7. The Caves

Published Sep 18, 2024, 7:01 AM

We explore underground caves in Arizona.

Missing in Arizona contains graphic depictions of violence and may not be suitable for all listeners. From iHeartRadio and Neon thirty three, I'm John Walzac and this is Missing in Arizona, the story of a man who disappeared after allegedly killing his wife and kids, blowing up their suburban home, and escaping into the wilderness. Twenty three years later, I'm hunting, Robert Fisher, and I need your help. What got me about this case? Where the caves, people often pitch me story ideas. Many are good, few are great. It's extremely rare to find one that warrants two years of exhaustive investigative labor. There has to be an X factor. A man kills his family, blows up their house, and flees into the wilderness. Go on, then escapes or dies in a cave. Okay, sold? I picture a goony style skeleton in an underground cave in the Arizona Mountains, A romantic, morbid Western adventure. Of course, I want to search the caves myself, but first I need to find them. And let me tell you, the Arizona caving community is the most secretive group I have ever encountered. More than anyone I met while reporting on the Mafia or nine to eleven or anything. Really, no one will tell me the location of these caves, and they're not on a map, but I know that they're very close to where police found Mary Fisher's forerunner, Find the suv, find the caves. For months, I examine every piece of data for clues, every news report, every police record. I'm proud to say in the end my best final guess is within a quarter mile of the actual spot. But that's not good enough. These aren't Hollywood caves. They're holes in the forest floor, tiny dark doors into a subterranean world. They're easy to miss in a vast wilderness. I need the exact spot. I need help. This is where I introduce you to Paul Gemperline. Hey, y'all, Paul is a fan of Season one Missing in Alaska. Of the thousands of people who contacted me, he's been the most helpful when I choose this case. I email Paul, hoping to loop him in as an amateur researcher and satellite imagery analyst. Unsurprisingly, he says yes. Surprisingly, he tells me he's also a recreational caver, an intelligent tech savvy caving superfan a perfect fit the plan. Our producer Chris and I will go into the woods with Scott Steal Detective TJ Juran trying to find the forerunner spot. Based on my research and TJ's memories, I all video the woods and from his headquarters in Kentucky, Paul will try to pinpoint exactly where the SUV was abandoned, like literally the tree was parked against. So one pleasant Phoenix morning, Chris and I meet up with TJ and drive into the mountains. A twist here, A turn there.

Okay, so this is Young Road.

Turn right now, So.

Now we're going to start heading down to.

We descend from the top of the muggy on rem that jagged strip of cliffs extending across Arizona. Young Road is paved for a bit. Then Bumpy, look at my fucking back windshield. Oh fuck, So you used to have a Bronco. Yeah.

I actually bought it in ninety four, early the year he was arrested. And I go to the Ford dealship and there's a white Bronco and I told the guy I don't want to fucking white. So he shows me all these different colors and I picked one that was turquoise green, but it had, you know, the white top.

It had the turquoise top, and it looked stupid. So he goes, we're here, come around back. Let me show you what else we got, and he takes me around back. There's like fifteen white Broncos lined up. I'm like, I told you, I don't want to know J Bronco.

We're driving down this dirt road faster than OJ on an LA Highway when.

Your destination is ahead on the left.

We're here where.

There should be a little road that we can turn left onto it. No, holy shit, that's it.

That's it. Yeah, huh shit.

We turn onto a raggedy side road and park.

It should be right generally in this direction.

Do you want to walk?

Yep.

An eerie silence forms the soundtrack of the forest, interrupted only by our footsteps in the wind. I pull out my phone so I don't have cell service, but I have GPS, so since the map is loaded, if we start walking, we'll see okay, well we're here.

And then we'll get right to that spot.

So we walk.

Watch where you walk, rattlesnakes and bears.

TJ and I head in different directions. Memory guides him. GPS guides me.

Do you mind if I walk to finish the coordinate?

TJ yells at me to follow him. I can tell he's kind of pissed. I ignore him and speed walk away. We've made it so far. I'm not stopping until I reach these coordinates. I think this is it. Our producer Chris is stranded in the middle, unsure who to follow me or TJ. TJ, the cave's over here. I found it. TJ walks over.

That's it. That's the cave, the cave.

That shall not be named. I know its name, but I've been asked by cavers not to publicize it. They're worried a name will help people find and vandalize it, which means I get to rename it Apex Simple, the name of my high school. Winding through the forest, I spot a sinkhole maybe thirty feet wide thirty feet long. A wash or seasonal creek bed flows right into it. Today, there's no water, one hundred percent dry. The sink is filled with branches and leaves and dirt. A fallen tree crosses from one side to the other. A precarious bridge peering down maybe twenty feet at the bottom between craggy rocks. There it is the cave entrance. I know the Forerunner was parked near here, within one hundred and fifty feet. The problem is it all looks the same trees, bushes, rocks. This will take more detective work, so I video it than TJ. Chris and I walk back to the car.

Jesus Christ. Johnny made me fucking sweat.

TJ and I laugh about bolting in different directions, yelling at.

Each other, and then some poor sap caught in the middle.

Well, sorry, guys, but we made it. Back in Phoenix, I send my video to Paul Gemperline. I often joke that these stories turned me into John Nash or Carrie Matheson or Charlie from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a crazed person surrounded by maps and charts and sticky notes. Paul puts me to shame. I see his computer monitors. They're playing a dozen videos simultaneously. He's comparing old footage of the Forerunner recovery, every archived angle to video. I took in the woods. Here a tree, there a bush, Here's some rocks. They are a shadow. Can we narrow it down? Can we find the exact spot where Robert left Mary's forerunner.

I think I've figured it out, when a little bit crazy in the process.

Yes, this genius man found it.

I've identified those double trees. I've identified this dead tree. I've identified this leaning tree, this tree here, I've identified the dead one there.

VOILA. Thank you, Paul. So at this point we found the cave and the fore runner spot, which allows Paul to search old satellite imagery for any photos taken between April tenth and April twentieth, two thousand and one. Why let's say we find an image from I don't know, April sixteenth. Can we see the fore runner. If so, we can narrow down how long it was in the woods. Tighten the timeline. Paul starts to rule out or in dozens of satellites. It's a taxing, months long chore with no payoff until one day.

Hmmm.

An email from Paul.

The good ish news is that the spot for satellite took two ten meter resolution photos of the Toyota location on April sixteenth, two thousand and one. We got lucky with this because there is zero percent cloud cover and the bit of overlap between satellite images happened to work out that the location was photographed twice. We're even more lucky because there's also a fifteen meter resolution Landsat image of the area taken on April fifteenth, two thousand and one.

Paul strikes again. He finds images of the fore runner spot taken by two different satellites during the correct period. Unfortunately, that's where the good news ends.

Only about four percent of a fifteen meter pixel would be filled by a toyota. Additionally, it would be under tree cover and also possibly split across as many as four pixels.

So if you zoom in down to the pixel on a fifteen meter resolution SAT image, a four runner would cover only four percent of that pixel. Tantalizingly close, but useless for us. We need high resolution photos. It's frustrating to stare at my screen at this wide swath of Arizona from the right time frame, knowing the fore Runner is likely down there somewhere. I zoom into the spot where Greg the camper found it. This is the part of CSI when I'd say enhance and the image would resolve to finer detail, but in reality it doesn't work that way. Blurry blurrier, blurry, IST one pixel no detail. We've now ruled out all but three satellites our last hope IRS one, c IRS one D, and Arrows A. The first two were operated by the Space Agency of India, the third by an Israeli company. As Paul digs around online, I email the Indian and Israeli embassies in DC. Paul soon determines there's no way the Indian satellites capture the photos we need. The final final hope is aeros A, which would give us two meter images detailed enough to see the fore Runner. In August twenty twenty three, I get an email from the Israeli embassy saying they'll check on it. Six weeks later, Hamas attacks Israel war breaks out. I never hear back from them again. We still haven't determined whether or not Aerosa captured imagery of the fore Runner spot in April two thousand and one. If you can help, please contact us. Okay, so we found the four Runner spot and a cave. What about other caves in the area. My hope is that someone will give us a list, or better yet, a map. That's dashed immediately when I realized that the Arizona caving community is something of a secret society. They do not like outsiders, especially reporters.

The joke in the caving community is say, hey, I'm going caving in Arizona, and the joke is there's no caves in Arizona.

Ken Bailey a caver in Kentucky, and.

We all have a big laugh because no one is going to tell you a location of a cave in Arizona. It's just not going to happen.

You'll find two modes of thought in the caving community.

Dave Decker a caver in New Mexico.

Arizona is kind of like on the far side of that, which is, we don't have any caves, so don't come here looking for caves. And the reason that they want to keep things secret, and I'm more along these lines myself, is that you've got this group in the general public that they don't care about the caves, they don't care about the wildlife, they don't care about the archaeological history that may be associated with it, and they just want to go in there and party, throw beer cans around, knock down the stalactites, and spray paint the walls.

This is critical to understand. The caving community is secretive because they've been burned repeatedly. Vandals routinely desecrate pristine caves, destroying irreplaceable features of beauty that took thousands of years to form. It's not that these cavers are asocial. They can be friendly. It just pains them to see something so elegant, something they love deeply defiled, so they turn inward. They're suspicious of outsiders. They have a code. Don't speak to outsiders, especially not a podcaster looking for the body of a killer. Beyond vandals, even people who mean well can unintentionally do irreparable harm. One big concern is white nose syndrome, a fungal disease that kills bats more than six millions since two thousand and six. Humans can spread it to unaffected caves where bats hibernate. There's more, but you get the idea early on. I try to build trust. I tell cavers that I worked for years at a biodiversity research and in stad I care about nature. I love nature. That doesn't work silence, I fail to be frank. It kind of pisses me off. I have ten million things to do. I'm trying to report this story responsibly and no one will help me. Meanwhile, YouTubers who just don't care are recklessly going into many of these caves anyway. Slowly, though, I earned some trust. More so, several cavers help me off the record because I learn information independently, and now they need me because they don't want certain things publicized, like the name of the cave one hundred and fifty feet from where police found Mary's forerunner. Keep in mind, I already committed to not publishing coordinates or directions or anything like that, but the name, not even the name. I think this desire for secrecy will backfire, but I'm honoring their wishes. To this day, I still don't know exactly how many caves are within a mile of the forerunner spot, at least four, including Apex, again only one hundred and fifty feet from where police find the fore runner. Our producer Chris and I do a little test. We park a Subaru cross track at that exact spot. We walk to Apex and can still easily see the cross truck. It makes sense why police thought Robert Fisher was hiding here. They couldn't enter it in two thousand and one, the entrance was too tight. Instead, they called a plumber who snaked in a drain camera. No sign of Fisher. Forty one club. Forty one club is on tribal land the Ford Apache Indian Reservation. Police teargased it in two thousand and one. No sign of Fisher. Pishee Burrow, pishibo ro though I've seen alternate spellings. It's unclear if police attempted to search it and Redman Redman is locally famous. Police tried to search it. No sign of Fisher. There's something you should know about Redman. Another reason for all the secrecy. Caves, even popular ones like Redmen, can be deadly. You have to worry about sliding into a crevasse. You have to worry about rocks breaking off and bashing in your skull. You have to worry about bad air decaying or antiicmatter creates pockets of air saturated with carbon dioxide. It can kill you. You have to worry about critters, snakes, mountain lions, bears. You have to worry about hypothermia. You even have to worry about the rapture and extreme anxiety that you need to get the out now. Inexperienced people can easily die in caves. In fact, one died in Redman. His name was Aaron's Standage. On February twenty fourth, two thousand and one, only six weeks before the Fisher murders, Standage and a friend descended into Redmen and traversed it until they reached a flooded sump or passage at the back of the cave. The friends squeezed through a three foot pole and swam ten feet underwater, surfacing in a cavern with only six inches of air between water and the rocky ceiling above. Standards swam into the same cramped space according to the pacin roundup, bobbing in the water breathing scarce air. They debated what to do. The friend turned around. When Standage didn't follow, the friends sought help. A rescue diver entered the flooded swamp through the three foot hole feet first, pulling an air tank behind him. Navigating underwater, he bumped into a body. Using his legs. The diver pulled the body out of a crevice slowly through the sump to the surface. Neither Standage nor his friend, a certified diver, took any safety precautions. According to the Heela County Sheriff's Office quote, they were strictly diving in, holding their breath, swimming underwater, and hoping they had air in the next cavern. My goal here is not to scare you off from caves. They can be places of discovery and adventure, of camaraderie or solitude. With experience or guides, They're typically safe, but you need to exercise caution. Caves are unpredictable. Even profession oles die. The most famous death occurred ninety nine years ago. A man named Floyd Collins got stuck in a cave in Kentucky, pinned in place by fawn rocks for weeks. Dozens of men tried to save him. The rescue became a national spectacle. Millions followed updates via radio. Tens of thousands showed up in person. Vendors sold everything from balloons to hamburgers. According to The Daily Beast, Bread and Circus, a newspaper reporter, William Burke Miller, only five foot five, even managed to crawl to Collins and interview him. Miller won a pulitzer. Collins died for years. His body was a tourist attraction, displayed in a glass covered tasket. Pay a dollar enter a cave, see a corpse. In nineteen twenty nine, someone stole the body. It was recovered minus a leg. Finally, in nineteen eighty nine, Collins got a proper burial. Since the Collins spectacle, caves have popped up repeatedly in mass media. In nineteen seventy three, Cormack McCall the published Child of God, a novel in which spoiler alert, a man kills a woman, burns down her house, and flees to a cave. In two thousand and five alone, Hollywood gave us the Cavern Spolunker's Fall, Prey to a supernatural force in Russian caves six percent, on Rotten Tomatoes, The Cave Monsters Huntsplunkers in Romanian caves twelve percent, and The Descent, set in western North Carolina, eighty seven percent. I love that film. I saw The Descent in a theater a week before moving to Asheville, North Carolina for college. There is, of course, so much more caves in literature and song and lore, from Plato to Mumford and Sons to the Lord of the Rings. Seijin Pang lived in a cave for seven years. A cave in Kenya gave us Ebola a cave in Greece gave us Armageddon. John of Patmos had apocalyptic visions and recorded the Book of Revelation in that cave. I once hiked Devil's Courthouse, a mountain in North Carolina with a cave that, according to Cherokee legend, is home to a plant eyed giant named Judhicola. Judahicola controls wind, rain, thunder, and lightning. We rarely see caves in a positive light. They're usually scenes of fear, horror, death, isolation. That's what we project onto them. But extricated from human narratives, they're undeniably sublime, exquisite quirks of nature. They form in many ways. The ones near the Forerunners spot where police thought Robert Fisher was hiding, are called solution caves.

They have been carved out over the course of hundreds of thousands of years by the action of running water dissolving away the limestone.

Frank Kimbler is a geologist and associate professor of Earth Science at New Mexico Military Institute. He lived in Arizona from the late eighties until two thousand and nine, working as an engineer for the state Department of Minds and Mineral Resources. He explored the caves near the Forerunners spot in the nineties. The first thing he tells me is that.

The caving community is very, very secretive, and they won't tell you anything because people trash things out really bad and they leave cans. There's this caving thing that says, leave nothing behind and kill nothing but time, and take nothing but pictures.

Frank has been in two of the four caves near the four Runner spot, forty one Club and Pishie Burrow, where in nineteen ninety two he almost died on the way out.

I was really tired. My arms were cramping up, and I miscalculated the stride length. You need to have enough space to reach up and grab the top ledge to pull yourself out. And what happened was on the way out with my arms cramping up and I was dead tired. I get to the top and I was about a foot short. I'm going, oh my god, I messed up the stride length. So I'm dangling in there and I'm going, all right, I'm too tired to go back down and redo and then come back up. So I was the last person out and my friend Wayne was at the very top waiting for me, and I tried to reach him and I couldn't reach. He reached down and I stretched with all my might. He caught my fingertips and literally pulled me out. I was scared to death. I thought it was going to die dangling in Pisheborough Cave. But he pulled me out, and when I got to the top, I just laid down. I says, thank you, Wayne, this is the second time you've saved my life. He says, don't worry about It's what friends are for.

Pcburrow was much harder to access than other caves like forty one Club or Redman. First, you had to descend into a deep sinkhole.

You would absolutely have to repel to get down into Picyboro. No other way to get in there, and that's about forty to sixty feet to get to the bottom.

In nineteen ninety two, right after Frank's near death experience, the Picheboro sinkhole collapsed. Now there's only one way in.

The flat metal plate goes in through what's called the filopium tubes, aptly named I wouldn't be able to fit through it. You probably would because you look like you're a pretty slender dude, So fillopium tubes is horrible to get through with fancy names like Restricter one and Restrict two.

And you're telling me that it's so tight that. I mean, I'm five eight hundred and thirty five pounds, so I could probably do it, but you're not. You could do it, You're not that big of a guy, but it's tight enough that you don't think you would be able to get in there.

I know when I was younger, I weighed one sixty five and I could have done it. It would have been a little bit of a stretch, but I was used to that. But now that I'm one hundred and eighty nine pounds, I don't think so.

By chance, Frank is within one pound of Robert Fisher's weight one hundred and ninety pounds when he disappeared.

I think the chubb around I think that the good life from my wife's cooking, I would have been stopped at probably Restrict one because they have different diameters on them. That's the reason why they named them Restrict one and Restrictor two, and hence the name. I mean fallopium tubes that describes all tight.

That is, if I went in there, am I just in an extraordinarily claustrophobic tube for a long period of time until it open.

It would be you would be. That's a guarantee. And I've been in tight places like that before. You would have been probably more than one hundred feet of ultra tighte we're talking about. Got to have your hands directly in front of you, not by your sides, and you've got to push with your feet and pull with your hands to get through it. No way to turn around, no way to do anything. You can't back out. You just once you get started, you got to keep going.

When I spoke to a coworker of Robert Fishers from the early nineties, she was the first person to confirm to me that he had been in at least one cave in that area, and she did not remember the name of the cave, but what she said is that they went biking with some coworkers and that Fisher and some of his coworkers went into a cave and then came out another entrance. As far as I could tell, the only one in that area that fits that description is PC Burrow. Are there any other caves in that area that you know of that you can enter one way? And exit another.

I gotta think about this. You can't do it in forty one Club, as far as I can remember PC Burrow before the sinkle entrance collapse. If you knew the way around inside that cave and knew it well, yes, you could go in one side and come out the other, although coming out the filopium tubes would be an absolute bitch. Going in that way as an absolute bitch. Forty one Club I heard somebody say something that there was another inference to that. I don't know, and I don't remember, but I do know that pshew Borrow had two ways in and two ways out at one time. Now I think it only has one unless somebody made some discoveries since I was there.

I haven't been able to determine which cave Robert Ashley and their coworkers entered in the nineties p she Burro seems unlikely they would have had to either repel down into a sinkhole or crawl through fillopian tubes, neither matches Ashley's account, but I'm unaware of any other cave in the area through which Fisher could enter one way and exit another. Frank and I are kindred spirits adventurous souls. I suspect you are too past caves. We chat about lost minds and treasures and UFOs. Sorry UAPs. I once hunted for Forest Fenn's treasure. So did Frank. Fenn was an art dealer who hit a million dollar treasure chest somewhere in the Mountain West. He wrote a poem with nine clues to find it. This is what I wanted to do for Missing Season two, spend my days in the wilderness treasure hunting. Instead, someone found the chest, Fenn died, and I ended up in New York at the height of COVID, sifting through nine to eleven photos. Frank tells me intriguing stories, including one about people he knows who found treasure in the Oregon Mountains organ in New Mexico.

They found a partially concealed mine in the Oregon Mountains, and once they unsealed it and went back into the back end of it, there was a stacked up silver bars and Spanish armor in the back.

Frank zoom background is the site where a UFO allegedly crashed near Roswell in nineteen forty seven. Did you ever find any piece of it?

I have got probably thirty or four fragments of metal that have come from out there. Some of it's been analyzed and it comes back as being anomalous.

I tell Frank that these shows missing in Alaska, a nine to eleven in Arizona are Gothic treasure hunts. A plane carrying two congressmen, a doctor who vanished in New York the night before nine to eleven, A familicidal fugitive. What drives Frank, what drives.

Me, It's that innate curiosity that is in almost everybody. What's at the top of the mountain. Well, we climb Everest because we want to go to the top of it. We explore space, We go to the moon. It's in our nature to look for things. It's just there to.

Explore, including caves, which feel like a final refuge from our digital age voids. To explore blank space is to give us some meaning, any meaning, in a day and age where it feels like there isn't a lot of exploration to do. It's something that is a little bit of a pioneer spirit, because even when we're saturated with satellites and cameras and drones and maps and tobo this and Tobo that, and history and photos. There are caves that are undiscovered, and it's got to be absolutely exhilarating to discover something new that you're either the first person or the first person in a very long time to go into.

There are undiscovered caves. There are many things that need to be explored. The exploration days are not over yet.

As our interview winds down, Frank hou's a surprise. He tells me about another cave near the fore Runner spot number five Columbine. I get excited, but.

It's full of water. There's no way that you could even camp out in that thing. We were water up to our armpits and that thing. I kept thinking we were going to drown, but no, and it was ice cold.

Not habitable, a dead end. If you like this show, please download our first two seasons, Missing in Alaska and Missing on nine to eleven. For updates, visit Neon thirty three dot com or follow me on Twitter at John waalzac Jo n Wa l Czak. Thanks for listening. My initial plan is to search the Fisher caves using autonomous aerial drones. Then I have trouble finding the caves. I don't want to damage them. There are legal issues that technology isn't there yet, and regardless, it's expensive, and we are, as I've said before, but a humble podcast. There are so many hurdles.

It's dog dusty, narrow, all kinds of geometry, and you have to figure out where do I go, how do I stay safe?

And do all of this with all.

The human Sebastian Chaer is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. He was part of a team that participated in something called the DARPAT Subterranean Challenge, sponsored by the US Defense Department.

The goal was to explore underground spaces and find objects in those spaces, such as people and so. The ideas that before you send any first responders in, can you see what you have ahead of you in a safe way.

One day in the near future, police might unleash a swarm of drones into a cave to search for a fugitive or a missing splunker. Yet for now, nothing beats in old fashioned boots on the ground approach. So let me reintroduce you to.

Hi, Dave Decker.

I'm the owner and principal geologist at Southwest Geophysical Consulting out of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

And Hi.

My name is ger Jorgensen Olage. I've been working for a Southwest Geophysical since twenty eighteen.

We hired Dave and Garrett to help us search two caves, Apex and Redman. Part of this is just for fun. What an absurd job I have. I tell friends, I'll be off the grid in Arizona in a cave hunting for the bones of a killer. However, it is also a legitimate search for clues. We're hunting for guns, bullets, tobacco, tins, keys. Our plan is not only to search the caves, but also to map them with widar, scan for other caves using a drone and metal detect around the fore Runners spot. So in November twenty twenty three, I fly back to Phoenix, as do the Polls, Paul Deckett, our executive producer, and Paul Kemberlin, our fan turned researcher. The Pauls and I meet Dave and Garrett at the fore Runner spot. I tell Dave he looks like Gary Sinise. He seems mildly offended, which I don't get. The next day he explains he thought I was talking about Gary Busey. This is our plan. Day one explore and map APEX and Redman. Day two metal detect and fly the drone. To start, we get a safety briefing.

Okay, so always want a good quality helmet with the chin strap. Don't wear a construction helmet with rubber band. Not going to work if a rock falls off the ceiling and hit your head because the first rock's going to knock the helmet off, the second rock's going to crush your skull once you're around the cave entrance. The cave entrance tends to be the location where most rock fall actually does occur, so try to be pretty careful when you're at the cave entrance. That's also where most critters hang out, so snakes, coyotes, rentail, cats, raccoons, any number of wild animals use cave entrances and the first inner room of a cave as shelter, so that's where you're most likely going to run into them. So just be aware of that and kind of be expecting it, so when the raccoon comes flying out at you or the owl comes flying out at you, you don't get startled, step backwards and.

Fall off a cliff.

One time in a cave entrance. Garrett came face to face with a bear.

Start to crawl in.

Look up and it's about as close as we are.

Just looking at me there.

I'm like, oh shit.

I start to back out and then I stand up and I hear it bolt, so I think, a fuck, it's coming. It's charging me. So it's the cave entrances backed up against the cliff face. I don't remember climbing into about twelve feet high. I just remember the next thing I was up on top of it, scaled the rock, and then from there I did jog to my group. At that point, I'm like, Okay, it probably can't get to me up that sheer rock.

It might get tight in the cave. Dave says, it feels like mother's giving you a hug.

If you're into that kind of thing. I am like it. I like the feeling of being in a rock chamber. It's surrounded by rock on all sides. But some people don't like that and they start to panic.

Remain calm in case someone does get injured. The first risk is going to be hypothermia. Not moving around forty degree environment becomes very cold, very fast.

It's important to bring.

Extra water, extra food, extra light, redundancy. It's just good to emphasize how isolated the environment is. It may seem obvious, but we're becoming more dependent on these technologies that just don't work underground. No Google maps, no satellite, no GPS, no radio, no cell signal. What you have on your person and what your teammates have is all you got down there, and there's no way to get in contact with the surface.

Treat critters, snakes, spiders, bats respectfully. It's their home. Don't break off decorations, stalactites and stalagmites. Be careful with any sign of human activity.

The footprints that you see in there could be one thousand years old. The charcoal that you see along the path might actually be from the Native Americans that were exploring the cave.

And with that, the descent we climb down in the sink to the entrance into Apex, a small hole in the ground, a jagged cavity in the earth that even light struggles to enter.

There's blood on the rock in here.

O human, No, No, I'm sure it's just a gameing like something killed something and.

Dragged in there.

Oh okay, so scary, but it does go.

So it goes into a small room right over here. It's big enough to turn around in.

Can tell how fresh the blood is?

No, I can't tell it.

To a good start.

Garrett goes first, then Paul Gemberline, then me. I slither forward, constricted dirt below rock above. It's very, very tight. This is the first cave I've ever been in. Had to crawl on our stomachs just to get into the entrance. And then you drop down, and it's very tight. The front room is barely big enough for two people. Paul Gemperline and I crouched down. Garrett is ahead somewhere, scoping a route. To go any further, I have to drop into a cramped hole, crawl forward, double back, drop down again. And this is just the start. Remember police thought this cave was so tight and treacherous they didn't even attempt to enter it. We've already made it further than the SWAT team. I debate moving on. I want to push myself. I want color for the show, but I don't want to navigate the winding, hermetic belly of this rock beast. I feel suffocated only ten feet in. I choose not to proceed. Unlike me, Paul Gemperline isn't phased. Another day, another cave. I give him my recorder.

Yeah, I'm not gonna mess with the settings. And I clicked it and it's got a red light and it's recording. I'm pretty sure.

So, and you need to just shum in your pocket or whatever. Yeah, I'll try to not destroy it.

I exit. Dave enters, Hey, Paul, I'm coming in right by it, all right, Paul Deckt and I stand in the sink.

Dave made off in comment.

He said, unless Fisher was an experienced cave or I doubt he would have gone in here.

Yeah, it's extremely tight.

So yes, he is known to have gone into caves occasionally, but he definitely wasn't a professional. So we are with two people who do this professionally and somebody who's done it extensively recreationally. Paul and I have never been in a cave before. I've now been in a cave about ten feet in. This is extremely tight. The idea that you would crawl in here with like a big packful of supplies and survive for weeks in a labyrinth of tunnels, I mean maybe somewhere else, but the only reason you would crawl into this cave is either to explore it for fun or to die, not to hide out here. It's very clausophobic. It's very tight. I doubt he was ever in it before. It's not one that people really know widely. My nerves are a little up, even from crawling on my stomach through the entrance. The entrance itself, that's the first cave I've ever been in a my life is very tight. Think, even if you want to die by suicide, you're not gonna be like I want to call into this miserably claustrophobic little cave. We're in a beautiful forest, Paw and I are down in the sink, but you look up top and it's very pretty, and we're looking up at the trees and it's still sunny, and it's burning like the entrance of a dark little hole. Here for a while, we hear voices grow weaker than vanish.

Hey, Garrett, can you hear me? Yeah, I'm coming through this triangle part?

Did you do you do? Headfirst? Okay?

This is like a hands and knees crawl.

Uh, I'm talking into the just to myself here.

Sorry.

It's like a long tunnel, kind of like a you know, almost like what a drug gunner would use or something like a drug grounder tunnel.

Oh, this is.

It's cool.

Oh yeah that opened up.

Yeah you do you have a camera on you on my phone.

Yeah.

We had a tunnel that was pretty long, like I don't know fifty how long you think that tunnel was, Garrett, I'm bad at that one hundred and fifty two hundred feet tunnel. And now it has opened up to a room that you could fit a small like a like a business jet. You could fit a business jet in here if you could get it down here. It's not flat, but uh, it's you know, very rocky, and there's some kind of like rock in the center of it. But it is big and open for sure. You just walk this kind of ridge here. Yeah, okay, does look pretty vertical.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, that goes down forty fifty feet or something.

Yeah.

Very Now Dave has to turn around.

Yeah, so I think just as bad as far as I'm gonna go. My shoulders are starting to bug me.

Garrett and Paul press On.

Hey, since it's the two of us, if somebody, well, you know what to do, but if you fall, should I what immediately?

Go to the surface or.

Okay, forty five minutes later, Hello.

Yep, we're coming out here in this a couple of minutes.

Paul and Garrett made it one thousand feet into the cave one hundred feet below the surface. Apex is much bigger than we anticipated, including a chamber maybe.

Thirty wide, twenty high and eighty long, so enough to fit like a like a bus in but not not flat, but a decent size. You know, it's a regularly shape, so it's a little hard to give estimates, but.

Wow, that's huge compared to what you would imagine.

Wow.

And yeah, the registers in this room and it says welcome.

The last time anyone signed the register a scrap of paper coiled into a piece of PVC pipe was February eighth, twenty twenty three, ten months earlier.

By judging at the register people quit their times in and sign up time when the register people would spend anywhere from two to six hours beyond that point. So I'm going to guess that's just the start of the cave. It's pretty sizable.

Neither Garrett nor Paul saw any sign of fissure, or anyone for that matter, save for the register. By now it's late afternoon, the sun sinks, the forest dims. We navigate south through the woods to Redmond Cave. At first we can't find it. We reach a barbed wire fence, a boundary between the Tanto National Forest and the Ford Apache Indian Reservation, and turn around as twilight soaks the forest. Okay, this looks a little bit, a little bit more inviting. I spot something fifty feet from the cave. There's what looks to be a headstone. It's very old, so I mean, it's not modern, it's not recent. We try to read its weathered letters. J Redman, I don't know who Jay Redmond is, but this is his cave and this is his grave. Something says not haunted like entering a little cave near a grave in the woods. Cave near the grave, Okay, John focus, lingering is a luxury we can't afford. It's not the sun that matters. We are, after all, descending into darkness with headlamps and flashlights. But we have call out times. If our loved ones and producers don't hear from us, they're supposed to call the police. So chop chop.

It's five fifteen pm. The sun's going down and I'm standing in the entrance of a cave.

Belt to crawl underground on my knees through a little gate into the cave. Redman is immediately more inviting than Apex, but I still have to slither in.

Yeah, this is very different.

I squeeze through a metal gate.

This is not bad.

Yeah, it was.

Actually it has an opening at the top.

See, so.

Paul, it's up to you.

You don't.

Don't feel obligated. Okay, well it's it's not too bad. I'm okay with it. But it's a little tight. You'll have to get on your stomach. It's not nearly as bad as the other one though, and then it's walking past that, so it's pretty easy.

Over here.

Wow, this is so cool.

Redman opens up into walkable tunnels maybe seven feet tall, four feet wide.

Okay, this is I feel better. This is cozy, all right.

So the reason I'm stopped here, and what I want to show you guys is you had asked me a questions on how caves form, and this particular cave is actually a really good example. So look in the ceiling right here. You see this crack yep, you'll see that it goes all the way down.

Uh huh.

So that was the original crack that this cave formed along, So water was seeping through here, so it actually started to dissolve the rock at this location.

Onward this spider.

There's some crickets, right, Okay.

So there's spiders.

I signed the register again. Garrett is ahead of us. He finds the sump, the flooded passage at the back of the cave. Only problem, it's down a forty foot drop. Garrett, you know that somebody died in the sump.

Yeah, somebody drowned in the sump. Yeah, in two thousand and.

One, four hundred feet in. We pause briefly.

Look like a cozy place to hide out as a fugitive.

Honestly, yes, I like this cave way more than the other one.

Sadly, though, this is the end. For us to proceed, we'd need climbing gear and more experience time to go. On the way out, Dave points.

To that Scott. Okay, so this is probably one of the roosts. Okay, I'm calling out.

We exit into night, a black forest, hike tower cars, drive to Paysin in our west, check into hotels, grab dinner. The next morning we return back to the woods. It's sunny and cool. We've been sent good weather. Praise be. Garrett shows us the light our scan he took of Redman last night. After we exited. He scurried around like a hobbit, crouched over with fancy equipment, building a three D model. It's colorful and fascinating.

Here's that final bend that it does, ninety degrees. And then we stopped up here where it started dropping down into the lower level, pointed it over it so you can see the floor of that, and then from there the sump would be like right here, it takes another ninety degree bend.

Today is all about technology. We want to use a drone mounted thermal camera to scan for hidden caves in cold weather. Cave entrances vent insulated air to the surface, contrasting visually on screens with the land around them. Sadly, though it's too warm, we're limited to an eye's only search. As Garrett pilot's the drone. We're going to the four runner spot with the metal detector and we're going to work our way out and see what we find towards the road and then also towards the cave. A metal detector might seem basic, but I think it's the most promising technology we have. To my knowledge, no one ever metal detected the fore Runner spot. We could find keys, or a pistol, or a pot of gold.

How deep can it detect?

This one? About eighteen inches?

By golly, miss Molly, we got a hit.

It was detecting my steel.

To dude, we find any gold who lays ownership?

Uh for service? It's like, I was like, man, this is all over the place.

We went like six inches and we're getting results.

Not keys. Got it?

Bullet point two right where the driver's side door of the fore Runner would have been.

That's a fired bullet. It's hit something. It's mushroomed out.

Wow, okay, it's very interesting for that to be right where.

Yeah.

He's like, hey, let's put it in the sun so you can see it literally the.

Place his foot would have.

Stepped getting out of the car.

Don't get too excited.

Looks like another bullet. Case it's exploded. Bbbbe another bullet.

Here, here a bullet. They're a bullet everywhere a bullet. This is the forest, after all, this is America, after all. Basically, what I've learned is all the forests land, and it's just littered with bullets everywhere everywhere. Yeah, even areas that look pristine, you know, looking at the surface, there's there's not garbage or trash or litter here.

It's pretty prisceine and clean.

Well, it's not like this is random location, though we do there is.

There is a fire, There is a cave, especially the cave, because there's like.

A million other campsites.

But well, I think the point is more like in your proscene, natural area that looks clean right below the surface is littered with bullets everywhere. We find so many twenty two's.

We're jaded at this point.

Bullets, bullets everywhere, and not a clue. Paul went from like videotape this flags it's a clue to like gang.

Oh it sounds a little better, a little bigger, a little better.

Any idea I'm going to ask you every time, but any idea?

Eight?

Really, So that's the gun that's missing.

First someone was the twenty two, But the gun for sure that we know was missing of his was a thirty eight.

Very it was like, no, got it, what do you got here?

Thirty eight?

So it's been fired because it's not in its casing, or it's been taken out of its casing.

It did not hit anything before it fell to earth.

So this was fired and just fell.

Yep, didn't hit anything any good shape.

I mean yeah, So that one you could get forensics off of this, So that the rifle, the rifling inside a barrel, you could get info off that one.

We find it in the drywash, the seasonal creek bed, not far from the fore runner spot. What are the odds it's Robert Fisher's zero point zero zero one percent. Regardless on the off chances of forensic value, I'm happy to turn it over to law enforcement. Moving on, we find rusty cans, barbed wire, a wrench only fifteen feet from the fore runner spot, and of course bullets.

Which is no longer of interest to me, and dead inside.

And a bolt, which is somehow the more interesting thing these days.

A bolt bolt, an exhilarating bolt. Make it stop, please no more. We were finding so many twenty two casings and what was the other one, Dave seven casings that we actually got tired of finding them with our limited time and resources.

Moved on.

As Dave and the Pauls poke around, I wander out far into the woods alone. This is the real joy, to disconnect and adventure A soundtrack of wind Peace. A few hours later, Dave and Garrett have to leave, but first one final beep under a bush next to where the Forerunner was parked, And now they really have to go. They have to drive back to Albuquerque. Dave gives us a crowbar. This is our final hope. So we clawed the dirt maniacally with the crowbar and our bare hands. Sorry about life, Dig dig dig, find nothing, continue diggig big. A judgment called a splend to stop diggig.

I'm burnout and exhausted. I just guess they have to stop digging.

Next time. I'm missing in Arizona. It's interesting to think that he could have another family. He absolutely could and probably does. To be honest, you can reach us by phone at one eight three three new tips that's one eight three three six three nine eight four seven seven, by email at tips at iHeartMedia dot com, tips at iHeartMedia dot com, online at neon thirty three dot com, or on Twitter at John wallzac j O n w A. L. Czak. Paul Decan is our executive producer. Chris Brown is our supervising producer, Hannah Rose Snyder is our producer. Paul Gemperlin is our researcher, Ben Bowen is a consulting producer, and I'm Your Host and executive producer John Waalzac Special thanks to Wolfgamefink. Additional production support provided by Ben Hackett. Cover art by Pam Peacock, Neon thirty three. Logo designed by Derek Rudy. Our intro song is Utopia by ruby Cube. Please download the first two seasons of our show, Missing in Alaska and Missing on nine to eleven, and if you're so inclined, give us a five star rating. Missing in Arizona is a co production of iHeartRadio and Neon thirty three

Missing in Arizona

In 2001, Robert Fisher killed his family, blew up their suburban home, and vanished in a remote Ariz 
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