The Vanishing Point: Episode 1, Hoopa Valley

As we prepare for a new season of Up and Vanish this January, please check out The Vanishing Point, a new series from the Up and Vanish team. This podcast is absolutely free, but if you want to listen to it ad-free, subscribe to Tenderfootplus at tenderfootplus..com or on Apple Podcasts.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast and do not represent those of Tenderfoot.TV or their employees. This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.

As you might remember, in season three of Up and Vanished, I covered the case of Ashley Loring Heavy Runner, a 23-year-old Indigenous woman who went missing from the Blackfeet reservation in Browning, Montana, in 2017.

What is happening to these women, who do you think is preying on them? are they the victims?

Of trafficking serial killers that have maybe set their sights on more rural areas, what do we know?

Hi, I'm Zalicia Stanton and a few years ago, I was the victim of a huge financial crime, one that forced me to navigate the criminal justice system for the first time. It was that experience, actually, that prompted me to want to dig deeper into true crime stories, to tell them with the kind of nuance that I'd experienced firsthand. It all led to my podcast, Truer Crime, where I tell the stories of real people murdered, missing and misled. With more context, more nuance, and a lot more questions, I'm deeply interested in shedding light on the kinds of stories that we tend to brush under the rug.

One year has passed since Ashley Loring was last seen on the Blackfeet reservation.

There's something wrong happening in Montana and on these reservations. And the only way to fix this or move forward is to cover it and to talk about it.

There's been an uptick in exposure for cases like Ashley's, and yet many of these cases are still overshadowed. And ever since Up and Vanished season Three, we've been hearing about a lot of them.

I've been following your new season about Ashley Loring and Brown.

I'm sure you may have been contacted regarding the open and unsolved case.

A woman by the name of Aaliyah, Heavy runner.

My sister, a mother of two, was recently killed by her boyfriend.

So now the up and vanished team is going to bring you along the gorgeous Pacific Northwest coast up to Hoopa, California, home of the Hoopa Valley tribe.

This lonely stretch of foggy coastline is what some think of as a doorway to heaven.

On earth, others as a gateway to hell.

There's a long list of unsolved cases here, We're going to look into five of them. This is the vanishing point, an up and vanished series.

You have reached Tenderfoot TV at the tone, please record your message.

Hi, my name's Laura Fraser. I'm an investigative journalist based in Oakland, California. I'm working on a bunch of stories for The True River Tribune, the newspaper based on the Hoopa reservation in northern California. We have various missing people up there, various unsolved murder cases, along with a few missing people cases.

Last year, we were contacted by Laura Frater, a journalist who'd been covering MMIP cases in Northern California. She'd been writing these articles for The True River Tribune, the sole newspaper in Hoopa Valley.

I got into these cases because I study federal Indian law as part of my P.h.D. And then one day I was thinking about getting back into journalism. I hadn't written for any publications in many years, and I was on a database looking at statistics regarding missing Indigenous women in Humboldt County. And suddenly I see Emily risling on the list.

Thirty-three-year-old Emily Risling, a mother of two, was last seen near this village in.

October.

And then, in the preceding weeks, I could not get Emily off my mind, she's my age, she has two young kids. I thought there must be like a newspaper in her community that's looking for coverage and I can do that.

Laura discovered the True River Tribune and reached out to the staff. Little did she know the paper was run by a sole employee, editor-in-chief, Allie Hossler.

I found Allie on Facebook and I sent her a couple messages. The craziest thing was she never checks her Facebook messages. She just happened to see my message that day saying, You know, I want to write about Emily Risling. Are you willing? You don't have to pay me?

Laura researched Emily Risling's case for months, interviewing family members over the phone and following tips.

I wanted to write for the paper because I think that community news is democratic, it validates people's experiences, and you should see yourself in your local community newspaper.

Laura's first article was published last March.

Okay, do you want me just to go through each PDF or stop between highlights? All right, I'm reading from part one of Emily's Then.

There was only so much Laura could do from afar and hundreds of miles away. Allie had her hands full on the front lines of multiple causes, all while running the newspaper by herself. Without gaining as much traction on the cases as they'd hoped, Laura suggested that they try to get the stories into an even bigger market.

With podcasting, we all know that it's incredibly accessible, it's the modern way of storytelling, it's global, and I wasn't super familiar with the American podcasting platforms because I'm not from the U.S. And then somebody one day at a yoga class says to me, Have you heard of up and vanished?

Nestled deep in the rugged wilderness of California's extreme northwest, the Hoopa Reservation sits on 144 square miles of mountainous terrain and redwood forest. When you search for it on a map, its border appears as a square box, and that is no accident. For generations, the Hoopa tribe existed peacefully, their lives interwoven with the landscape.

Thank you.

Hi.

What do you think of Hoopa? I like it so far. Yeah, feels like Scotland.

Did you drive in from reading today?

From Eureka.

Oh, from Eureka.

This is Allie Hosler, she's Indigenous and a member of the Hoopa Valley tribe. Not only is Allie extremely proud of her heritage, but she possesses an exceptional wealth of knowledge about the history of her people.

Hoopa is, in my opinion, the most beautiful place in the world, and it will always be the most beautiful place in the world. There's the Trinity River, cuts through the mountains and flows through the Hoopa Valley. The Hoopa Valley is the heart of the Hoopa tribe, but our ancestral territory spans into the mountain areas to quite a ways.

The 92,000 acres of land the reservation spans is only about one-fifth of the Hoopa tribe's original territory. Through all these years, the Hoopa people have maintained their fight to reclaim their stolen land from the federal government.

We're very rooted in place, I know, like during certain eras in the U.S, people have been like, I think we'll just move, you know, get the heck out of here, or go somewhere else, or let's leave California. That's not an option for Hoopa people. Hoopa people are rooted here. This is home and it always will be.

In an article from 2023, Allie wrote that the tribe hopes to regain over 10,000 acres of land. A victory that would allow them to manage natural and cultural resources that have been inaccessible to the Hoopa people for over 100 years.

It's really off balance now. They've put in dams on all these rivers, the flows aren't the same, the fish runs have been devastated. We're out of sync.

Allie runs the newspaper, yes, but her love for her community runs deeper. Still, it reveals itself in all the ways she continues to show up and all the ways she champions causes for her tribe.

Working as a journalist in this community, I've sat in a lot of meetings and I feel like we talk about the same thing over and over for years on end. And there's a lot of money pouring into this town for help with different things, but it's not getting where it needs to be.

Allie gave our team a tour of the land that her ancestors have called home for hundreds of years. As she showed them around. The somber truth of how her community has been neglected was inescapable, even in the small moments.

Gotta have a wood stove around here.

Oh, I bet so you lose....

Electricity constantly.

Really, yeah.

How often?

Lately, like one or two times a week, and then sometimes for a week at a time. Like, look at this place over here, you know? Tarps for roofs, trailers with tarps over them. I mean, it's just people are living like this.

With her Hoopa roots, Allie understandably has a lot of relatives in the valley. In fact, she's related to not one but two of the folks whose stories we'll be covering this season, and one of those is Emily Risling.

Her case is one of the saddest cases because it was a whole year that there were so many opportunities to intervene. And her family begged for help and the community begged for help, and the people who could provide that help didn't step up.

Having followed Emily's case for some time, Allie introduced our team to the people who knew her best.

I am Mary Risling today I turned 25, I am Hoopa Yurok in Karuk, and I am the sister of Emily Risling, who went missing in October 2021..

The Risling home is a living tapestry of Emily. family photos are framed on every wall, proof that Emily used to be here, that she smiled and danced, that she was surrounded by people who loved her.

Mental health was something that majorly affected her in the time that she went missing. In that time, you know, we didn't have the best relationship and so we didn't spend a lot of time together in the last, you know, year or so.

The article that Laura wrote drew a holistic picture of the person. Emily was a loving sister, mother and friend, but also, like so many of us, a woman with her own struggles.

Risling, a University of Oregon graduate who studied political science, suffered from severe health problems prior to her disappearance. I think people thought she was just on drugs or abusing other substances, Gonzales explained. But what a lot of people don't realize is that it often starts with the mental health problems, and then people turn to other things to help them numb the pain.

Emily was a very outgoing person in high school. She was president of her high school class for four years. She was really a go-getter.

This is Emily and Mary's mom, Judy Risling.

After graduating from U. of O, she went to work for a TANF program. And she helped a lot of other native people with resources, people that were having difficulties. When I said she was loyal, I always run into people that tell me how helpful Emily was, She was very generous to them in their time of need. After she had her daughter, postpartum, psychosis kicked in and she became pretty delusional. And it came to light that Emily was having some mental issues, and as that progressed, I think she started to perhaps self-medicate.

For the rest of the family, despite their efforts to connect her to resources, Emily would slowly lose everything with nowhere to live. And concerns about her ability to care for her children, social services got involved and Emily's two kids were placed in the care of her parents.

It was hard for me to watch her not be with her kids or not take that responsibility. I know how hard it was on her son to not be with his mother when she no longer had a house. When she kind of let go of the person she was. It was really hard for me to see her do that without being frustrated in her, and so out of my immediate family. I was kind of the one to confront her about that and that did kind of push her away from our relationship.

Emily's life seemed to spiral further and further out of control until she was nearly unrecognizable to the people who loved her. In the depths of her struggle. She was often seen walking around town in various states of undress. Facebook posts on the local Hoopa page show that residents were concerned and frustrated that there seemed to be no help for the quote.

I think California in itself is a rough place to have a mental illness, considering that you can't force somebody to get help unless they want it. So if someone is out of their right mind and doesn't think they need help, good luck trying to help them. And that's the case with my sister. At a certain point, you know, she thought everything was going to be okay, so to telling her that it wasn't okay. This is not okay, you know, walking around naked, it's not okay.

Emily was oftentimes walking around nude and many times in hoopa. They would just simply pick her up and give her a ride to where she wanted to go. I was constantly begging them to pick her up on a 5150 and they were always saying that she didn't meet the criteria for that.

Code 5150 of the California Welfare and Institutions Code permits police and mental health professionals to transfer an individual experiencing a mental health crisis. And they can do that involuntarily. The individual is brought to a facility for 72 hours for psychiatric evaluation and stabilization. To qualify, though, you have to be gravely disabled or considered a danger to yourself or others, Emily was determined not to meet either of these criteria.

She did get arrested for a small fire in the Hoopa cemetery and they took her to jail. And really, as her family, we thought this is our golden ticket to get her some help, and it's a small community. We knew the people in the DA's office, so we had already been talking to them about trying to find a dual treatment facility for Emily.

You don't know what happened, you don't know if she was trafficked, you don't know if she was murdered, you don't know if she did suicide or what.

Emily's father, Gary Risling, grapples with what might have happened to his daughter and how the system failed her.

None of the systems that work in there are really incomplete. It's a sad, sad, tragic thing that's happening. Emily's not the only one I talked to my cousins.

The last confirmed sighting of Emily was on Highway 169 at Pequan Bridge, located across the Klamath River, in a remote part of the Yurok Reservation. Highway 169 dead-ends. At the end of the road, a bus full of children and their driver saw Emily that cold autumn day standing naked on the bridge. One student, the child of a tribal police officer, alerted his father.

I drove down there a number of times to where she went missing and drove around by myself and looked around. But we need people, you know, that are knowledgeable about investigations and you know how to find someone. People that can serve warrants, that can do interviews with people that are suspects. I believe if there was a proper investigation, she would have been found.

There was no sign of Emily, she just vanished. Mary told us that there wasn't a fully-fledged search party until a foundation focused on wilderness safety got involved six months later.

They got search dogs, cadaver dogs, and they did a three-day search and that was really the biggest thing to have happened. In efforts to find my sister, you know, it wasn't successful, you know, the tribal agencies aren't equipped, you know, with enough people or knowledge to do something like that. That's why there's so many missing and murdered Indigenous women and people on different reservations. Because there just aren't the resources, the manpower to really do anything about it.

I've heard stuff from tribal police departments and everything, and people tell you why something can't be done. I think it's idiotic to say, well, we don't have the manpower and we're not trained, somebody has the responsibility.

Hopefully, if there is another search, then, you know, we can get some answers, but at this point we're at a standstill. It's just kind of sitting. You know, my mom calls law officials every week to try to get movement.

And I just keep calling Sheriff Honsell every week. It takes him about three weeks to finally return my call. I have told him my frustration with him and the Europe Police now. There were some jurisdictional problems. Because Emily is a Hupa tribal member, she was last seen on the Yurok reservation.

So who's in charge when someone is murdered or goes missing on tribal land?

Particularly in reservations and village areas, there is a maze of jurisdictions, of policies, of procedures, of who investigates what.

And unfortunately, the sheriff's department put it in the lap of the Yurok Tribal police. That kind of got it off of his lap. Of course, I don't think that was the right decision. I really feel like they don't have enough manpower to have search done six months later. It has to be right away.

It was not uncommon for Emily to go for periods of time where nobody heard from her.

This is Chief O'Rourke, the chief of the Tribal Police Department that was put in charge of Emily's case. He elaborated on his experience with the search for Emily.

So the family wasn't super worried before making a report until a greater length of time passed. And so typically, when law enforcement starts a search, you start from a central point and then grid out from there. We weren't able to do that with Emily because we can confirm where she was last seen. But then we also had several unconfirmed reports of where she was rumored to have been, or people she was rumored to have been around. And that was miles away when the formal police report came in of Emily being missing. I remember gathering my officers that were on duty and telling them this is not going to end well and we're going to get called to the carpet. And you guys need to document everything that you do on this case, you know the terrain, the mental health, the substance use, the time of year, the circumstances.

Chief O'Rourke states that his department performed the best search possible given the circumstances and resources. But Emily's family, well, they feel differently.

So has there been a thorough investigation? I don't think so. The Yurok police and Sheriff Hansel felt there wasn't enough evidence for another search, which, of course, I thought was absurd. Because that's what we're looking for, right? is evidence. We strongly believe that there could be foul play involved. What made her not worthy of an immediate search?

Judy told us about rumors that she and Gary had heard about their daughter's case, including a map that they were told would lead to Emily's body.

Well, it was a woman that she had overheard a conversation. We even have a map that she drew and it had a location where she felt Emily was buried.

The police would later tell us that the map could never be substantiated. After hearing all this, we spoke with Sheriff Hansel of Humboldt County Police. We wanted to talk to him more about Emily's case and the tips that had come in over the years.

One of the things that was really concerning was that there was a lot of people that knew information. Supposedly that didn't want to talk to us. Or basically said, Oh, you should know. The rumor out there is this. We said, Okay, great, but we can't act off of rumor, we can't write search warrants off of rumor. If someone knows something, they need to come and talk to us, and we can write search warrants based upon first-person eyewitness statements. If someone said, I last saw Emily here, she was hurt, someone hurt her here, or she was buried at a certain location. But people in small communities love to talk and rumors get started, and that can be very detrimental to investigations.

When we asked the family what could have happened, they couldn't say for sure. But they don't think any theory should be shot down, and they're afraid law enforcement has written off some leads prematurely.

She may have not been in the right mental state, but she would not have hurt herself. Law officials are saying there was no foul play. Even though she disappeared in a place with a lot of known convicts, she was hanging around a lot of little, shady people. And I know that something just went wrong.

Police records say Emily's last known location was Pequan Bridge. But this place that Mary's referring to, the one rumored to be associated with darker activity where Emily would sometimes be seen, that's just past the bridge.

Some people refer to it as the end of the road, and it kind of is. There's not much there, there's no cell service, you know, there's no stores, there's a couple houses, and that's all you're going to find down there at the end of the road.

Emily likely did not disappear around the Pequan bridge. She disappeared at the end of the road.

Next time on the vanishing point.

I have several theories, but then after talking to everybody.

And like their different sightings and their different stories.

I kind of think something bad might have happened with her and they're just all trying to cover it up.

Do you think somebody knows?

I think, yeah, definitely, somebody knows something.

More than they're saying, you know?

Do you think more than one person? Yeah, I do.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Vanishing Point. This six-part series is released weekly absolutely free, but if you want to listen to it ad-free, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus at Tenderfootplus..com or on Apple Podcasts.