Pushkin.

Dark Canyon is a narrow slot canyon that cuts a jagged line from the top of Payuma Road down toward Montanito.

It's choked with poison oak and brush and surrounded on three sides by canyon walls at least a thousand feet high.

The terrain all around it is sunny, breezy scrubland, but the canyon itself is cold and dark and almost impenetrable.

So how did my trees get to where she was found in Dark Canyon?

Here are some possibilities.

My trees entered Dark Canyon from the bottom, My trees entered Dark Canyon from the top.

My trees entered Dark Canyon from the Porn ranch.

My trees was alone.

My treees was not alone.

My treese was alive, my treece was not.

If we're going to figure this out, it'll be by process of elimination.

We tried going up Dark Canyon from the bottom a few different times.

The remain site is not even a mile up from the entry point on the Backbone trail, but it is incredibly slow going.

It's hours of hiking and traversing this stream bed back and forth and things to.

Get up to where she was when I went.

It was after a winter of heavy rain and the water was gushing.

Even if it was mostly dry in the actual drainage, you would be scrambling over boulders and rocks, and you'd have to be really motivated to do that, Like, why would you do that?

Let me go that night.

Hayley, my reporting partner, made another attempt during the dry month of July.

She bush whacked up the creek bed for two and a half hours before hitting a sheer rock face, at which point she was forced to turn around.

We don't think it's likely my teres walked into Dark Canyon from the bottom, and if she did, it doesn't seem possible that she was alone.

I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, episode seven in the shit, So how else could my trees have gotten into Dark Canyon?

On Google Maps, it looks like you can access the canyon from higher up on Payuma Road.

There are trails that disappear under a canopy of green brush.

We checked various turnoffs, sidestepping locked gates and trying to stick to public land.

One day, we were crashing around in the bushes at one of these seeming access points, getting increasingly discouraged.

When we heard the sound of a radio and a hammer.

It was a guy in a bandana building a greenhouse.

My name's Ed.

We're up in the hills here in the Santa Manca Mountains, and.

I live in the most beautiful spot in the world.

And I'm the only one in Malibu who has an undergroundhouse, and it's like being in heaven.

Ed didn't want us to use his last name.

He's had a few scrapes with the law, and even though he's changed his ways, he likes to be under the radar.

But as it turns out, we're not the first people to come around asking about my trees.

The Sheriff's department had been to see him too, after her remains were found.

They had information about an access point leading into the canyon near his property.

And then one of them was like grilling me, like, oh, what do you And one of the other guys came up and said, what do you know about my trees?

I was thinking, maybe you guys should tell me what you know about her, you know, but I didn't.

There was nothing I could really say.

Ed takes us into his underground house.

We follow him through a curtain of camo netting and down a ramp to a heavy wooden.

Door and we're inside.

We got the fridge over here.

Oh.

This in the interior is thirty two feet by sixteen feet on the inside eight feet tall, and there's a I use wood beams, just purely ornamental.

It's dimly lit and crammed with slimy terrariums holding rare botanical specimens, carnivorous plants, miniature bogonias, mosses.

He sells them on eBay, along with some fancy millipedes he calls pink dragons.

And then I'm selling this pogonias and this is super rare.

This one.

It's a grass pogonia from Madagascar, Pogonia bognariai, and it's pretty spectacular.

Before he was growing bogonias, he was a marijuana farmer.

I've been through the whole all the wars.

I've been arrested bunch of times and almost done a bunch of time in prison, and the whole thing.

Ed says he used to grow in Dark Canyon.

Yeah, it's going.

Back to from two thousand and one to about two thousand and four, and they were about three hundred plants.

Here three hundred plants.

Yeah, back before legals, this area was riddled with illegal grows, some amateur operations, others run by drug cartels.

Ed says Dark Canyon was a great place to grow weed.

The plants were so big.

You know, there was this one spot I was telling you about called Queen's where the plants were like, you know, twelve feet tall.

Well, once it gets above that, now you're exposed.

Now you have a problem.

One day Ed's grow got spotted.

There was a helicopter that flew over and they flew over here, and they went into Dark Canyon and they circled around, but kind of far away, and I go, did they see because they flew right over the plant.

I go, I think they did, but I wasn't sure.

But they were sneaky about it because they didn't just circle directly overhead.

And so about two weeks later, I harvested everything.

I did, the whole thing.

Three hundred plants was a huge amount.

Then all of a sudden, I'm sitting here, I'm doing something, and all of a sudden, the helicopters and they're ten feet above the ground and they're sitting right on top of me, and I run down into that.

I had this whole tunnel area underneath the shrubs, like a like a trail that was underneath, so it was like a tunnel.

And so I went, I went running down into there, and these guys were like ten feet above the you know.

At one time, I could actually I was in this little crevice area.

I could actually feel the rotor wash like this, like fifty mile an hour wind just blowing through this little dry canyon that I was in, you know, under the brush.

And I'm telling you it was it was live.

It was intense.

Ed says that twenty years ago, a friend of his hiking deep into Dark Canyon had come across a big industrial pot.

Grow Ed thinks if his friend got down there, maybe we can too.

He warns us, We're gonna have to do a little bushwhacking.

We check our watches.

It's eleven am.

Do you want to do more torn or you want to go down get get hiking.

Yeah, maybe let's let's go back to your car and olds.

Yeah, we'll get my heat and then we can come back and talk.

Yeah, let's get let's get let's get on.

The Yeah, I like it.

We go over the lip of the canyon into the dense brush.

Head's in front, clipping.

We're behind him, crawling on our hands and knees.

Yeah, you made a good path here.

I hope.

So you want to get one of those cloudy trails.

If you can't, we pick our way along a ridge, then drop into the creek bed.

It's filled with massive boulders and six foot tall saplings.

There's poison oak everywhere.

How long.

I think we've been hiking for two hours?

But hike it crawling, That's what.

I would call it, too, Crawling, sliding on our butts.

Haley keeps checking the GPS app on her phone, which is loaded with the coordinates of the remain site.

The little arrow representing our position is still ridiculously far away.

We press on, but it's starting to seem like we might never get there.

Ed's been saying just two hundred more yards for what feels like hours.

I also, I could say, no one's been here for real life.

That's I've never even been this far down myself, So probably no one's been here in thirty forty years at least, maybe even longer.

By now, the canyon is engulfed in shadow.

It's two thirty less than three hours till the sun goes down.

We're not going to make it to the remain spot, not even close.

We have to turn around.

We haul ourselves out of the creek bed and up to where we have a vantage point.

I can see the porn ranch through my binoculars.

Everything between here and there is trackless wilderness.

How would you describe that terrado on there?

Oh you're in Shia, Yeah, you're in living hell.

Bed pulls out a loaf of bread and takes a few bites you.

Itself is another three So it's about an eight hundred foot canyon in there.

It's very very intense.

I have been down in there, and I'm telling you it's you feel like a little teeny tiny bug down there.

You look up at this massive cliff, you know, and yes, the earth, Yes, the Earth's crust has been lifted up out of the ground and you've just seen the side of the earth.

So it's just spectacular.

I don't remember if we actually got around to saying at our turnaround point that I mean, we've been going for two hours and we were like a fifth of the way that we needed more than two hours to where my trees remains worse.

So there's just no way on earth she hiked in from the top.

There's there's no way on earth.

There's no way on earth that somebody brought her body in from the top.

No, there's no way, no, no, it's impossible.

He finishes as bread and we drink the rest of our water.

It takes us another couple of hours to get back to Ed's place, beat her way out of the brush, just as the sun slips below the horizon.

So did my tree center dark canyon from the bottom?

Probably not.

Did you go down from the top?

No way, But we do know there's another way in through the porn ranch.

Sues Randall, aka the porn Queen of Montanito, lives in a big, white Spanish style house surrounded by horse corrals and stables.

She's in her seventies, feisty and petite, with white pixie cut hair.

We are the upper class.

Some men come on, Oh, we started upper class and worked our way slowly down.

But with an English accent you can get away with Filth.

Had a huge career as a photographer of high end adult content.

Back in her heyday, porn was classy by comparison to what's out there today, I think lush highly produced images of Stormy Daniels in a lacy white bra beside a donkey.

But Sus is retired now.

I got kicked in the face by one of my horses in lust and I so that was a good excuse.

But also when we shoot, we'd spent two or three days getting ready.

I'm going I'm not going to go and just shoot.

You know, it's going to be prepared allah Playboy kind of drapie pape, all that crappy whapye.

Sus came to America in the seventies courtesy of Hugh Hefner, who hired her as a photographer at Playboy and then later at Hustler.

She shot herself using a cable release and a mirror.

Male photographers wanted to shoot me.

Oh no, no, no, I'll shoot myself.

It's much more relaxing instead of having to do what some guy tells you.

You get stiff and your shoulders raised, and you like this.

It's like dancing.

You've got to be on a flow.

It was.

It was cool.

I'm glad I did it because I certainly don't look like that now.

At the dawn of internet porn, sus became a business tycoon, minting money on her site sus dot.

Net, instead of being lockstock and boo.

You know, I would do what I wanted to do.

I would go and party with them and then do what I wanted to do, and they'd get mad, and I'd say up yours, and I'd get fired, and then I'd go work for somebody else, and then the same thing hefna Flint.

I fought with all of them, but it meant that I ended up shooting for myself independently and owning all my pictures, so that when the Internet came, I was the only photographer who owned her own pictures.

Susan's house is up the hill from Montanito, at the end of a long driveway.

Oh, the history of this house is quite interesting.

It's been here since like the forties.

Has been ranches here, and Bishop Raley had a chapel down there for the Church of Antioch, and this house in the seventies burnt down, and the guy who owned it rebuilt it, and he did all these arches and everything, but he rebuilt it around the bar so he could party with lee ages and then they got so drunk he'd be sober an hour a day.

So he lost the ranch.

But he was up here drunk with a gun, and nobody come and see him except I used to ride up on my horse and chit chat him up.

Because you had designs on this property.

And he knew I wanted it.

It took three years, and he knew I'd look after it.

She says.

Montanito was a great place to ride horses and raise a family.

We moved to this area because we were looking for a good school district for the kids.

Kids do that for you.

Your life revolves around them.

I mean work was work, but it was not our social life.

There's nothing more boring than a bunch of pornographers, I'll tell you.

But the ranch was also the perfect porn location, first for Sues and then for her daughter, Holly, who followed her mom into the business.

I grew up in what I like to say, kind of the Sue's bubble.

Everything that we shot was very beautiful, very high end.

Holly has occasionally used the ranch for shoots as well, though it's been years at this point.

It's a great property.

I mean it's big, it's lots of parking, there's lots of different areas to shoot.

It's super private, yeah, but you don't.

Get them screaming through the gullies.

You don't get echoing.

Holly said that one time a shoot of hers had been interrupted by a pop bust in Dark Canyon.

We had a huge, like illegal weed patch up the canyon and I was actually shooting when they were harvey it.

Well, when I say harvesting it, when they were possessing it.

You know.

The police had come and they these police helicopters and they had all this weed that they put in these huge nets and then the airlifted it directly over our ranch.

And I just remember being here and my whole crew was here and the models were like, I hope they drop some so yeah, but that was the only like big weed bus that we saw.

And they got to it from Upper Payuma and we didn't even know.

We never saw anybody going down then until still the cops turned up.

We didn't know, otherwise we'd have been up there taking.

Some SU's agreed to give me a tour of the property.

We got in a quad and she drove me around.

I asked her about my trees.

She told me that when she learned of my Teresa's disappearance.

She organized a search party.

I mean, we spent days looking for her on horseback when she went missing, riding these things.

And then but then people started to speculate that Sus might somehow be involved in my Teresa's death.

My Terce was young and beautiful, and her body was found on public land bordering SUS's ranch.

That would obviously make for a compelling narrative.

But like so many elements of the my Teres Richardson story that have taken hold in the public imagination, I've seen no evidence to support this theory, none whatsoever.

Yeah, people were accusing me of having done s and m or something unmurdered.

Sorry, yeah, I just don't want.

To go there.

That's bullshit.

Come on, Yeah, if I'm going to murder anybody, it's going to be a cop.

We drove up SUS's driveway and stopped the quad at an overlook at the edge of Dark Canyon.

It was a sheer drop to the creek bed.

My Teresa's remains were found down there and about a quarter mile east of where we stood.

I'll call it Matries Canyon just to myself, but I'm really trying to.

The twenty twelve report from the Office of Independent Review included only a few details about the discovery of my Teresa's remains.

One of these details was that the rangers had hiked into the site from quote, a property located on Payuma Road that would be SUS's property, the Porn Ranch.

The report also said that after Malibu Search and Rescue and the homicide detectives arrived by helicopter, the rangers hiked out the way they'd come in.

The report notes that it took them about a half an hour to get back to their starting point at the Porn Ranch.

So, according to official documents, there's a way in from SUS's life.

Sue's is extremely private and she takes the security of her property very seriously.

There are big dogs and the place is crawling with groundskeepers.

That means you can't just show up there and knock on the door.

It literally took years to convince her to let Haley and me come back and poke around a bit.

We were hopeful that we could find that elusive trail, the one used by the rangers that would take us to the remain site in half an hour.

Sue's had arranged for a chaperone.

Travis local guide, Montonita resident.

Travis shows us the staging area that was used by law enforcement during the recovery of my Teresa's remains.

Yeah, I mean, it's a really short little cut across here, but I think honestly that they probably entered down there.

I don't know where she entered, but that's definitely where the police entered.

We start walking through thick green grasses on a narrow horse trail that quickly turns into an even narrower game trail.

But yeah, this whole area hasn't for in a long time.

The flight's overgrown so beautiful.

Love that safe smell too.

It's the ball into a game trail because nobody really goes this way anymore.

But yeah, it's just deer, deer and deer and coyotes, probably mountain lines.

I can tell.

We're somewhere above the creek bed.

I'm thinking this is the shortcut we've been looking for, and I can't help it.

I'm getting really excited.

It's where we go from here.

Down here go where the coyotes go.

We get down low, limboing under a tangle of branches.

You know, this is kind of like the tree because it looks stable, but it'll actually just break.

So watch over the scene and DESI it's probably has it overgrown.

Yeah, oh yeah, there is a trail down here.

But then, to our indescribable disappointment, we find ourselves on the backbone trail, a few yards from the point of which you turn up into the creek bed, the place We've been so many times before.

I feel like I'm being pranked.

We convince Travis to take us back to the overlook, the place Sus calls my Trees Canyon.

In the years since I was last there, I've tried many times to picture it precisely to test mentally.

Anyway, if there could be a hidden trail, it would be the most direct route in.

And another thing is you wouldn't have to walk up SUS's driveway to get there.

There's a fire road with an outlet higher up on Payuma Road that leads right to the overlook.

It's gated and probably guarded, but still someone could have slipped through there in the dead of night.

Back at the staging area, we get in the quad and head to the overlook.

Okay, so the fire road entrance is over there.

Yep, this is the road coming down.

That's the start of the canyon.

We're standing by a wooden horse fence looking down over a precipice into the canyon.

It's a sheer drop off.

That's probably i'd take close to three hundred feet I mean to the to the base of the creek, which you can kind of see.

I mean, I don't even know that could even be four stories high.

And then from the GPS, I'm guessing she's probably about a quarter mile that way, so we're not even i mean, let's say about we're probably about a two thirds of the way in to where she would be.

So you'd have to drop down four stories and then hike up a quarter mile to get back in there.

It would take a very very skilled bushwhacking guide to get back in there, because it's impassible, and there's so much poison oak down there, and it's mature poison oak, so you can't really even bushwhack it.

You just got to go through it.

And that's what the amount of search and rescue said, and that's why the reason the helicopter to get back in there, because it's it's impassable.

We stand there quietly, just looking out over the Canyon with its dozen shades of green.

Everything in Montanedo proper is pretty rustic and kind of just you know, it's unrefined.

I think that that most of these mountain communities back in the Santa Monica Mountains are people like, you know, living kind of you know, rustically.

But you know, you can go into Calabasas and hang out with Kanye and the Kardashians if you want, because this is technically Calabasas, but this ain't Calabasas.

You know, it's thousand miles away from you know, the Calabasas Commons and justin Bieber, this is raw California, you know, this is this is as Rasa gets.

Nobody's ever lived here.

You know.

Local chew have told me stories about this area that you know that they still believe they're up there, you know, artifacts and stuff.

So this is all untouched wilderness.

You know a lot of people don't think Ella has wilderness, but this is as wild as it gets.

When we leave the Porn Ranch, Haley and I are stumped.

It seems like we may have exhausted all our possibilities.

We think my trees couldn't and wouldn't have gone in from the bottom top or the porn ranch on her own.

We think someone must have taken her in, but who There's just one more source of information we can think of, a person who boasts about having detailed knowledge of Dark Canyon.

We've asked so many people how to access the part Dark Canyon where my rise was found.

Everyone says, yes, of course, there are lots of ways in, but when we ask for details, the certainty fades away and we're back where we started.

Except for one source.

He seems to know everything.

It's the guy in the video we found online, the Montanito Lifer interviewed by Raven Masterson.

Did you hear being on the door talking at the door like they just.

Shut it on her or something.

He was the person who claimed he'd seen my Terse at four thirty am on the day of her disappearance, shouting in front of the Tennis court House.

It's just screaming at something now, and it was pretty loud.

I'm thinking, God, it's for three in the morning.

But he also talks a lot about the part of Dark Canyon where they found my Terce's remains, what it's like there, and how to get there.

He says that after he'd spotted her at the Tennis court house.

She must have walked up Payuma Road.

That road it's very you know, like a lot of twists and turnsent for her to walk.

It's close to two miles to where it's turned off the Dark Creek, you know, from the top.

Well, the only way she could have gotten in there.

There's no way she could have hiked up from the lock.

I mean, that's like ticks me and everything I have hyped up it.

He thinks maybe my trees walking along the mountain ridge in the dark fell down in a ditch.

Is it really dark.

That night?

It would have been pitched flat.

It isn't clear how he's envisioning this ditch in relation to the spot and Dark Canyon where her remains were found, but he sounds extremely familiar both with the canyon and the remain site.

Yeah, Dark Creek, it's pretty, Uh, it's overgrown with huge oakes and you know a lot of rocks.

But you know, I hadn't been down in this one spot for a lot of years because the friend of mine's parentry on that property.

He says, the place where my trese was found was a hangout spot, a place locals knew.

Well, we stood down there when we were younger.

He shown me on there, and just like Haley and me, he's thought a lot about how my treece would have gotten in there.

Do you think that a car could have gone up there?

And no way a car could have gone right, ware Will?

We had took three people, you know what I'm saying, right.

Two people would have gotten too tired.

And she was a big girl.

In fact, my ruse was not actually all that big, five feet six, one hundred and twenty five pounds.

But can I just say his description is so specific, so concrete, it almost sounds like he's recalling a lived experience.

Do you think somebody could have taken her?

Or you know what, if somebody took her, it did, whatever they did, I think they would have had to have come back.

It's more than one person to drag that body down to where it was.

He offers to take Raven, who incidentally is a young black woman, to the site.

And she's two miles up on them.

Man, you want to go up there right now?

Yeah?

Sure, I can take you.

Aware of what I know.

The video cuts now they're driving through Montanito, past the tennis courthouse.

So what house is this?

This is the house where she was where I heard her.

I came down off the cross the street right there as Woodluff, who's here yelling it?

I came down.

Then I watched crush and I sit right here.

But see I couldn't see the front door because of all these cars.

Another cut.

Now the camera's looking out over Dark Canyon from somewhere above.

Well, they've had people were able to get down there on that bluff.

Right and then that start creek going down there, and I think that's where they found her, right down.

I think that was some hootgers place.

Another cut, Oh, everybody, what's happening?

Is your girl?

And now Raven is on a hike.

She could be down in the canyon.

I'm just getting to where my trees, Richardson's barley was found.

I'm carrying.

Then another cut and she's walking by some odd fencings.

Then the video just stops.

We had a million questions for Raven.

Had she actually found a way into Dark Canyon from higher up on Payuma Road, had the Montanito lifer guided her to the remain site?

Did she have video of all that?

We set up a meet with her, Raven wasn't what I expected.

She has a big personality online as a topless rights activist and a shaman who sells hexes on Etsy.

In person, though she's surprisingly quiet and mild mannered.

She doesn't have a fixed address and asked us to meet her at a Popeye's in South LA.

We ended up sitting in my car to talk.

She says.

She was very disturbed by my Teresa's disappearance and the lack of resolution to her story.

So you started going out to Malibu to kind of interview people to learn more about the Mitrees case.

Yes, she says, she stumbled on the Montanito guy a year or two after my Teresa's remains were found.

I found him totally by accident.

She tells us.

She liked him even though he was in someone's basement.

He saw himself as a mountain man living at his spot.

She got that he was essentially homeless.

He was a very very nice person from what I recall.

I remember him giving me beers.

He was very very down the herb.

He didn't mean any harm.

He didn't come off to me as anybody malicious.

Unfortunately, Raven says she can't really remember much about the trip into Dark Canyon, and she can't find the video she made about it, but she does remember that the guy showed her his spot on the mountain.

It was in the woods off Payouma Road, passed the driveway to the porn ranch, but before you hit the property's fire road.

He had a little dugout.

It looked like a very earthy hovel.

But he had it set up very very nice.

I mean, I think he might have had a fridge, a little refrigerator that was a propane stove.

I think he had like a separate room.

He had it set up very very nice.

When she went back to find him a short time later, he was gone.

Sergeant Wright always told me he thought my Trees had wandered into the canyon and died as a result of her mental illness.

This was the consensus view of law enforcement, supported by the fact that the coroner had not been able to determine a cause of death.

But then, after we'd known each other for three years, he told me he didn't actually see the case as quite that cut and dried.

He was well into his retirement and he was supposed to be relaxing and spending time with his family and having coffee with other retired deputies.

But he was.

Ruminating on this old case.

Of course, it bothered him that he hadn't found my trees alive, but also some of the specifics were nagging at him.

He didn't really buy the hypothermia theory or the dehydration theory.

It just wasn't that cold in September of two thousand and nine, and there was water in the creek, So what did she just will herself to death?

How many days would that take?

That's when he told me something new, something law enforcement hasn't shared publicly.

He told me the Sheriff's Department did investigate someone.

It was the guy with the fort with the deer ribcage and the women's IDAs, but they never named him publicly and there was no arrest.

Sergeant Wright thought that guy might hold the answer to the Miteres Richardson case.

But Sergeant Wright wasn't a homicide detective and he was out of law enforcement anyway, so there was nothing he could do about it except give me his name next time on Lost Hills?

Do you know.

Anything about that girl?

Rick?

And he's like, what girl, Laura, what girl?

You know?

He had a raspy voyage.

She's like the girl, the girl.

You know, the girl that fucking the girl.

Is dead, the girl that they found that's next in episode eight, Rick Trouble.

Lost Hills is written and hosted by Me Dana Goodyear.

It was reported by me and Hayley Fox, our senior producer.

The show was created by me and Benadere.

Lost Hills is a production of Western Sound and Pushkin Industries.

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Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus