Lost Hills: Dark CanyonThe Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department listened to our podcast and now they’re asking us some new questions — and answering some of ours. Are they ready to reopen the investigation into Mitrice’s death?
Pushkin. A few months after episode twelve came out, Haley and I found ourselves standing in pretty much the last place we ever expected to be outside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Homicide Bureau in Monterey Park. I feel like we're gonna need a selfie.
Oh yeah, right here, right now?
Oh yeah?
Can we see us in here? Probably?
But it's okay.
We're excited we're allowed to take a selfie. We've been trying to get the attention of the Sheriff's homicide detectives ever since we started reporting on one of the county's most notorious unsolved cases, the two thousand and nine disappearance and death of my Teres Richardson. We'd appealed to them to share information with us, and when that didn't happen, we tried to provide them with the new information we'd uncovered. But now, after years of avoiding our questions, they want to talk to us.
So I'll keep my.
Last recordings for a while. Definitely need to turn this off when we go inside, should we? Just ready? I'm Dana Goodyear and this is a Lost Hills bonus episode. After the last episode of Lost Hills, Dark Canyon dropped in July, things went surprisingly quiet. The season had been so intense to make and the material was so urgent. We'd found startling new information potentially connecting a local Malibu man, Rick Forsberg, to the unsolved disappearance and death of my Teres Richardson. I think we were expecting to feel a cosmic shift in the after math of our reporting. Instead, there was silence. But then on a Thursday night in the middle of August, I checked my inbox. There was a new email with the subject line my Terce Richardson. The sender was Detective Sean McCarthy in the Cold Case unit of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. He wanted to talk. He was inviting us to the homicide Bureau to meet with him, another detective and two lieutenants, and he wrote, we should quote feel free to bring anything that you believe may be pertinent to the investigation unquote. In the last episode of the season, we'd listed the actions we hoped the Sheriff's Department would take in light of what we'd discovered. Our number one ask was that they'd take into evidence and test the underwear and other items we'd found at Rick Forsberg's Mountain fort to see if there was a connection to my trees. Now it sounded like they were giving us a green light to bring it all to the station. Oh my god. Also, can you just picture us walking in with a trash bag pull of underwear to the homicide department. I mean, it's frightening. Was easy for me to picture that. Uh yeah, So there we were at the homicide bureau with a bag of underwear, which we left in Haley's car. We still had to convince them that they needed to assume custody of it. We rang the bell and got buzzed into a sparse beij lobby. After a few minutes, Detective McCarthy came out to meet us. We followed him down a hallway lined with pictures of historic homicide investigations to a conference room he'd reserved for the afternoon.
Haley, we're allowed to record. Amazing.
To our total surprise, Detective McCarthy said we could record the meeting. We just fully assumed that we were not going to be doing this, but this is great. The iPhone's pretty much we're going to record too, Apparently our podcast and what if anything the Sheriff's Department should do about it had generated quite a bit of internal discussion, and.
I'm going to be honest with you because i want to be transparent.
There's a lot of disagreement on whether we should even be here today, a lot of disagreement to the point of people being angry at me for setting up to interview. Some feel that this case is over with, it's come to a conclusion.
There was a part of me that wanted to tell you to go pound saying too.
But when I listened to your podcast, there are some things in there that I think.
We at least need to talk about.
Before we got into the details of what we don't. He wanted us to understand a couple things. First, he wasn't quite or wasn't yet the assigned investigator, although he was an investigator and he'd been assigned to hear us out. Second, he didn't want us getting our hopes up that they'd be able to solve my Teres's case.
I just want to educate you on the Sheriff's Department, okay, and our unit in particular. We've been in existence for one hundred and two years, the Homicide Bureau. We have over twenty thousand homicides in our library. Of those twenty thousand homicides, over forty five hundred are unsolved cases.
Forty five hundred.
Right our unsolved unit is made up of about twelve investigators, some who don't investigate cold cases. We have six investigators that are currently investigating cold cases for forty five hundred cases right sticks. Right now, I personally am investigating about thirty five cold cases.
Right. Of those thirty five cold cases, there's more.
But those are the most solvable cold cases that I feel there's viable information or we have recently received viable information that make that case.
Solvable.
The first thing detective McCarthy wanted to know from us was how confident were we that Rick Forsberg had played a role in my Teresa's death?
In your opinion, based on your entire series of podcasts, is Forsberg the one and only viable suspect in your opinion, if he is.
A suspect if she was murdered.
Yes, okay, So, which is not to say that there couldn't have been other people. There could be eyewitnesses. This is in essence what we reported the podcast Forstburg had been a person of interest going way back to twenty ten when my truse was still missing. Then her remains were found in Dark Canyon, in the same area where Forstburg was known to grow pot and about a mile from his fort in the brush off Payuma Road. Forstburg was given a polygraph exam in twenty twelve and then for some reason they let him go.
We know that he was on the radar, So what happened to him?
Like, why didn't why wasn't anything pursued past a point?
I mean, that's still one of our biggest questions. We're going to try to answer some of your questions.
Detective McCarthy opened a folder that was on the table in front of him.
So how do we determine, based on what we have, if Rick Forsburg has anything to do with this. Forsburg, in March of twenty twelve, was interviewed. I know you know that he was interviewed, and I'm going to read I'm going to read a sentence to you. Investigators recalled the name of Rick Forsburg being associated with a clue received in January of twenty ten.
That clue was about Rick's fort, where witnesses said there was a ribcage, and there.
Was a follow up investigation done. The clue indicated Forsburg lived near tree Fort. In May of twenty ten, tree Fort was located in the immediate search area by deputies. Bones were located which were later identified as animal remains. Does that mean that they couldn't have missed something though, It doesn't mean that one hundred percent sure, but they at least did a search of that area and they found nothing related to my trees Richardson.
Then Detective McCarthy said in twenty twelve, a quote citizen informant had tipped the Sheriff's department about Rick. Again, he didn't say her name, but we know this was Lisa Lapour, who we interviewed for the podcast. She told us Rick had tried to take her into Dark Canon, but instead she drove him to Lost Hill Station where he was interviewed by homicide detectives.
So they interviewed him.
And at least according to the report, and I spoke briefly with the investigator, he was forthcoming. There wasn't any contentiousness that I can tell, And in my conversation with him, he admitted he was a heavy drug user and alcohol user. For thirty years. He admitted he had a tree fort. He called it a cottage in that area. He denied having anything to do with Richard's and or disappearance, and offered an explanation.
Rick told the detectives a version of the same story he told his friends.
And here's where we get into the information that you already talked about, is that he was in the canyon. He was at his tree fort smoking math or marijuana or whatever he was doing.
And once he was done, he was.
On his way back to his residence, and on his way back he hears a female voice yelling. And he described it. And I asked rich Tomlin, who's a black man. He described it as an African American voice. I don't know how he determined that, but when I asked Tom and he goes, I can see that. Okay, here's an African America female African American. The logical connection my trees, right. But he said it wasn't a woman yelling for help. It was more of a woman in some sort of confrontation with somebody. And Forsburgh said he went to investigate, but he could not find the source of the yelling. He told investigators this right, couldn't find a source source of the yelling, so he went on his way. He said he didn't come forward because of his contentious relationship with law enforcement.
At that point, Detective McCarthy said, the detectives asked Forstburg if he'd be willing to take a polygraph.
Polygraphic examinations are not admissible in court, so we only do them under certain circumstances. And in this case, they're trying to find out does he have anything to do with disappearance? Right, And I will read this to you. It's striking to me. You may scoff at it, but it's striking to me. And this is a poly examiner explaining this to the investigator. A score of plus four or higher indicates little or no deception. A score of minus three or below indicates deception. The preliminary scoring for borderbergs indicated a score.
Of plus ten.
That is passing with flying colors. Okay, now you can say what you want about polygraphic examinations, but that's striking to me, the plus ten that's passing with flying colors.
Right.
So this is why Forstberg walked, not because he had some other alibi that Haley and I didn't know about not because investigators found some other credible reason. If there had been one, I'm sure Detective McCarthy would have been all too delighted to tell us about it. No, the detectives let Forstburg walk because he passed a polygraph with quote unquote flying colors, even though the most superficial googling suggests that if he was high on pot and or meth his drugs of choice, this alone could have thrown off the results. This was depressing as hell the way we saw it. They had my Terce's killer in custody and they let him slip away, and now he was dead. But then Detective McCarthy offered us a tiny fraction of hope that maybe the case can be solved. After all, we've been sitting around the conference table for several hours at this point, explaining what we knew and how, and gleaning what little bits about the investigation Detective McCarthy was willing to let slip. We'd taken coffee breaks and bathroom breaks. The detectives had even ordered pizza. But now it was time to stop asking questions about the past and see what they were willing to do moving forward. We needed to get them to think about Rick's fort. It was potentially a crime scene, maybe still rich in evidence, and some of that potential evidence, what we using shorthand called the bag of underwear, was sitting in the trunk of Haley's car in the parking lot out front.
Yeah, so probably for us.
The biggest question we weren't able to answer, which we believe the Sheriff's department could answer potentially, is is there a connection between I mean the women's undergarments that we found at the site and my trees, or bigger question, is there any physical evidence that could place my rise at the fort? Because I think, look, I don't know yet what your standards are for viability, but to me, that would be viable. There's also another kind of corollary question, which is are any of these items of underwear and lingerie linked to other women who might be victims.
They were varied in.
Their sizes, styles, One thing clearly belonged to a child, and we think it's quite possible that Forstberg had a much bigger pool of victims than even we know about. So that's why we kept everything and we did bring it today in case you want it. So that you know, there might be something that you could get a signature off, but we ran out a one way with what we could do. Using a private forensic lab, we've been able to test one pair of the underwear we'd found at Rick's fort. We chose a size medium black thong, similar to the style we knew my Trees wore, but the DNA was too degraded. It was possible that the rest of the underwear would be similarly useless, but we didn't know. We were hoping the Sheriff's department would test the rest of it. There was something else we wanted to bring to their attention too. It was probably the biggest long shot, but importantly it would not depend on DNA. It required a little teeing up. When my Teresa's remains were exhumed and re examined in July of twenty eleven, the coroner's criminalist noted the presence of quote, loose green fuzz like hair slash fibers located near the legs unquote. There were some other things that were not clothing that were collected, including this green fuzz like material that was near her legs that when we first read the supplementary autopsy report we thought was so weird, like, what is this green fuzz? We hadn't been able to see a picture of the material, so we didn't know exactly what it looked like. But digging around in Rick's trash heap at the fort, we'd found a swath of bright, kelly green material.
And this is the thing that might be nothing, or it might be everything.
Is at the fort we found material that looked like it could fit that description. So would they take the bag of underwear and the green fuzz? Detective McCarthy looked over at his supervising lieutenant.
I've already made decision. Obviously, you can overwrite it. I say, we just take it and loook it in that that way is.
Safe if it does become later on, if it does become something that we want to pursue, we already have it. It's safe if we just let you walk away with it. I don't want to be second guested by somebody higher up the food chain. I say, we just take it into evidence and we'll make decisions later on. By letting you walk away with this suitcase, and then something does come up later, we already have it.
Note that there's less.
Issue Detective McCarthy cautioned us that there was no guarantee the crime lab would agree to test the items we'd collected.
The Sheriff's Department has over eight hundred homicides that have DNA evidence, right, that's not counting other sex crimes and other units.
And we're talking into.
The thousands of requests to do DNA testing and we get rejected all the time. When we say this need they want to know what link do you have that links this suspect.
So the first question they're going to ask is is this murder? And you know what my answer is going to be. I don't know. That's what my answer is going to be. So it's going to drop on the priority list.
But by this time I have to admit I was hardly listening to his management of our expectations. I was celebrating the underwear was going into evidence.
That's what would I do is slap the evidence figure on it and enter it into.
Can I watch that process happen. I don't want to miss the slapping of the evidence on it. That's going to be very satisfying for me. Haley and I left that day feeling triumphant and exhausted. We'd been there for almost five hours and we'd accomplished our most important goal to get that potential evidence safely into the hands of a homicide investigator. But that wasn't the last we heard from Detective McCarthy. Two days after our afternoon at the homicide beer, he sent me another email. I couldn't believe what I was reading. I called Haley right away, Hailey, Yeah, I am taping our call. They want us to take them to the fort.
Are you serious?
Yes?
Let's wait. Okay, start from the beginning.
Did they call you or what happened?
They just emailed me and I just p seed you on the reply, saying and the title of the subject of the email is Rick Forsberg. And those Detective McCarthy believed us enough to drive over an hour to go bushwhacking in Malibu. We were closer than we'd thought possible to some kind of resolution on my Teresa's case. I told him to bring his hiking boots. 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 Bennadet. Lost Hills is a production of Western sound and Pushkin industries.
