Pushkin.

Haley and I have been operating under an assumption that if Rick was involved with my Teresa's death, he would have told someone.

We've reconstructed his universe person by person, cold calling and emailing something like one hundred people, and when that didn't work, driving to their last known address in burned out mobile homes and tidy trailer parks and remote stretches of the suburban desert where they were hoping never to be found.

And that's how we found Jill Walski, sitting outside her double wide in Oxnard, surrounded by plants and antiques from her parents' old home in Montanito.

I know God, all right, honey, Well I got company, so I'll call you later, all right, Shooter, love me, thank you, Bye bye, any poor guy, tuck.

Jill's the den mother of the Montanito Boys.

But excuse me.

The thing is me I might have straight here.

I'll just put it here.

I see there's this crystal ashtray on the oh.

Thanks.

Jill is a straight shooter, totally unclouded by visions of Rick in all his blonde water skiing glory.

Of all the Montanito boys.

She says Rick had fallen the farthest from Golden Boys status to addiction, prison and homelessness.

He had been arrested several times.

And he also wasn't mentally there because he had you know, head on into a tree, hit by a car on a motorcycle.

Jill is the person the Montanito Boys go to with their problems, and in twenty twelve, Rick came to her with a very big problem.

The police were after him again.

She was at home in Montanito.

Knocks on the door, comes in.

He says, Jill, do you have a beer or something or shot of something?

And so I gave him something to drink and sitting outside and he's just like, I just got interrogated by the police.

I did a light detective test.

The police had asked him what he knew about the death of my Trees Richardson, and.

He's like, yeah, I don't know how they got my name.

And he just kept putting his head down, and he just sat there probably for about forty five minutes and just kept pacing and putting his head down.

By the time Rick left her house that day, Jill had no doubt that Rick had information about my Trees's death.

He knows something and I think I don't think it was on purpose, but he knew he knows something and he had something to do with it.

I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, episode eleven, The Suitcase.

Jill says when Rick arrived at her house after his polygraph, he was anxious and sweaty, and he kept asking for more alcohol.

She could tell he needed to get something off his chest.

Because he had his head down and he kept rubbing through his hair.

He wanted to tell me something, and I'm like, Rick, please, I really don't want to hear this because then I would feel obligated to have to say something.

But before she shut him down completely, Rick did manage to tell her something crucial, something that has never been reported before.

And he said, he goes, I picked her up, but I didn't do anything to her.

This is a bombshell piece of information.

Rick didn't just see or hear my Trees on the day of her disappearance, as he says in the video.

He picked her up.

Jill says, from the way Rick was acting at her house, she strongly believes something else happened between him and my Trees, something Rick couldn't tell the cops.

But why Rick doesn't say, yes, I picked her up.

I brought her up.

He was afraid of going back to prison.

Bottom line, he had.

Just gotten out.

Yeah, so you know, and he just his mannerisms at the house.

I know he brought her up to his place.

She would like to think my Teresa's death was unintentional.

And that's my belief, is that it was an accident.

But in my opinion, according to him, and he was sweating bullets, is that I think that she either slipped and fell and he freaked out or I cannot see Rick raping to somebody.

Did they ever do a kit?

It was too long after she disappeared.

She'd been up in that canyon for eleven months and there was no soft tissue left.

It was bones, So you can't do a rape kit on bones.

I tell her what we've heard from other friends of X, that he wouldn't have been sexually interested in my trees because she was black.

Meth changes people's minds, you know what I mean.

And if you're up for a few days.

Look, I don't think I don't think he'd even think that way.

I know he made the comment I was surprised that the black person in Mortnito.

I didn't know they lived there, you know, you know, I hate to use the term, but pussy's pussy, you know, and I don't know she He may have given her drugs too, and then she started to wander, and then he didn't want her to tell anybody anything.

Jill knows Rerick's violent history and his drug has and she's no fool.

As we talk, she starts to wrestle with the possibility that Rick could have harmed my.

Trees, so he then may have gone after her.

I don't think he was strong.

I don't think that he in his right mind would ever kill somebody.

But when you're on that drug and you've been up for a few days and you go off and say, if she tried to take something of his, you know, he may have pushed her.

He may have grabbed her by her neck and realized, oh shit.

Jill brings up the video of Rick talking about his encounter with My trees.

She's especially unnerved by the part about the vultures circling over Dark Canyon.

And then when I watched the video, the thing with the birds and the way he was laughing, you know, kind of like, oh, you know, just his manner.

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

But if he pushed her, she hid her head.

He panicked she didn't wake up.

He would move that body.

And in the video he said, you know, he had heard about it and saw the vultures there.

He had seen them before.

You know, remember he said like three days after so, and he knew exactly where the spot was.

Jill is filled with regret when she thinks back to that conversation with Rick after the polygraph.

She wishes she hadn't stopped him from saying whatever was on his mind.

But he did pick her up, and he wanted to tell me something.

I mean, if he was still alive, I would go visit him and ask him flat out.

So unfortunately, yeah, I think it was Rick Well, which sucks.

Jill's given us new information.

Rick admitted to her that he picked my trees up on his motorcycle, and for what it's worth, Jill feels sure he took her to his spot on the mountain.

It feels like all the scattered fragments of this story are finally starting to come together.

Jill refused to hear a full confession from Rick, but she did hear and share with us a crucial piece.

Leaving Jill's place, Haley and I.

Decide we need to go back to Rick's fort.

Rick took a lot of women to his fort.

He took care Aaron McKellar there.

He took Lisa Lapour there, he took Raven there.

Did he take my tries there too?

Rick had a special name for his fort.

He called it Chateau shangri La.

It was a spooky place with animal bones and carcasses from Rick's mountain man activities.

There was a big old oak tree from its branches.

Rick hung Ladies Lingerie.

After months of playing hard to get Rick's friend, Art Davis calls me up totally unexpectedly.

He's the guy we met by surprise at Cheri's house when we knocked on the door there.

One day, Art invites us to his friend's place, just down the street from the house Rick grew up in, in the lower part of Montanito that's known as Malibu Meadows.

We sit in a grove of oak trees by a rushing creek.

You try to figure out what went awri Art's.

Been thinking a lot about Rick, pretty much NonStop since we last met, and.

All of a sudden, you show up, Hannah.

When you show up, I'm going like, Wow, there's a conduit to connecting the dots.

He tells us people in Montanito are afraid of the questions we're asking about Rick.

They're afraid of you because they're kind of like letting them go.

You know, I just don't want to say anything really, you know, bad about Rick, because I mean, there's so many memories when I come down this creek going to the bus stop.

There's so many memories walking through this yard, you know, on early growth of these trees.

And then when you come back to this place is like the paradise that you left behind.

You took it for granted back then.

Art wants to help us get to the bottom of what, if anything, happened between Rick and my trees, but he always emphasizes that his intention is to persuade us that Rick, the Rick he knew, is innocent.

I'm going to give you bread crumbs, you know.

Art tells us he never went to Rick's fort.

It kind of depressed him that his friend was living like that.

He just remembers seeing a photo of Rick at the fort, sitting on his motorcycle.

He was always telling me about it.

Come up there.

No, I don't want to do that because I don't want to identify with the fact that you want to live off the grid.

I just don't want to go ahead and do that.

But I'll hook up with you somewhere else, like at work, and then we'll go out to eat and we'll be civilized.

Haley and I had been planning to head to the fort after our visit with Art.

Haley's never seen it, but Art isn't ready to say goodbye.

He wants to show us all these other spots up Payuma Road, his little breadcrumbs, I guess.

So we make a split second decision and invite him to come with us to ricks for it all right here for that?

Do you like windy roads?

No?

No, but I brought my sour patch kids.

I'm the one who gets carsick.

We all pile into my car.

You're driving just fine, thank you.

What will happen to Dana and Art in the next exciting adventure?

We pull the car over in a turnout and head into the brush.

So I'm gonna pull vegetation now because of all the rain.

We get to a marker, I remember from when I was here three years ago.

Think we can do it and make a sharp left.

I could have brought a machete.

Okay, so this is so overgrown, but.

We got to get crouched down.

As we move deeper into the woods, Art starts to hesitate.

You don't have to do this, you know, we can do it in another time.

We're here.

We're here, let's do it.

After a couple of minutes, we see the trash.

First, it's just a little pile of sun faded bludweiser cans.

Yeah, well that's Bloodweiser's Rick.

I was gonna say, is that is?

Is that his?

Your choice?

Yep.

Then as we get closer to the big tree that mark's Rick's camp, we see more trash mixed into a mound of loose, churned up leafy soil.

There's an empty jug of Sunny Delight, red bags, yogurt cups, a sharpie, a toothbrush, a blue plastic razor.

That that would have been DNA at the wing wearing right there.

Razor Eli like to keep itself clean, He like to keep knees and tiety.

But he's hiding here.

I'm so confused by what I'm seeing I was here in twenty twenty one and none of this was here.

Then we've had two seasons of historic rainfall in Los Angeles County.

Is it possible that all this stuff was buried underground and the flash floods and storms and atmospheric rivers unearthed up.

If this is Rick's garbage heap, that means there could be something of my Teresa's here.

We don't say that out loud.

We don't have to.

Haley and I start poking through the trash with sticks and a blue plastic hangar we find lying in the dart.

We're not touching anything with our bare hands.

It's disgusting, but also who knows.

We could find something that has value as evidence, something that would link my trees to this site and finally get the attention of law enforcement.

Several pieces of my Teresa's clothing were not found at the remain site in Dark Canyon, her vans, her Bob Marley T shirt, the brown hat she had with her when she left the station, and then there's her id.

They're all I can think of while we dig.

What's the What is that?

That's a gas line?

Art looks like he wishes he'd stayed back in Montanito, and he is actively trying to manage us.

He thinks we're being hysterical.

Look look in that hole, Art in there.

Yeah, what's that thing for the right thing?

Is that a pipe?

That big thing is that a pipe?

It's this that thing?

Oh, come on, overreactact you're overreact?

What is that like?

And then we see it.

It's stuff his stuff right here.

It's a suitcase, plain black carry on size with a brand tag on it.

See that name Embark or whatever is it Embark.

The suitcase is stained with mud and mold.

Little bright green plants are growing through it.

But Art recognizes it.

He says it's the kind Rick would use.

So this looks familiar.

This looks like.

Art.

Prize.

Open the main compartment.

It's empty, but there are pockets.

Art.

If you're feeling continually brave, will you just unzip that front bucket?

Oh lucky you are, there's two pockets.

Oh my god, Oh my god.

Inside is a mass of disintegrating women's lingerie, bras thongs, stockings, a small black nightie with spaghetti straps, a mesh romper.

I catch Haley's eye.

I can tell we're thinking the same thing.

We know.

The bras don't belong to my trees.

Her bra was found in Dark Canyon, but her underpants were never found.

Is that ladies underwear?

Lady bra with roses on it.

It's a surreal experience.

It's like this stuff just materialized, a whole suitcase of it.

And just to add to the bizarreness, while we're trying to process what's happening, Art is frantically downplaying the whole thing.

These are tights.

Those are those?

Are his?

Are those tights?

Yeah?

These are tights.

It's like to stay warm.

Well maybe at friends.

They're small.

I don't think these would fit him.

Let's do a little inventory.

Ladies, small stockings, black underpants, age underpants.

Art starts making noises like he wants to get out of the woods, which is great because we want him out of our hair.

We need to get some gloves and some garbage bags and remove as much of this stuff as we can before the sun goes down.

It's a long shot, but we're wondering if there could be DNA evidence that would definitively connect Rick and my trees.

We drop Art in Montanito, drive to the nearest grocery store and fill a shopping cart with supplies.

We settle for a box cutter instead of a knife, and a kitty litter scooper for a shovel.

They'll have to do.

We return to the fort with one goal to bring back the contents of that suitcase and any other potential evidence we can find.

Back at the fort, the suitcase is just where we left it.

And now we notice there's another pocket which we didn't open with art.

The zippers jimned.

Okay, so now we've got a oh, purple like string bra.

What do you call that?

Oh?

My god, I don't know what.

This is, just some massive Ladies garments.

The underwear is wet and moldy and falling apart.

I hold open a garbage bag and Hayley deposits it piece by piece.

Yeah, let's just start here.

Let's just bag let's bag up the.

Ladies underwear first.

We'll do a full accounting later.

But even now, in the moment, it's obvious that this collection does not connect to just one woman.

There are all different sizes small, medium, extra large, and the styles are eclectic, solid black patterns, thongs, granny panties, like girls T shirt.

It makes sense that some of these things would have belonged to Darien.

She's the dead girlfriend whose thong ricked like to put on, and we've heard he kept a lot of her undergarments here.

But still it's pretty obvious that they are not all hers a mouse.

Now that we have gloves, we dig through the mound of dirt around the suitcase a bit more.

Haley pulls up Rick's headlamp.

It's bright yellow, and I don't know why, but it feels so personal, like a representation of Rick.

It makes me think of him up here in the dark.

It's not an image.

I want to sit with.

You.

Here's some more clothing.

We find more pieces of fabric in the mound, long lacy strands that disappear deep into the earth, intertwining.

With the roots.

We pull on them, and I feel my guts turn over nauseatingly, like I'm tugging on my own entrails.

This looks like a little kids lee hard.

I spot something bright, purply pink and shiny.

It's a kid's nightgown, like a toddler would wear.

It's a Barbie princess.

It's crust or I mean, dizzy princess.

That's what I mean, I have no clue what to make of that it goes in the bag.

All I can think about are my Teresa's missing things, her shoes, her T shirt, her underpants if she was wearing them.

To find one little sign of her, if.

She was here, she was here for like.

One day, I know, or you just brought back something, you know.

Yeah, that's true.

I look over the mound of dirt again and notice a long, narrow piece of green net like fabric.

I've always been stumped by the description of the material that was found during my Teresa's second autopsy.

The criminalists who collected it described it as quote loose green fuzz like hair slash fibers located near the legs.

Could this green fabric at the fort be connected to that green fuzz found near my Teresa's legs?

Hey, I think we should get out of here.

We put it in the bag, and then we get out of there with a big garbage bag full of molding underwear.

Well, what are we going to do with it?

I don't know.

So we don't feel like the beleving.

We can't leave it.

I think we have to figure out what we're going to do with them.

Yeah, and maybe like talk to some other people about it.

Yeah, we don't know exactly what to do with this stuff.

We just know we can't leave it out here.

There's some friend of Rick's who gets wind of it, could come and move it.

It might be our only potential way of connecting my trees to the fort through physical evidence.

That night, it pours rain again and there's another flash flood.

Warning.

My mind goes to Rick's fort.

Maybe it would all be gone, buried again or washed away except for what we rescued in a garbage bag that's now locked in Haley's office while we formulate a plan.

We don't know why law enforcements stopped pursuing Rick after the polygraph.

Maybe they learned something that excluded him, but we asked and not one of the detectives we spoke to said Rick had definitively been ruled out.

Maybe it was just he passed the polygraph.

But even if law enforcement had wanted to keep interrogating him, it would have been extremely difficult because not long after he was interviewed, he sustained yet another traumatic brain injury.

He had a long history of those.

Art Davis again.

I mean he ran right into an eighty year old eucalyptus tree like that.

In two thousand and one, Rick, driving drunk, had smashed into a tree onto Pega Canyon Boulevard.

Exploded his you know, all his teeth and they put all his teeth back in.

He busted both knees, broke his neck, you know, his back, his leg, all kinds of stuff.

I mean, they took the jaws alive man and got him out of there.

Then, in the fall of twenty twelve, not long after he took the polygraph and beat up Lisa Lapour, Rick was riding his motorcycle down Payuma when he collided with the Toyota Highlander at the intersection with Cold Canyon Road.

So he was on a motorcycle and he told my mom, Okay, I'm going to go feed the dogs really fast at his mom's house.

This is Shari Amic again.

When the accident happened, Rick was back living at Schari's parents' house.

And when I pulled up, my mom was standing outside, and I knew there was something wrong.

I just knew right away because there was a chopper.

Rick wasn't wearing a helmet.

Rick was in a coma again, and this time you know, everyone just said Rick's gonna die, and I was like, no, he's not, No, he's not.

Rick didn't die.

He emerged from his coma and the first thing he did was to attack the hospital staff.

But he was probably no longer mentally capable of being interrogated, and the detectives may have had no new leads to pursue about him anyway.

Over the next decade, Rick had more accidents as his cognitive abilities declined.

So his heart is telling him, like, you know, he always used to be, you know, very athletic and could do anything, superman.

I'm making it up those chairs well, you know, off balance, No you're not.

He spent his final years in a nursing home.

I went to go see Rick.

Rick couldn't talk, he couldn't speak.

He could understand me, he understood everything.

And they had him heavily drugged, very heavily sedated, you know, because he's going to try to get up.

He's just going to try to get up and do things his body can't do anymore.

Most of Rick's old friends stayed away.

Even Cherie found it almost intolerable to see him so diminished.

He was only in his sixties, but he was unable to speak or walk.

It felt to her like everything was catching up with Rick.

Rick is alive, but this is like, oh shit, now he's going to pay for all you know, the times he didn't listen, you know, like a little kid just didn't listen, did what he wanted to do, reckless fun Rick.

When Rick died in December twenty nineteen, he had a picture of his son, Ricky taped above his bed.

No one had told him Ricky had died two years earlier, at the age of twenty two.

Rick didn't make formal amends for his mistakes in life.

That person.

Haley and I were hoping to find someone he might have confessed to about my Terse, what he knew, or what he may have done.

We never found that person, but we did find Rick's poems.

Yes, it turns out Rick wrote poetry.

In the fall of twenty ten, about two months after my Terce's remains were found, Rick started a blog, Prose of a Khan.

He published a number of poems, most of them centered on themes of drug addiction, deception, regret, and the hope for forgiveness in the afterlife.

For example, quote as I lost my integrity the truth all but dies, and when it all comes forth, I'm caught in my lies unquote.

In the poems, Rick writes a lot about finding salvation through God, and for spiritual guidance, he turned to his former girlfriend Karen McKellar.

She'd gotten away from drugs and into God and spent her adult life counseling female addicts as part of a Christian ministry.

Karen says that for about a year after Rick took her up to the fort and put on the thong, he reached out to her obsessively and it was always about the same thing.

He called me and and he was asking me questions about Christ.

It seemed like Rick was seeking absolution for the life he lived.

And then I told him, you know, Jesus is the only way, Rick, you know, you really need to surrender to him.

And so I was trying to, you know, help him, and on the phone only because I would not come back there, but he always would call me, you know, interrupt me in my life.

And so then it was kind of like a client and a sad soul that I was trying to help get saved.

And he told me, he goes, yeah, Well, I prayed to the tree, and I said, Rick, the tree isn't going to save you.

Rick was praying to the big tree at his fort, the one where he hung the bras.

I told him, you need to confess all your whatever it is that you're going through, because he was so troubled.

So when he told me that he prayed to the tree, I was like, I'm this is just a waste of time.

And I ended up blocking them off my phone because I couldn't take the you know calls.

All the time I was praying for him, you know, because it was sad, very he was not mentally stable.

So yes, I think for sure he was looking for salvation and I prayed found it.

Back at the office, Haley goes through the contents of the garbage bag.

She makes a catalog and we go through it, marking the items that seem like they could potentially connect to my trees.

Black thong with lace down the front, rampage, size medium black thong, badly degraded Zanana outfitters, size medium, two black thongs, no labels, and the piece of green net fabric.

We contact a private forensic lab.

The DNA expert there tells us that even though these items have been moldering, possibly underground for more than a decade.

It's entirely possible they'll be able to identify a DNA signature.

This clothing might have nothing to do with my trees, but we've got to see this through before we send it to a lab.

Though.

We have to go see her dad, Michael.

We need to return my Teres's journals and we're hoping he might have something more to share with us.

Next time on Lost Hills.

It's in a ziplock bag and some just told me never get rid of and I couldn't do it if I wanted to, you know, So I just always felt like someday somehow we got to need him, We got to need him.

Yeah, So let me know when you're ready.

That's next in episode twelve, Dig two Graves, the final episode of season four of Lost Hills.

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 Benedere.

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 Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus