investigator's report, this particular investigator's report was very straightforward. It said. Somebody from law enforcement was checking an area in a remote canyon and found the bones and the clothing, and the clothing was about 100 feet away from the skeleton. You know, that's very limited information.

The soft tissue was mostly skin that had been mummified.

Yeah, mummification is a process, it can be accidental. If you have a body in a very dry, hot environment, the liquid essentially disappears. And what you get is this very leathery, rigid skin, sometimes some soft tissue. Usually, the internal organs don't mummify, so it's mostly the skin, muscle, tendons, that type of thing.

There were a few small marks on some of the bones. The work Dr. Sheinan thought of animals scavenging the remains.

The toes of the left foot were missing and that was consistent with animal activity.

But otherwise, the bones were intact.

We look for things like fractures, which would usually mean some sort of a blunt force impact. We would look for any evidence of a gunshot, wound or a stabbing. I didn't see any evidence of a physical traumatic injury.

There was also no way to tell if Mitrice had been sexually assaulted.

Without soft tissue, there's really nothing that you can do or see, and sperm doesn't last.

Without internal organs, there was no way to tell if she had overdosed.

She wasn't found with cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, anything like that. She didn't really have a history of that type of thing. But again, without being able to do an accurate test, we don't know.

There was a small amount of leg muscle. Dr. Sheinan sent it in for toxicology, and that report came back inconclusive.

In this particular case, there's several possibilities. There are rattlesnakes there, she could have been bitten by a rattlesnake, there's also fire ants. She could have had a severe allergic reaction to something.

But why would the skeleton be naked? Mitrice's bra, belt and jeans were found hundreds of feet from the skeleton, and the belt was no longer on the jeans. A seasonal stream dark creek runs through the canyon. And cops suggested that a flash flood could have removed her clothes, carrying them downstream. The winter Mitrice was missing was a rainy one. But even so, it takes a real contortion of logic to imagine a flood could strip a body naked and remove a belt from a pair of pants.

Usually, when we have a person who's dead with their clothes on, the clothes will stay on, even if the body mummifies, the clothes are going to stay on. Water might wash off socks or something like that, but it's not going to completely undress a body.

Dr. Scheinen raised a different natural explanation for Mitrice's nudity hypothermia.

There's something that happens with extreme cold, called paradoxical undressing. Normally, when you're cold, your blood vessels will constrict to try to keep the blood more central in the body. Well, what happens with paradoxical undressing is there is a reflex dilatation of these blood vessels. So all of a sudden you get this rush of nice, warm blood into these areas that were previously cold. And people who were probably a little bit out of it by this point think, Oh my gosh, it's so warm, I'm too hot, and they take their clothes off. However, that tends to happen more often in extreme cold, where there's snow.

In mid-September 2009, the average overnight low at the weather recording station, nearest to Dark Canyon, was in the mid-60s.

And I'm not sure it would get cold enough up in the canyon for that to happen, but it's just something to think about.

Obviously, there's another possible explanation foul play.

There are sinister reasons for the person not having their clothes on. I mean, could she have been sexually assaulted? And they just took her clothes off and left them off, who knows?

And what about the missing clothing?

And also the fact that it was an incomplete set of clothes and none of the additional items of clothing were ever found, including shoes, which I think have a little more weight than other clothing.

As with everything about Maitrese's case, the story of her remains is a story of absences, gaps and guesses. A forensic pathologist works by process of elimination, but with so little hard evidence, it was difficult to rule out anything.

So the fact that I didn't see any trauma in the bones doesn't mean trauma didn't happen. It's always possible that a gunshot wound can go through and through a body without hitting bone, same thing for a stab wound. What's also possible is asphyxia or manual strangulation, or maybe, you know, choked with a rope. The reason people die when they're strangled is you're cutting off the blood flow to the brain.

In the autopsy report, there's a list of missing bones some bones from the hand, the left toes, presumably scavenged by animals. The tailbone, the xiphoid process at the bottom of the sternum, and a thin, fragile neck bone called the hyoid.

The hyoid bone is the only floating bone in the body, it's not attached to any other bone. It sits a little bit above the thyroid cartilage, and it's essentially there as a base of muscle attachment.

Because of its shape and position in the body, a broken hyoid can provide clear evidence of strangulation. For a forensic pathologist, it's a very significant bone.

And what's important about it is it's a U-shaped bone with the projections heading towards the back of the neck, so if it's compressed from both sides. Which is what happens when you have a strangulation case with manual strangulation, is that you're putting pressure on the wings of the hyoid bone and they can fracture. The thing with the hyoid is, if you found it and it was broken, you could say, Aha, this person was strangled.

But like the missing clothing and her ID, Mitrice's hyoid bone was never found. Dr Scheinen says Mitrice's case could still be resolved with new evidence. The coroner could change the cause of death from undetermined.

If there was foul play involved, someone could confess, you never know, could be deathbed confession. Maybe they'll raid somewhere someplace and they'll find pictures of her. Anything is possible.

Anything could happen, including this someone who knows something could decide they've kept the secret for too long.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States since it was established in 1861. There have been 3,517 people awarded with the medal. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. And our new podcast from Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor Stories of Courage wherever you get your podcasts.

Maitrese's movements on September 17, 2009, are mostly unknown. After she was released from Lost Hill Station at 1225 a.m, she somehow made her way 6 miles to Montenito in the dark. The next morning, around 6.30 a...m, she was spotted there in the backyard of a house at the bottom of Cold Canyon Road.

I didn't know that Black people lived in Montenegro, they live in Montenegro.

So, he says, he decided to hang out just to make sure she was safe.

She was screaming loud enough that I go, the cops are going to be here soon. I better get out of here, so I went home.

The woman, he says, was a total stranger to him at the time.

And so I just, I didn't think much of it, you know, I didn't know that she'd just been arrested. It was the same night, you know, the circumstances of the situation.

He didn't know that deputies and search parties with horses, drones and dogs were going to be pouring into sleepy little Montenegro. Looking for her, this young woman who was not from Malibu, who he thought didn't really fit in there.

I go, huh, you know? I didn't think much about it until, like, two days later, when all this came on the news. You know, what a whoop-de-whoo.

Even though he didn't know any of that, he knew something out of the ordinary had happened.

A couple days later, you know, I hear that she's missing and that, you know, whoop-de-whoo and all this stuff's going on. And I saw it. I'm up at my spot two days later.

Now, when did you see this?

I saw this like a few days after she was missing, or maybe four days after she was missing. Mm-hmm, you know, I thought to myself, you know, because I've lived out there all my life and I'm kind of like a trapper. I'm kind of a mountain man, right?

This story of the Montanito lifer who saw Mitrice the morning of her disappearance, it's not out there. The recording and all the new information in it got buried under so much other information, so much misinformation, conspiracy theories, dead ends, lies. It was lost in the leaf-litter detritus of the internet. But it's kind of like that hyoid bone, tiny and super significant. Because this ordinary guy sitting on the edge of his bed, drinking a beer, telling a story. He makes what is probably the single most important statement of any witness in this case.

I don't know any of the facts, except for that. The Constant eye was the last one to see her alive.

If he was the last one to see her alive, did he know something about her death? This season on Lost Hills? I know one of them, officers that had something to do with it.

It's like, when I seen the news.

It was like, Damn, that's crazy, because I was like, in a cell with this woman, somebody said they actually followed her after she left.

You think you heard someone talking about how the deputy could give her a ride somewhere?

Yes, yes, it was a male deputy. If I'm going to murder anybody, it's going to be a cop.

I mean, I had to sleep in front of my kid's door because people were coming to kill my kids. I was dating her at the time and she ended up going missing. And I was questioned by L..A. Homicide as a possible suspect for her disappearance.

And one of the other guys came up and said, What do you know about Maitrese?

He knew exactly where she was, which gives me the chills.

Imagine if this was your kid?

That was swept up and put in a box like this.

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The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States since it was established in 1861. There have been 3,517 people awarded with the medal. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. And our new podcast from Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor Stories of Courage wherever you get your podcasts.