Pushkin.

Sergeant Towey Wright told me about the guy with the fort in the spring of twenty twenty one.

It was about to be my birthday, and I felt like I'd just gotten the gift of a lifetime.

I texted Haley right away.

I told her the cops had suspected foul play.

They had investigated someone there was a person of interest.

His name was Richard Wayne Forsburg.

Some googling pulled up an obituary from a funeral home in Westlake Village, a valley community not far from Montanito.

Forsburg had died a year and a half earlier, at the age of sixty four.

The picture on the website wasn't a middle aged man, though, it was a strapping, blonde California kid circa nineteen seventy three, blue eyes, bullneck, stuffed into a brown suit, probably for a high school photo.

The guest book was filled with comments from his neighborhood friends and former classmates at a Gurra High.

Guys revered him.

Quote Wow, rick we had so many adventures.

Yahoo.

Women adored him.

Quote Ricky was a talented athlete, handsome as hell, always the life of the party, and just a wonderful guy, one of the loves of my early years.

This wasn't the profile I'd been expecting.

He sounded like a bit of a charmer, a bit of a hell raiser, definitely a bro, but not on the surface anyway a monster in any case.

He wasn't reviled, rejected, or an outcast of his former world.

He was a golden child.

I don't care now, yeah, right down the street.

I've lived in Montana all my life.

Six weeks after Sergeant Wright told me about Rick, I saw the video that Raven Masterson had made of the Montanito lifer.

But so I just heard this a couple weeks later, you know, I hear that she's missing, and then you know, I walk through all this stuff's going on like sorry, I'm up with my spot, like two days later, and I see And I've seen a lot of vultures in my life.

I lived after fifty years, right right, I've never seen one hundred vultures just swoom.

I seem like a thousand of them, you know, I mean, I've never seen that many, you.

Know, So when did you see this?

I saw this like two days after she was missing, maybe four days after she was Missing.

Raven titled her video the fall Guy because she thought he was a scapegoat.

She doesn't say his name, but I recognized him though he'd aged and faded.

Zucka.

I don't know any of the facts except for that the constant Eye was the last one to see her live.

It was Rick Forstberg.

I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills episode eight, Rick Trouble.

As soon as we got Rick's name, we started hunting for information about him.

Who was he?

We found a Facebook group called Once Upon a Time in Montanito.

Skimming through it was like reading an old timey California fairy tale, full of images of picnics, parties, motorcycle rallies, horseback rides, and sun struck days at Surfrider Beach and Corr's beer.

A lot of Corr's beer.

We found pictures of Rick back in the day in bell bottoms or short shorts and tearing around a track on his motorcycle.

One commenter on the page calls him the Montanito nick Nolty, and in general, the page seemed like an informal memorial to the community's boys, boys who played rough, partied hard, and died before their time.

They called themselves the Montanito Boys, and Rick was their ringleader.

He's tall, handsome, He's got a really good vibe, bright blue eyes, tan, just gorgeous.

He was just beautiful to me, absolutely beautiful.

This is Sharie Ameck.

After many failed attempts to set up an interview, we dropped by our house one day unannounced, and to our surprise, she invites us into her backyard.

It's the house she grew up in and the yard she got married in.

Rick did everything like for my wedding I had here with my dad.

He was always down to help and he knew what he was doing.

Her parents were half a generation older than Rick and extremely close to him, and Rick was like a big brother to her.

He lived with them off and on, and she worshiped him.

And Rick was always just loud and I'm loud.

He's loud, and he's loves loves you.

He just loves you and he loves live.

Excuse me, that's my phone.

It never rings.

It's someone named Art Davis on the phone.

We've actually been trying to reach Art for months.

Two His stepdad and Rick's dad owned an HVAC business with Scherie's grandfather, and Art and Rick were childhood best friends.

Arty, come over, just come back, just come home home.

See, isn't that fucking crazy?

Something's never changed.

My god, we're family.

We're family.

A few minutes later, Art walks into the yard and joins us on the patio.

He's lanky and weathered, a former basketball player who's been working as a roofer for decades.

And that's how we end up doing an impromptu interview with two of Rick's most loyal, longtime friends.

Okay, and I met Rick in nineteen sixty three.

Just shut up and show her.

No, just kind of just.

Building up a little story here, right, Okay, look at this picture.

This is Rick and his sister.

Art shows us a picture on his phone of two little white, blonde kids back in the days when his family and the Forestburgs were neighbors in Malibu Meadows, a private area in Lower Montanito.

Art says, whatever was going on, Rick was always at the center of it.

Rick he was known good, bad or otherwise he was known.

He could just be sitting in his dad's boat in the garage, put that hot engine in the back man, and all the kids in the neighborhood.

We'd all go down there and we'd sit around.

You know, Rick, what's Rick doing?

You know?

Rick was always the guy.

Rick was an adrenaline junkie, dirt bikes, motorcycles, cars, boats.

If it could go, he wanted it to go faster.

His family spent time at Lake Havasu and he became an ex optional water skier.

He had no fear and no internal monitor.

He could barefoot water ski any circle raced.

And those guys, the boats that he was behind there, It's the scariest thing that I ever did, just being an observer for one of the races that they were in.

You know, like you get like fifteen boats going into one turn and the wake behind the boats is so high you can't even see the skier and the skis that they're in are so thick so that they can go right through that stuff, you know, and they were just like thumbs up.

Thumbs up means faster, faster.

So Art and Sharie hold a candle for the heroic side of wreck.

But I wondered what some of the other surviving Montinito boys would say.

So Haley and I head to an assisted living facility in Long Beach an hour and a half down the coast from Malibu.

Names William English Hall, and we had oatmeal and fried egg and sausage and biscuit for breakfast.

Were set up in the employee breakroom where there's a handyman repairing the ceiling.

Bill that's what he goes by.

Knew Rick his whole life.

My dad called him Tricky Ricky, which is kind of a good nickname for him.

Bill and his brothers were part of the Montanito Boys.

And were they in addition to being like Rick, like handsome and athletic and the ladies like them, were they also kind of bad boys?

You know, I wouldn't say real bad boys, but yeah, in the drugs and whatever.

You know, we all kind of dallied with drugs.

Though it was the times right ye.

The Montanito Boys spent their days playing in the creek and exploring the canyons and riding motorcycle on a course they built at the Triangle that was a patch of undeveloped land formed by Payuma, Cold Canyon and wood Bluff Roads.

My first memory of Rick, I was probably about eight years old, and I was down the street from my parents' house and he ran up to my bike and grabbed my bike and stole my bike.

This is Jay Engelshall.

He's one of Bill's brothers, a skinny, self effacing guy who's clearly still living hard.

We met him in the parking lot of a sporting goods store near his brother's nursing home and sat in my car to talk.

Jay remembers Rick as rowdy and fun when they were younger.

One time, after Rick crashed his corvat, he was fixing it up in the Engelshall's driveway.

He was working on the fenders and stuff, but us, being kids, we jumped in the front of it, like five of us, and he starts it up, and he took us around the circle down the down below my parents' house.

There's a big circle with gravel and dirt roads.

He was pretty much just sideways around every turn, gravels shooting up and dust and oh the neighbors should be coming out shaking their finger on them.

The dangerous.

We had kids in the rood, but it was a lot of fun.

There was quite a few times he gave us rides like that, just either crying, laughing or peeing in our pants or Yeah, it was pretty insane, pretty crazy.

But it was not all fun and games.

The Montanito Boys had enemies, the Malibu cops who hunted the boys from the air.

They were pretty very I would just say aggressive with the helicopter.

I mean, I remember I thought it was a little too much at the time, chasing them with helicopters on the dirt bikes.

As they got older, the trouble got deeper.

There was one wild party that has become part of the community's collective memory, not because it was so crazy, there were a lot of wild parties back then, because of what happened after the cops showed up.

They broke it up and they told us, you know, wrap it up in the night or whatever.

But there was still a bunch of beer left in the kegs.

So the older brothers took the keg to Lust Canyon.

That was one of the Montonito Boys hideouts.

When the cops got there, I guess, a couple of guys just ran off in the hills and they you know, basically taunting and you know, flipping them off or whatever, yelling back at him, you know, leave us alone.

The cops pursued them and they ended up attacking a kid called Glen.

They beat him with the flash light and it almost cut his era off.

But he had stitches everywhere, I mean all over his heads, forehead and all that.

Jay says, the cops were always focused on Rick.

It was pretty obvious that he was a problem.

Rick was playing one of the worst kids in that neighborhood, you know, with them, so that he was well known in that regard.

And one of the worst beatings the Malibu cops ever doled out was to none other than Rick Forsberg.

Some people said it changed him forever.

Okay, Hi, I'm Neil Samuelson, author of malbou Up the Grid, a book about the Malibu area and all that has transpired here in the years past.

How's that.

After Rick died in twenty nineteen, his family put up the obituary site.

That's how we found his old friend Neil.

In the comments section, there was a plug for his book, a self published memoir of growing up on the margins of Malibu.

It was the best place in the world to grow up.

And eventually, you know, it all kind of caught up to us.

You know, some of us were real successful, and some of us stayed around here and we were caught in this you know, little world that we couldn't get out of.

The parents were pretty well off, and you know, although Rick never lived off this folks, he was bounding a demined to make it on his own.

So, I mean he was you know, I mean, he was a good guy, but the alcohol kind of brought him down a little bit.

Neil was several years younger than Rick, and he lived in a different neighborhood, but they hung out together, and he knows a lot about Rick's history.

He's even given Rick a special pseudonym in the.

Book, Oh Trouble, Rick Trouble.

A lot of Rick's personality, Neil says, can be explained by what happened to him as a kid at the hands of the Malibu cops.

He says, the Malibu cops were notorious and vindictive, and they absolutely despised the spoiled kids in the area.

Oh, they were the roughest of the budge.

You know, you didn't want to mess with the Malbouy sheriffs, especially as poked you know, rich kids.

You know that we were like the pray for them home host.

A lot of kids got beaten up by those guys.

But you know, as you If you run, you've got to pay the consequences.

Rick would always run, but one night in the spring of nineteen seventy seven he got caught.

This was my grad night, and I was supposed to be graduated, and you know, and I'm messing around with the older kids.

Banded up at the old missile site at the top of Payuma Road, where obviously they weren't supposed to be the nuclear missiles were gone, but it was government property.

We you know, found a spot and we're up there hanging out, and you know, we had a little pod, but nothing, you know, big, and then all of a sudden, boom, out of the blue, there's cops there, you know.

So two of the guys ran, and then Rick tried to run, and he was the last guy to run, so they ran him down and he tried to get away and they cornered him, and the guy just really hammered him.

They really just beat him to a pulp and they dragged him up to the police car.

Neil's watching all this from the back of a cop car.

He's been arrested and is about to be taken to the place the kids call the Malibu Hilton, a facetious nickname for the local jail.

We watched Rick just get clubbed.

The guy just kept beating on him, hitting his legs.

Finally he crumbled to the ground and that's when they took off and they wouldn't allow us to see the rest of it.

So they took us down to jail, and we didn't know what happened to Rick.

And four or five hours went by.

Rick came back to the jail and he was his head was shaved and he had stitches all over his head, and he was very defiant and it's like very mad.

After the beating, Rick's golden boy glamour began to tarnish.

He got wilder and meaner, and his relationship with law enforcement grew more combative.

In the years that followed, Rick was in and out of police custody and did time in state prison.

Rick was always one of those guys that was going to conquer the world.

Man, he had it in him, you know, and little by little, you know, he kept getting in these situations where he would, you know, run from the police and something would happen.

I mean, I could think of five different incidentss just off the top of my head, where he would run and have police contact, you.

Know, and he would right back to wouldn't he One.

Time he did, Yeah, And that's the one that got him in the most trouble.

He ended up hurting a couple of police officers.

I think it was the way the story goes.

But you know, he he was kind of a mystery.

After a couple of years, you'd see him, he tell us his story, and uh, he was living all over the place.

Most of the time.

He lived a very suffered life.

Rick's family continued living in Montanito.

His father died a few years ago, but his mother and one of his two sisters are still there today, respected and beloved members of the community.

As an adult, Rick lived in various places around southern California and spent some time in Hawaii, but he always gravitated back to the area he was from, and in July of two thousand and nine, when he was released from prison for the last time, he came back to Montanito.

This was two months before My Trees disappeared.

Friends say by the time Rick returned from prison, he was no longer welcome at the house he grew up in, but Rick had been building forts in growing pots since he was a kid, he was at home in the woods, so he built himself a hide out at the base of a large tree in the woods off Payuma Road, and he retreated there to hang out and tend his plants in peace.

Neil says he thinks he knows where Rick's spot was.

He remembers going there a few times.

Okay, so you guys follow me and I'll drive real slow.

We follow him up Payuma Road, past the entrance to the Porn Ranch and around another bend or two.

We park in a turnout and get out of the cars.

He points down into the dense brush below.

Well, this is his spot that I knew, where he grew a couple of plants.

It's right here.

Was he a physically fit guy, because getting down there looks like a giant pain.

Oh yeah, Well, like I said, yeah, it's rough walking down there.

That's why it's so secluded.

That's why it's a perfect spot for somebody to hide out in.

I'm sure there was a little trail here ten years ago.

Though.

Right before leaving, I want to run one more thing by him.

I just want to verify that the fort Sergeant Wright told me about is the same one Neil visited.

So what I was going to tell you is that I heard that there was like a tip that, oh my god, this guy has a little structure and there's somebody had seen it and said there's a rib cage in there, and they came and looked and it was a deer rib cage and ricked.

Eight and deer.

You know, he's he was a he kind of went into you know, wild boat.

I think, you know.

A few days after Neil shows me the general area of rick Spot, I meet up with Sergeant Wright.

He's got something for me.

It's the coordinates for Rix Fort.

I punched them into Google Maps.

There off to the side of Payuma Road is a skeletal tree right in the area Neil had showed me, and there's a trail running by it, a section of the Backbone Trail.

I decide to go check it out.

I'm thinking maybe I'll find something, some remnant of wreck.

I picked my way through overgrown dry brush.

The brush forms tunnels and you have to crouch low to get through.

Is that an access trail?

Where does that one go from?

On the ground, I spot a plastic water bottle and some black irrigation tubes and other items that look like detritus from growing pot.

I remember the thing that I was told is that there were four trees that, in not a perfect square, had been kind of bound together and topped over.

I find the big dead tree pushed up against a smaller tree.

Nearby is a decaying mattress, the fabrics caving in and torn.

It looks like a home for rats.

Nothing else.

That's all that was left of Rick's old fort.

But I've learned the fort wasn't the only place Rick was hanging out.

He was down in the neighborhood too, partying with old friends, and back in two thousand and nine when my trise went missing, some of them immediately thought of Rick.

Laura and Ray Robbins Shari Ameck's parents were like a surrogate family for Rick.

Over the years, the Robins would be a refuge for him when he wore out his welcome at home, and in two thousand and nine, after he got out of prison, when he wasn't at his fort, he was spending a lot of time there.

He'd use the shower or sleep on the couch, and sometimes he'd live in the basement.

Rick's parents would give the Robins money for his room and board.

Rick was middle aged, fifty four years old in the summer of two thousand and nine, but he was kind of like a kid who refused to grow up, and even though he had the Robin's house to stay at, he generally preferred to be up at his spot.

He'd walk or ride his motorcycle up Payuma Road at dusk and head back down to the neighborhood at dawn.

Back on the patio with Shari and Art, I ask about Rick's spot, did you ever go up to the fort?

I did not not your scene up there.

You know, I didn't want to go.

I didn't want to know.

I didn't want to know.

He was so proud of it too, it was hilarious.

He took my ex husband up there and he went up there, and my ex was like, oh my god, like it's so awesome.

He's got it all set up like a tent and it's all He's got a chair and a couch and the light and this and the that.

I'm like, oh my godness, why is he doing that.

He doesn't need to do that.

But he was growing pot up there, so you know, he was protecting his plants and at that time it was still illegal.

You know.

Also, I was like, oh my god, you're growing plants.

Ah, you're gonna get busted.

My mom, be careful, Rick, Rick, be careful.

Rick had been drinking and smoking pot and using PCP since the seventies.

He'd also done a lot of coke and heroine, and by the two thousands he discovered math.

It had a very noticeable effect on him.

That was always something that was being passed around, for sure.

And he wasn't you know, he was the type that would disappear.

You know, he wasn't.

He wasn't.

He wasn't Rick.

He wasn't out in the open right up in your face and everything else and how a good time?

You know.

He was like are they here?

You know, he's all paranoid and freaking peeking out the door.

I'm like, oh my god, okay, so no, no, no, no, I'll see you later.

Even as he aged and people around him changed their ways, Rick didn't seem capable of toning it down.

You either died or got sober.

You know, he did do was driving that insatiable desire to go to oblivion.

I work in mental health, well not currently, and I really wanted to ask him, like why, like why are you like this?

Why are you so we were like you know, running or getting in trouble or hurting yourself or you know, continues like doing the same thing over and over.

On the day of my Teresa's disappearance, Rick told the Robins that he'd heard her at the tennis courthouse.

He says this in the video, and Laura Robbins confirmed it to me when I spoke to her on the phone, though she emphasized that her goal was to protect Rick.

I don't want anything said other than that he was the best guy in the world.

She said, he's not your man's sweetheart.

He's not but CHERI says.

Laura was deeply concerned that Rick was involved with my Teresa's death, and she confronted him with her suspicions.

I was here when my mom was like, Rick, do you know anything about that girl?

He was saying right there then we had a couchhare.

I remember the whole thing.

Do you know anything about that girl?

Rick?

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

You know?

He had that raspy boy.

She's like the girl, the girl, you know, the girl, that fucking the girl is dead, the girl that they found.

And he goes and he looked at her like, are you fucking serious?

CHERI didn't think Rick would lie to her mom or to her.

Would he tell me?

Yeah?

I think he would.

I think he would.

He just trust to me that way.

And if he had lied, she would have seen right through him.

He was guileless.

And I know, I mean, I have a really good sense of intuition, and if I thought Rick did that, I would know.

I would be able to see it.

He couldn't hide it.

He was like a little kid.

He couldn't hide.

He couldn't He wasn't a liar.

He wasn't a liar, and he wasn't a killer.

He never killed anybody to my knowledge.

In the video, Rick proposes that my Trees fell down in a ditch.

My Trees didn't use hard drugs, just pot.

But she also wasn't in a normal state of mind on September seventeenth, two thousand and nine, so she might have been more open to trying something, or she could have been tricked into accepting what she thought was a joint when it may have been laced with meth or cocaine or something else.

The toxicology from her autopsy was inconclusive, so it's impossible to say if rugs were in her system at the time of her death.

But there says she just can't picture Rick seeking out my Teresa's company.

And I'm just being completely honest.

I don't want to say that he was, you know, racist, but I don't think that he would have any interest in even especially on a tennis.

Court at night.

He's already like Rick would have.

Nah, it takes me a second to believe what I'm hearing.

You think he wouldn't be attracted to a black woman like that when she was too young for him.

First of all, let's just say that.

But that is not many people have not been stopped by that.

Well, I mean for the most part.

No, she says, it's not the age.

My Teres wasn't his type.

She turns to art for confirmation.

Seek about it being a black woman's think about that.

Do you see Rick going to have an engagement time and get wasted with a black girl at four thirty in the morning on Payuma coming down when she's yelling and somewhat disoriented, or you know, he sees there's an issue.

What he says jump on the back of my bike.

Let's go get high.

I'll help you.

Yeah, I think you do that.

I do.

My Trice was a stunningly beautiful twenty four year old dancer.

Rick was a fifty four year old ex con methaddict.

The idea that his racism could be exculpatory proof that he wouldn't want to get involved with her.

It's not just deeply offensive, it's illogical.

To my mind.

Racism could easily explain a crime against my teres, not make it inconceivable her freedom, her life, it might have seemed expendable.

Also, I'm wondering how much Cheri really knows about what Rick was into.

I'm thinking of the Raven video.

He does not seem at all off by or uncomfortable with the attractive young black woman he's being interviewed by.

Quite the contrary, he invites her up to his fort.

Sheree is clearly troubled by this whole conversation.

She loves Rick, but she also feels for my trees.

How do we figure out what happened to my trees?

How do we figure this out?

I feel like her brain is kind of melting down.

She just can't believe Rick would have killed someone.

She addresses art again, Rick wasn't that brutal or that calculating?

Was he?

Do you think that he would have the ability to keep that as alive?

Do you think, really think you've known him your entire life?

Could Ricky get away with that?

I have no idea thought that.

We turn off the mic and are pa backing up to leave.

When Cherie looks up at the cloudless blue sky and starts to freak out.

There are vultures, dozens of them, spiraling overhead.

I grabbed my phone to record a video.

Oh my god, you guys, No, arety come here?

No, it's not normal.

Oh my god, Artie, look how many?

There's like thirty of them.

That is so crazy.

I haven't seen them in so long.

She thinks the vultures are a sign, a sign of Rick.

Rick's childhood friend Jay Engelshall, says he and Rick were together a lot around the time of my Teres's disappearance, but Rick didn't tell him about hearing my Teres that morning at the Tennis court house.

This was the biggest thing that had happened in Monte maybe ever, a woman going missing.

Cops everywhere, helicopter searches dogs flyers, So why didn't Rick tell him about his encounter with my trees.

It's just I never heard of doing that happening, and it's like, wow, I never heard him talk like that before about it, and I think I would have.

You know, it's weird.

Jay says he and Rick would hang out at the fort.

That's one of the reasons why.

I guess he built a fort so you'd have somewhere to go.

And when he did, he was sort of like, you know, watcho Mountain Ran.

In a way, it was he was proud of it, trying to make the best of it, I guess, but he was also just I don't know.

It seemed like he was doing his own thing and doing it and whichever way he wanted.

To Rick's fort and the remains spot in Dark Canyon, we're very close to each other.

As the crow flies, all you'd have to do is cross Payuma Road and find a place to drop over the side.

Not that it would be easy.

You'd be trespassing and it would be steep and treacherous, but Jay's sure Rick would have known how to get in there.

He tells me Rick had been growing pot in Dark Canyon since the seventies.

You know, he knew almost every trail up there, probably you know, and places where there were no trails.

And sure he can only think of one reason for my trees to be in Dark Canyon.

I don't think she'd have any interest to go up in their.

Head at all.

Why would you?

And somebody's luring her off, you know, hum or she's unconscious.

I don't know.

And he can really only think of one person who would have taken her there.

I think morrow morning you might have something to do with the tony truth.

Two days after our meeting, in the parking lot of the sporting goods store, I get a call from Jay.

It's a Saturday night, and I met a friend's art show.

I go outside so I can hear him better.

His voice comes frail and ready through the phone that's pressed up against my ear.

Jay says he just remembered something and he wanted to tell me because he thinks it might be important.

He says, around the time of my Teresa's disappearance, Rick had started growing weed in Dark Canyon.

Again, Haley and I are learning Rick wasn't just a charming rogue.

He wasn't just a danger to himself.

He had a lengthy criminal history going back to the eighties, and as we start sifting through it, we notice a clear trajectory increasingly reckless behavior with drugs and alcohol, punctuated by increasing violent attacks on women.

He was extremely incorrigibly abusive, and the women in his life bore the brunt of his rage.

Next time on Lost.

Hills, 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.

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

That's next in episode nine, Fearful Witness.

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 Putushkin 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