Pushkin.

Rick Forsberg's temper was legendary in Montanito.

When he'd get in a fight, he flexed his chest.

We called him a cover of him, and he'd just pretty much turn crazy.

There's weird seeing him go from gentle Rick and calm Rick to a madman.

This is his childhood friend, Jay Engelshall again.

Jay says Rick seemed to enjoy fighting.

He'd get in fights and then he'd go back for more.

And there was a couple of times at a party.

There's every time these two guys met, they'd fight, and a few times Rick would get the better of him, and he'd get better at Rick.

But they or they didn't like each other.

I remember them both going to the hospital, I think, getting stitches, and then they came back and plought some more.

When he was enraged, Rick's strength seemed almost superhuman.

He would take over the situation just by being aggressive, real, loud and mad or whatever.

Jay remember seeing a girlfriend of Rick's try to intervene when he was losing control.

She's trying to calm him down and he's getting really agitated loud, and he s picks up a ladder and he spins it around and he hits her in the face with it on accident, but it hit hit her in the face, and then she was all upset, and it just escalates, you know, it just keep escalating from there.

He was usually using drugs and he would get pretty violent sometimes.

Jay says Rick started abusing women as a young man.

I remember most of his relationships.

He'd get violent with his girlfriend.

That wasn't good.

Nobody should once see that.

We'd all step in and something like that happened.

Jay's brother Bill also remembers trying to get Rick to stand down.

It was such a close community.

They were friends with Rick and the young women he beat up.

Like Rick his girlfriend was.

He used to beat her when they'd argue.

He'd punch her.

She'd take off running.

Sometimes she'd run to my house and hide, you know, and he'd come over and I'd stand up to her.

He could kick my ass, but I'd stand up to him.

He wouldn't hit me, you know, it's like, go ahead, hit me.

Nope, you never did.

And you would stand between Rick and her.

But did you ever tell him separately, like you have to stop this, this is terrible what you're doing.

Of course, you know, But he didn't do any good.

He's going to do what he's going to do.

Over time, though, as Rick became a hardened abuser, some women would go to the police for help.

Women after women, girlfriend, domestic partner, the mother of his only child.

They all sought protection from him.

If we're going to understand Rick Forsberg and what he might have been capable of, will need the help of women, women who knew him, women he hurt.

I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, episode nine, Fearful Witness.

Throughout his adult life, Rick exhibited a toxic mix of good looks, charm, and drug fueled physical aggression.

Many women fell into his trap or were dragged into it.

Haley and I start calling around.

We want to talk to Leslie Alston, the mother of Rick's son Ricky.

In a restraining order she requested in twenty twelve, she cited a history of violence against her and her son.

She said she'd been trying to avoid Rick for more than seven years, but he researched her to find out where she lived.

She never responded to our calls and emails, but the women who would talk had terrifying stories.

Rick had a history of strangling women and threatening them with murder.

According to court documents, one of Rick's victims attested that when he attacked her, he told her he was going to kill her.

Then he called her from prison where he'd been sent after assaulting her, and the two deputies who came to her aid and said quote, I was told that if I hurt you again, I can do fifteen years in here.

Since you are the problem, the solution is to kill you because murder only carries ten years less five years off for good behavior.

Testifying at Ric's parole revocation hearing, she described herself as a fearful witness.

It's been more than thirty years since the assault, but she pleaded with us not to use her name, citing severe PTSD.

Knowing that Rick is dead did little to assuage her fear.

Among all of Rick's victims, one woman, Darien Merrick, stands up out.

She was his last serious girlfriend.

They were both very physical with each other, but they loved each other just as much as they would fight too.

You know, that's just one of those relationships.

It's addicting and chaotic and hard to get out of.

This is Sharie Amic again.

She's Rick's biggest defender, and so maybe it's not surprising to hear her say Darien provoked Rick.

She would just like slap him across the face in front of everybody, you know, and I'd be like, oh my god, did you really just do that?

Like we were all hanging out and everything be fine, you know, everything would be fine, and we've been talking to Lah Love.

Everyone's doing their own thing and everyone's happy making dinner, and then she would do stuff like that, and he's like, you got to get her away from me.

You got to get her away from me.

That's how it always was, you know, you got to help me get away from her.

But they would always go back.

Darien was a classic Rick Forrestsburgh love interest, a natural beauty with beechy blonde hair, light eyes, and a perpetual tan.

Her father was an Olympic hurdler with a bronze medal.

Her mother was a former competitive skier and model.

She'd grown up near Zuma Beach and married the eldest son of Malibu's most prominent judge.

Their son grew up to be a detective in the Sheriff's department.

At the time Darien met Rick, she and her husband had divorced and she was spiraling into full blown addiction.

Rick was fresh out of prison.

His offense slamming his white Mitsubishi Mighty Max pickup truck into a tree on Topanga Canyon Boulevard while driving barefoot and drunk.

The arresting officer reported that beer cans flew out of the car on impact.

The police report says that Rick was unconscious and had to be extracted by cutting open the cab.

He was sentenced to twenty eight months in prison.

By two thousand and six, Rick and Darien were living at a place called the Malibu Kanyon Apartments, a complex on Las Virgines near the intersection with the one on one Freeway.

Cherie, who was caught up in the party scene back then, had a name for it.

What was that stupid show Melrose Place?

We were hell Rose Place, because that's what we were.

It was total hell Rose Oh my god, idiots, total idiots.

Rick was in full on Cobra mode, amped up and paranoid and on a hair trigger.

His eyes glazed over.

He was always kind of on the edge.

No matter what.

Rick was always on the edge.

You know, That's why he would stay here because you know, his mom and dad wouldn't put up with that crap, and you know, and I try to always talk to Rick, you know, because honestly, back to the out of control times, I was never fearful of him, and I could get through I could get through that glaze, you know, which is very hard.

To do.

And risky, but I had no fear.

It was just I was going to do that.

I was going to take care of it.

Shari saw Rick and Darien's volatile relationship firsthand.

She says, Rick and Darien would spar Darien would call the cops and he'd run straight to her place.

So night after night that shit would happen, and he came over.

He said, sure, you've got to get me out of here.

The cops are coming, and so I took off.

I was like, let's go, I'll get you out.

Rick and Darien were in a doom spiral.

And of course with alcohol involved.

I mean, the switch is it's gonna it's gonna crash every time, you know what I'm saying.

And it was awful because.

They would fight and he would come to my house and she would be calling and you know, harassing and like egging.

The whole thing.

On, I'm gonna call the cops on you, and all you know, he's like, I can't.

I'm on probation, Like I got to stay away from her.

You know, I can't do this.

And that's when you know I was God, I'm out of control too, you know, we were all out of control.

In April of two thousand and six, Rick attacked Darien and was charged with two felonies corporal injury resulting in traumatic condition, an assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury.

He was convicted on the corporal injury charge and sentenced to three years in state prison.

At his sentencing hearing, the prosecutor recommended that he refrain from contact with Darien.

He could not even write to her from prison.

Rick protested.

He said it wasn't fair.

They were planning to get married when he was released.

Darien was present in the courtroom when she was asked if she had anything to say about the protective order.

She tellingly said, no, something else that I find telling.

Darien drank herself to death in March two thousand and nine, shortly before the protective order would have expired.

In July two thousand and nine, Rick got out of prison and returned to Montanito.

He crashed with Cheri's family and other friends.

He built his fort, drank his beers, did his drugs, and mourned the loss of Darien.

And when my Terse made her way to Montenito on September seventeenth, two thousand and nine, there Rick was waiting.

Two women told us about encounters they'd had with Rick around the time of my Terce's two thousand and nine disappearance that left them shaken.

One of them was a woman who said that Rick had been her boyfriend when she was a young teenager living in Montanito, and one day, when she was eighteen and he was maybe twenty or twenty one, he came into her house and tried to strangle her.

Decades passed in which she avoided him at all costs, and then in two thousand and nine or ten, she stopped for a hitchhiker in Malibu Canyon.

To her dismay, it turned out to be Rick.

He was acting crazy, she says, He grabbed the steering wheel and she was afraid they'd plunge over the edge of the canyon.

He invited her to go up to his spot off Payuma Road and then he forced to kiss on her.

Not long afterwards, she says, Rick left a message on her answering machine.

He sounded like a demon, and he was furious that she'd rejected him.

He told her he was going to dice her up and kill her.

When she heard about my Teres Richardson, the woman says she called Lost Hill Station and begged them to look into Rick.

She says no one ever followed up.

Karen, Yeah, Hi, it's Dana.

This is the recorded line.

Okay.

The other woman is Karen McKellar.

She also dated Rick as a teenager.

I just thought he was like the cast me out.

But what an idiot I was.

I was just a dumb girl with no you know, just dumb, smoking pot and drinking booze and just thinking I was cool with the people and they were all idiots.

Little did I know.

I was going all the way in the wrong direction in life, and I thought it was cool until I got snared.

The relationship left her with permanent scars.

He really broke my heart.

He wasn't abusive physically, but he abused me mentally as far as the relationship went, and he would screw around with everybody, all all the other girls, and I mean I had, unfortunately, and I'm not proud of it, two abortions from that guy.

And he never even went with me.

He was just a schmuck.

Karen kept tabs on Rick for a while.

We were broken up, but I still knew of him, and so I would see Rick and he would be high on angel dust or whatever driving down the canyon and he was obviously we knew it that he was really getting messed up like that where he was driving like ten miles an hour in the canyon where you're supposed to be going fifty.

And we pulled him over and said, Rick, what are you doing?

And he was like way out there, high by hisself, naked in the car driving.

So I was like, oh my god, he was just off the hook.

So, yeah, he was experimenting and doing a lot of angel dust when he was a kid.

I think it's cow tranquilizer or something.

Yeah, I think that's what they uh because I smoke it too.

But he never stopped.

You know, there was a point where like, Okay, you got to stop this stuff's twisting your brain.

After going through her own struggles with addiction, Karen got sober and devoted her adult life to helping women recover from substance abuse.

Then one day, she thinks it was somewhere around two thousand and nine or twenty ten, Rick popped into her head and she called him up.

I was in LA I'm helping people, and he said, yeah, come on out, you know, blah blah blah.

So I thought, well, maybe you know, I'm not like an idiot.

So I went out there, and I got on a bus and went out there, and they picked me up and he was very plied, very nice.

At first, she was kind of excited.

Rick was still good looking, and he was always a neat freak and into personal hygiene, so he presented well.

But after a little bit, then he started getting high when I was there, and it became apparent to me that nothing had changed in his life.

Rick told Karen he lived with Laura and Ray Robbins, Shari Amick's parents, But he also told her about his fort.

Yeah, because when we were kids, he always had like a fort, you know, in the mountains there.

And so when he was my boyfriend that I thought I was still in love with as a fourteen year old, it was like, really cool, you know, like, oh, they would go up there because we would go up there and drink or whatever.

And so he had built one up there from Lauras and he goes like, come on, I want to show you them.

I got a little ford up here, and I go, are you serious?

Turns out Rick was just showering at the Robin's house, hanging out there.

Occasionally.

He was living at his fort, the Fort off Payuma Road.

Karen humored him and went up there with him.

She remembers a small dugout about eight by ten feet.

I do remember too, like lounge chairs or a lounge chair or bad thing, and he slept on that I guess.

I mean he had little exit all over if I recall, right, like you could go one way, and maybe he did say he had pot up there.

I can't, but I remember he took me one way and I didn't see any pop plants, but he might have said he was growing one down there once and then he took there was another path.

He had paps out of it.

She says he was acting paranoid, worried about police helicopters that might be flying overhead.

He didn't want the cops to see him because they'd come in and care up this little place he lived in because the cops were always, he said, always out there looking for him.

I don't know if they'd thought about him up there or what that He's said that they were all they would go by because they were looking for him.

At the fort, Rick confided in Karen about Darien, his girlfriend, who had recently died.

He really was in love with her, like they did everything together, and he was really grieving her.

He said they got high and did everything together.

He was like they were active in sex and everything.

So they were active in all kinds of ways.

I didn't pay attention to all that as much as I really could see that this guy was really broken from her death.

While they were talking, Karen says, Rick started showing her things that had belonged to Darien, bras and underwear that he was keeping in a plastic bag.

You know.

He showed me the bag he had a like, you know, a little bag of bras and stuff.

I go, why do you have her clothes?

And he said, well, I'd just like to keep her close to me, and I went, okay.

She felt for him, but she was getting a little worried.

This wasn't the Rick she knew.

I just remember that he was really devastated that she died, to the point of where I thought, oh my god, he's slipped over the edge, because he's got her clothes.

Karen let Rick know she was ready to go.

The sun had set, and she didn't want to be out in the woods in the dark because.

It was kind of getting dusky, and so I didn't want to stay up there, but he said, give me a minute.

Rick disappeared down one of the little paths into the brush, and when he came back, he was wearing a new outfit.

And so he went wherever he went probably got high, because then he came back in a song, a literal g string song, a girl song, and I just went, what are you doing?

Okay, yeah, I can't even see his face all as I can see the stinking thong.

Karen was baffled.

When I think about it now that I'm talking to you, guys, he had to have had something, because he slipped way far off the planet edge.

And when people are like that, they're pretty much capable of doing anything.

So I would say, yeah, that guy was something jolted in the way wrong way.

Karen wanted to go immediately, but she was also conscious of the delicacy of the situation.

She didn't want to upset Rick.

They were alone out there, he was high and in a thong, and she no longer really knew who she was dealing with or what he wanted.

I just knew he was really off, and so I was trying to be careful, politely exiting out of there, you know, because just when somebody slips like that, you don't know what they could do.

So I remember just going, okay, you know, I'm just kind of appeasing him, talking and saying, okay, Rick is getting cold and late, I'm going to go back down the mountain.

The encounter put the kaibosh on any idea she'd had about rekindling her relationship with Rick.

It was absolutely the biggest turn off I've ever seen.

But it was shocking because I knew this kid as a kidney wasn't like that.

So it was very unsettling to see him like that, and he saw it on my face and he knew it.

And I told him, Rick, I don't know what you're doing, but I'm going to go down back to Lauras because I didn't feel comfortable.

I'm not that he was doing anything other than being actually so strange by putting it on that I'm not into any of that kind of crap, and so I just left.

Wow, Well, I guess you did not want to reconnect with your old flame after all.

Shit, right, you just really should not go backwards.

That I've learned from that.

To Karen, Rick seemed completely untethered from his old reality.

A year after my Terce was buried, something extraordinary happened.

Her body was exhumed and a second autopsy was performed.

Doctor Lisa Shinen, the forensic pathologist with the La County Coroner, says that in her career, she performed six thousand autopsies and this was her one and only experience with exhumation.

I wanted to know why it happened, so I called doctor Ronda Hampton.

Huh, Rhonda, all right, Hi, it's Dana calling.

Hey.

I'm in the car.

As I told you said, the exhumation had a lot to do with the discovery made by Cleia Koff, the independent forensic anthropologist who was working with the family.

It was just a few hours before my Teresa's funeral.

She thought she was going to open up a body bag.

Everything that was going to be fine, and then she was going to say Monty, everything fine, but she didn't.

She called me.

She's like fond of the closer in the body bag.

In the normal course of events, the Sheriff's Department homicide detectives would have requested the clothing from the coroner and sent it to the crime lab for testing.

Here was a naked female with her jeans and bra stripped off, her belt unbuckled and removed, and they'd apparently forgotten to test the clothing for DNA.

My Teresa's belt, bra, and jeans were sitting in a large, clear plastic bag in the body bag with her remains.

So the thing is was like, okay, CLEI just do everything that you can, and then we're going to have to We can't let them know that the clothing is there because then we don't know what they're going to do it.

And we were at a pitch because the media is all down there, you know, it was awful.

So she's like, I'll secure the clothing the way it needs to be secured.

I'm going to do as much of an analysis as they can.

We're going to find out what they didn't do and then will write at a report and we're going to have to have our body agive.

So almost a year later, on July thirteenth, twenty eleven, at ten oh seven in the morning, the concrete vault containing my Teresa's casket was removed from the ground at Inglewood Park Cemetery.

The vault seal was broken and the casket was taken into custody by the coroner and transferred to the Forensic Science Center.

That day, my Teresa's clothing and a number of other items were finally collected for analysis.

Those items included a single nail trimming cubic cares and a mysterious material referred to as quote loose green fuzz like hair slash fibers located near the legs.

What on earth was that The test results weren't made public, but doctor Hampton says that nothing useful came out of the analysis.

We can only assume that no other individual's DNA was found on her clothes, or on her pubic hair, or under her fingernails or on the green fuzz.

Doctor Lisa Shinan, the pathologist who had done the first autopsy, performed a second one to see if there were signs of trauma that had been missed the first time around.

We opened up the top of the head to make sure that there was no internal fractures of the bone.

We didn't see anything externally, and there was nothing on the X ray that suggested it.

We decided to just double check and open it up.

Then there was still nothing, so there was still no evidence of trauma, so nothing had changed.

Then a forensic dentist examined my Teresa's teeth.

That's because during her exam just before the burial, clea kof had observed pink discoloration.

Pink teeth is a phenomenon that can happen when blood flow to the teeth is impeded.

Historically, it's been linked in medical literature with strangulation.

The old wisdom was that it could be associated with asphyxia, but it's.

Really not.

The only possible explanation.

Pink teeth can also be an artifact which results from the head being lower than the rest of the body.

And that could just be a function of how the person was lying, which could have a totally innocent explanation.

At the second autopsy, the forensic dentist did observe some pink discoloration at the roots of several of Matreesa's teeth and on the surface of one of them, but in her opinion, it wasn't a case of true pink teeth.

There was no justification to change the cause of death to homicide.

Shinen wrote that the cause of death must remain undetermined.

Still talking to her today, she says, the color of the teeth might be meaningful in the context of other evidence.

I think because of the circumstances.

Could the pink teeth support a diagnosis of asphixia, Well, it could have happened that she was strangled, in which case the pink teeth would support that.

The hyoid bone, the delicate bone in the throat, might have provided direct evidence of strangulation.

Another person's DNA, had it been found on my Teres's remains, could have been significant.

But there was no hyoid bone and no report of DNA, so that left circumstantial evidence.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you're just kind of okay perfect.

So let me just start at the beginning, which is how you got to know Rick Forsberg.

We're in an apartment deep in the valley talking to a woman named Lisa lapour.

She's petite, with gnarled hands and pale blue eyes and a cell phone that's almost always out of service.

It feels like a small miracle to meet her in person.

Haley and I have been door knocking houses and residential hotels for months trying to find her.

Finally she picks up the phone and says we can come over, and then she tries to cancel the meeting fifteen minutes before we arrive, but we ignore that text and show up anyway.

Lisa is one of Rick's victims.

She met him in twenty twelve, about three years after my Teresa's disappearance.

They were basically drug buddies, and one day when she was hanging out with him, he came at her.

Rick just got freaked out and he just attacked me.

He just grabbed me and started punching me and choking me.

I know it's probably horrible to remember, but can you describe it?

In my throat and the got me on the ground.

He started to punch me repetitively in the face, and then he's strangling me, and everybody was sitting there, just sitting there watching that.

They didn't even move.

I didn't do anything you know, helped me.

She has no idea what provoked him.

He's just off in the head, that's all.

Lisa's blocked out a lot of the details of what happened and was Rick saying anything?

Was this?

Was yelling?

Was he?

Don't you remember?

But the feeling is still with her.

Did you think you were going to die?

Yes?

I knew I was going to die.

I knew it.

There was no doubt I was going to die.

It's really traumatizing.

I feel like I'm going to throw it right now.

At some point, as Lisa lay there being strangled and punched by Rick, her thoughts shifted away from her own predicament to my race, and.

I was thinking, this is what her last moments were like.

You know, this must be what her last moments were like.

Neither the coroner nor a team of homicide detectives had been able to figure out how my Trees died, but Lisa believes she knows.

Back before Rick nearly killed Lisa, when they were on good terms, she spent a lot of time with him at a house belonging to a Montanito friend of his.

This wasn't the Robin's house.

It was a big spread at the top of Cold Canyon Road, just past will Smith's estate.

The owner, Mark Wallace, was several years younger than Rick, but he was a Montanito boy through and through.

He'd grown up there running around the hills with the older kids.

Then, like his father, he'd embarked on a career with the Los Angeles Fire Department, becoming a firefighter and paramedic.

But Mark was also a bit of a renegade.

His business card from Wallace and Associates, a home building concern he runs on the side reads quote buildings erected, land developed, LSD, pot bars, emptied computers, verified missiles, tested, bodies inspected.

The card identifies him as CEO and quote head hancho slash motherfucker in charge.

In the summer of two thousand and nine, when Rick was released from prison, Mark was separated from his wife and living alone.

His house was the ultimate bachelor pad.

It was perfect for entertaining and perfect for shooting porn, porn being another business Mark dabbled in on the side.

In those days, Mark Wallace's house was a place where just about anything went.

And Rick toodling around the neighborhood on an old motorcycle, Mark gave him was a frequent visitor, so when law Enform Horseman started looking into Rick, they focused on what was happening at Mark Wallace's house.

Next time on Lost Hills.

I told a police officer what I heard, and I said, I'm going to scream it from the tallest mountain.

If you guys forgot something or whatever, I'm going to investigate this because there's a killer down there.

I'm going to find out about it.

That's next in episode ten the wally pad.

Lost Hills is written and hosted by Me Dana Goodyear.

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

The show was created by Me and Benadere.

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

Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can binge the whole season right now ad free.

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