From Valley of Shadows: The Devil's Punchbowl

Valley of Shadows is a new Pushkin true crime podcast that digs into a nearly 30-year old secret buried in the California desert. On June 11, 1998, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy Jon Aujay went for a run in California’s Devil’s Punchbowl park...and never came back. Nearly 30 years later, the mystery surrounding his disappearance has only deepened. Some say Aujay is just another missing hiker, claimed by the inhospitable landscape of the Southern California desert. Some say he took his own life out there. But there’s another theory that many of Aujay’s friends and LASD colleagues are convinced is true—that he was the victim of foul play, and that his own department is covering it up. Through exclusive interviews, revealing wiretaps, and buried police files, investigative reporters Hayley Fox and Betsy Shepherd uncover vestiges of the Wild West in a small California town, where outlaw biker gangs crank out methamphetamine and local cops operate on both sides of the law. Find Valley of Shadows https://apple.co/3YVCw3a wherever you get podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:58Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 1:39Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 2:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 2:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  Malcolm here. I want to tell you about a man named John Aje. He was a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy, an ultra marathon runner, a survivalist, and someone who had made a study of how to stay alive in punishing terrain. And one day, he went for a run in a place called The Devil's Punchbowl in the high desert of Los Angeles, and he never came back. Some say Aje is just another missing hiker, claimed by the inhospitable landscape of the Southern California desert. Some say he took his own life out there. But there's another theory that many of Aje's friends and colleagues are convinced is true: that he was the victim of foul play, and his

• 3:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  own department is covering it up. Hosted by journalists Haley Fox and Betsy Shepherd, Valley of Shadows explores Aje's unsolved disappearance and the stench of corruption that's followed the case for nearly 30 years. Through exclusive interviews, revealing wiretaps, and buried police files, Haley and Betsy enter into the criminal underworld of outlaw biker gangs, meth production, and crooked cops in Southern California's Mojave Desert, exploring one of the state's most mysterious missing persons cases. You're about to hear a preview from the show. If you enjoy it, you can find Valley

• 4:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  of Shadows wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  This series includes content that may not be suitable for all listeners. Listener discretion is advised.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  Is this okay?

• 4:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'll turn it down just a little bit, because sometimes you get animated.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  I get pissed off, pissed off old cop.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  This pissed off old cop is Mike Bauer.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Okay, my name is Mike Bauer, retired captain, LA sheriff. I retired in 2002. My last assignment was Major Crimes Bureau, Detective Division, LA Sheriff.

• 4:39Speaker 05

  Bauer spent 33 years climbing the ranks of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. And he looks the part of a retired captain. His white hair and mustache are neatly groomed, and his eyes are permanently fixed in a look that says, "Do not fuck up on my watch." And he's pissed off because of something that happened to one of his guys on his squad back in the summer of 1998. June 11th started off like a normal day in Los Angeles. June gloom and bad traffic.

• 5:10Speaker 04

  I got up early out of Long Beach and headed up the 605 and into East LA, our office in East LA.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  Bauer was doing paperwork when a call came in to the front desk. The receptionist answered.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  Then she hung up, and she comes down to get a cup of coffee across the hall. And I said, "Hey, who was that?" It was John Aje.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  John Aje was a 38-year-old K-9 cop, and he was calling to inquire about an upcoming job assignment.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  I said, "Well, I've been trying to get a hold of him." And she says, "Oh, well, maybe he'll call back." He never called back.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  John Aje was working for the unit Bauer headed up at the time, the Special Enforcement Bureau, or SEB for short.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Which consists of seven or eight SWAT teams. And the SWAT teams were involved in tactical responses to high-risk situations in the field.

• 6:12Speaker 05

  SEB handled things like active shooter situations, hostage negotiations, search and rescue. It was a job that attracted adrenaline junkies like Aje. He was an Army paratrooper and a survivalist. And those military skills, along with his buzz cut and square build, made him a shoo-in for the Sheriff's Department.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  He was in the Army in Special Forces. He was working at the elite unit of the department. I have to call him a loner, but he was an elite loner because the guy was doing 50-mile runs. He was an animal.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  Ajay got his kicks by going on long runs through California's backcountry. He'd go out deep into the wilderness to conquer the only obstacle course that still challenged him. And that's how Ajay was spending his day off. On June 11th, 1998, he woke up, put on his running gear, and drove to one of his favorite parks: The Devil's Punch Bowl. It's a rugged canyon where the Angeles National Forest, the San Gabriel Mountains, and the Mojave Desert all converge.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  Ajay entered the park just before noon, used a payphone to call into the sheriff's department, and then, he took off running. He never listened to any music, just the sounds of nature as he jogged along a maze of switchbacks and up a nearly 10,000-foot mountain.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  By early evening, he looped back towards the parking lot. But as the sun began to set, the shadows of trees and rocks grew, until night engulfed the park.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  That evening, I got a phone call saying that Deputy Ajay is missing.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  That he didn't come back to his vehicle, and that they were gonna start some more extensive searching for him.

• 8:19Speaker 06

  It's an all-out manhunt for John Ajay. Every search and rescue team in LA County has been called in to help. The 38-year-old went hiking Thursday in a rugged section of the Angeles National Forest known as Devil Punch Bowl's Park. It's a beautiful but dangerous area, an area where it may be extremely difficult to find Ajay.

• 8:38Speaker 05

  It's a pretty unique situation. The sheriff's department is called in to look for a missing hiker, who's one of their own. So the search and rescue team sent out to look for Ajay consists of his friends and colleagues.

• 8:51Speaker 07

  We took our teams out and deployed in two-man teams over the edges of the trails into the little nooks and crannies and the gullies that he could have slipped and fallen into.

• 9:02Speaker 05

  But searchers find no trace of Ajay. It was as if he just vanished into thin air. And now, nearly 30 years later, the deputy is still missing.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  I guess I'll open a box.

• 9:22Speaker 05

  All that remains from Ajay's life is packed into five cardboard boxes. The items are wrapped in plastic, and Bauer wears gloves as he combs through them.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  This is John's work jacket. And it's an SEV jacket with his name embroidered on it, and Bosco, his dog.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  Bauer's preserving Ajay's belongings for future developments in the case.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  Okay, so here's his running shoes with his name on the back. Those should have some DNA in them.

• 9:55Speaker 05

  The artifacts also tell us who Ajay was. There's a photo collage full of happy memories. Him and his high school sweetheart, Dub, on their wedding day. A birthday party for their daughter, Chloe, who was just five when he disappeared. And puppy pics of Bosco, Ajay's department-issued canine.

• 10:15Speaker 05

  And next to these snapshots of domestic life, there's a steel ballistics helmet intended to stop rifle rounds, trophies for marksmanship, Army fatigues. You know, tough guy stuff. Ajay moved at a fast clip, trying to balance the competing demands of home and work. But his life came to an abrupt and puzzling end.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  His death certificate says, "Cause of death: unknown. Manner of death: unknown." No body.

• 10:48Speaker 05

  The deputy's body has never been found, which raises a lot of questions for Mike Bauer. And a survivalist getting lost in the woods? Another big question mark. Over time, the mystery of it all has turned into something else: deep and unsettling suspicion about the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  The only law enforcement agency in this country that I know of, and I've looked around, who has a missing deputy sheriff and doesn't seem to care?

• 11:20Speaker 04

  What the hell happened? What's the answer? Who's motivated to find the answer?

• 11:26Speaker 05

  And that's my cue. When Mike Bauer first told me about Aje, I thought, "An unsolved disappearance involving a cop? That's unusual." But when he started talking about the sheriff's department, his department, that's when I locked in. Because you'd expect the LA County Sheriff's Department to turn over every stone to find their guy. So the claim that the LASD may have an interest in not solving the case? Now that's a story. So I called up my friend Haley Fox. Like me, she's an investigative journalist, and she knows a lot about the sheriff's department. Because she's reported on it for many years.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Hey, Betsy. How you doing? I'm good. I'm ready. Yeah? You gonna do this? It's about time. Going on a little road trip adventure? All right, let's do it.

• 12:19Speaker 05

  We've teamed up on stories before, and decided to get the band back together. To find answers about this missing deputy. And to take on the largest sheriff's department in the country.

• 12:31Speaker 08

  There's a code of silence in law enforcement. You break that code of silence, you're done.

• 12:36Speaker 09

  Hey, if they don't fucking kill a cop in Barrio, what are they gonna do to me? It's an obstruction of justice of a very large scale.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  I'm Betsy Shepherd.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  I'm Haley Fox. And this is Valley of Shadows, a show about crime and corruption in California's high desert.

• 13:03Speaker 05

  Episode 1, The Devil's Punchbowl.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  Betsy and I are making the trek from downtown Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley. That's the desert area north of LA where Deputy Aje disappeared. The drive's about 60 miles, but it takes an hour and a half to two hours because of the mountainous terrain.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  So you actually have to take... We gotta go north. Yeah, we're gonna go north. But this is LA, dude. We gotta go south. 110 south, 5 north, 14. And then I think there's a 138 thrown in there, but nothing's a straight shot. You're spoken like a true Angelino.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  I was born and raised in LA County. Go Dodgers! But this part of it feels worlds away. The Antelope Valley, or the AV as it's sometimes called, is a 3,000-square-mile stretch of the Mojave. But this part of the high desert doesn't have the same allure and vibiness as places like Joshua Tree. Instead, the AV is mostly empty space, dotted with defense plants, bedroom communities, and tumbleweed towns.

• 14:15Speaker 05

  So a lot of just like trailers kind of just parked out in the desert.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, power lines and scrub brush. Our story takes place in and around Pear Blossom, California. It has a population of 1,500, and it's where the Devil's Punch Bowl is located. Driving through it, Betsy gets a case of déjà vu.

• 14:41Speaker 05

  I get anxiety coming to places like this because it reminds me of like a town and a girl. And there's just, it's just like I feel the oppressive weight of boredom.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 14:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. I moved to LA several years ago from South Louisiana. I'd never been to Antelope Valley before, but it was immediately familiar to me. Because if you were to replace desert with swamp, this region would look a lot like the small town I'm from. It's rural and kind of rundown. There's more landscape than real estate, lots of pickup trucks, and town life seems like a thing of the past. We got an abandoned motel. What's this? Oh, like an abandoned old restaurant and rec hall. And people getting gas to presumably be on their way.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think the three gas stations in a row tell the story.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  But the closer we get to the Devil's Punch Bowl, where Ajay was last spotted, an otherworldly landscape appears, full of spiky Joshua trees and sandstone columns.

• 15:53Speaker 05

  It's actually really beautiful out here. I did not expect it to look like this.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Are you looking at these huge rocks jutting out of the ground? And like, they're making all those crazy shadows?

• 16:03Speaker 05

  I've never seen anything like them.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  I haven't either.

• 16:07Speaker 05

  I feel like I'm in an old western movie, you know? Like, where he's got this, like, wide epic landscape shots.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Oh, total, endless horizons, totally.

• 16:15Speaker 05

  Endless horizons. I can see why John Ajay likes to come out here.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's pretty, pretty epic.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Okay, we are pulling into the Devil's Punch Bowl County Park parking lot. Here we are.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  We've come here to retrace John Ajay's last-known steps and to meet with Ranger Jack Farley. He was working at the Punch Bowl the day the deputy disappeared.

• 16:50Speaker 05

  Hi. Are you, but are you Jack Farley by chance?

• 16:54Speaker 10

  I am.

• 16:54Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 16:55Speaker 10

  Are you this?

• 16:56Speaker 05

  I've been to you. This is my reporting partner Haley.

• 16:59Speaker 10

  Nice to meet you Haley.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Thank you for meeting us out here.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we're working this.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Jack Farley's retired now, but for 35 years, he was assigned to work the Punch Bowl.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  What a cool job.

• 17:11Speaker 10

  Great for me. Yeah, it was awesome. Good job.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  It was Farley's job to keep an eye on things, to tend the grounds and patrol the area. So he noticed when Ajay became a regular at the Punch Bowl, and he clocked Ajay's regular parking space, the one closest to the trailhead.

• 17:30Speaker 10

  So I can remember seeing him sitting in the back of his truck when he'd get done with a, um, run in the mountains. So when I'd walk out into the parking lot, I'd see him sitting out there and ask him about his run.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Farley remembers that the day Ajay disappeared, his white Ford F-150 truck was parked in that very same spot, surrounded on all sides by wilderness.

• 17:54Speaker 05

  One thing that impresses us so much about this area is that you have a desert landscape on one side, you have mountains and forests on the other, and then in between, it's these really cool rock formations.

• 18:08Speaker 10

  Right, it's all uplifted from earthquake activity.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 18:12Speaker 10

  That's Punchbowl Fault, and that runs parallel with the mountains. And then when you came up to here, you crossed the San Andreas Fault, which is, of course, the big one that runs through California. Several faults in the area. It took all this sand that was laid down flat by streams and tilted it up into vertical relief.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  And it creates a bowl shape.

• 18:33Speaker 10

  You can see a definite bowl shape coming around like this. So that's where it got the Punchbowl name.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  We're not totally sure about the devil part of it, though. According to local lore, early homesteaders saw grinning devil in the rock formations. We didn't see Satan in the rock face, but we did see something else, thanks to a county park employee named Dave Neumer.

• 18:59Speaker 11

  See this, right where the shadow ends? There's that big rock, kind of all by itself. If you look, it's like a forehead is facing us, and there's a nose pointing straight.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  Kind of looks like George Washington.

• 19:10Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's a natural Mount Rushmore.

• 19:13Speaker 05

  Cool.

• 19:14Speaker 11

  So there's all kinds of faces out here, because it's like, oh, our brains are programmed to see patterns.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  Pattern recognition is why we see gods and goddesses in the stars, and the man in the moon. It's also a key part of criminal investigations, a way to turn information into a story. And that's why we've come to the Devil's Punchbowl, to see if we can make sense of what happened on June 11, 1998.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  So we pull out a map we printed from the internet, because we're prepared journalists and elder millennials, and we present it to Ranger Farley.

• 19:51Speaker 05

  Let me show you what it looks like.

• 19:54Speaker 10

  Mine will definitely be better.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  This would definitely get us lost in the wilderness, but it was a good thought.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Farley proves his outdoor prowess by whipping out some real maps of the area to help orient us to our surroundings.

• 20:09Speaker 10

  Here's the Devil's Cave.

• 20:10Speaker 05

  OK.

• 20:12Speaker 10

  And there's Burkhardt Trail, right there. Goes over toward Devil's Chair, so that'd be just to the east. Goes to South Fork.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  One witness reported seeing Aje near the picnic tables at the main trailhead sometime before noon. This witness was a local teacher there on a field trip with a bunch of elementary school kids. Aje stopped to talk to him. He pointed to a jagged mountain in the distance, Mount Baden Powell, and said that's where he was headed.

• 20:44Speaker 10

  So the high mountain behind the telephone pole over there?

• 20:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 10

  That's Baden Powell, and that's where he would go sometimes.

• 20:51Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  How tall is that mountain?

• 20:53Speaker 10

  Jeez, that is one of the higher ones. Let me think, 10,000? 10,000, I mean, in this range.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  And he would run from here to that mountain, all the way over there, and then run up it?

• 21:04Speaker 10

  Yeah, he'd run over there, and then there's switchbacks all the way to the top of that mountain.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Aje was spotted again later in the day, when multiple witnesses say they saw him jogging through a campground just north of the mountain, in the direction of the Punch Bowl parking lot. But when Farley left his post at 5:00 PM, Aje's truck was still parked in the lot, and it stayed parked there as the evening bloomed over the desert. And then, close to midnight, Aje's wife called the sheriff's station to report him missing.

• 22:04Speaker 00

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• 24:53Speaker 05

  As June 11, 1998, nears its end, Debbie Aje becomes increasingly panicked because her husband, Deputy John Aje, told her he'd be home around dark, and by now, he's several hours late. So she dials up one of the sheriff's stations where Aje worked.

• 25:10Speaker 13

  The call comes into the desk, and it's from Debbie, and it says, "Hey, my husband, who's a deputy, he went for a run and he didn't come home."

• 25:21Speaker 05

  Vince Burton was a sergeant in the Antelope Valley. He was also Aje's colleague and friend. So he gets on the phone with Debbie.

• 25:29Speaker 13

  She was just upset. She was crying. She was obviously very concerned. I just, I said, "Okay, Debbie, we're sending people up there, you know, keep you posted."

• 25:42Speaker 05

  Patrol deputies high-tail it to the punchbowl, where they find Aje's truck, but no Aje. They think maybe he got injured, slipped and fell, or had a run in with some wildlife. So Burton dispatches search and rescue to the site and he calls in their coordinator, Dave Sauer, to discuss Ajay's likely route.

• 26:01Speaker 13

  And Dave comes in and we pull up a map of the area and I told him at that time, I said, you know, John's a runner. And he goes, yeah. And I said, no, he's a long distance runner. He's an ultra marathoner. And he's like, what?

• 26:18Speaker 05

  Ultra marathoners are running extremists who power through long distances. In fact, Ajay was scheduled to compete in a 100 mile run the week after he went missing. So responders have a hard time wrapping their heads around the scale of the search.

• 26:36Speaker 14

  I gave them the best information I could give them, you know, don't start your grid pattern so small.

• 26:42Speaker 05

  This is Randy Megardley. He was a patrol deputy for the sheriff's department and one of Ajay's running buddies. He reiterates to the command post that Ajay was a beast.

• 26:54Speaker 14

  You're running goat trails is basically what I categorize them as.

• 26:59Speaker 05

  What do you mean by that? Goat trails?

• 27:00Speaker 14

  Well, they're just makeshift trails. Sometimes they'll be covered with snow. Sometimes they'll be covered with mud, crossing rivers. I mean, it's crazy what kind of stuff that we were doing. There was one that we did, and it was hand over foot, trying to get up this mountain.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  Wow. And so part of the activity was figuring out how to get to the end of it?

• 27:26Speaker 14

  Yeah, in one piece.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  Hearing Megardley talk about ultra marathoners, it sounds like they have no off switch. So maybe Ajay just overdid it.

• 27:38Speaker 14

  Your brain does some wonky stuff when you're dehydrated. And they thought maybe he got on a trail and he was doing the forest dump, just kept running.

• 27:52Speaker 05

  That's a theory, that Ajay was doing the Forrest Gump and just kept running, and got himself into a tailspin of dehydration. Responders take note and fan out across the search grid.

• 28:03Speaker 10

  I was nice to him. I said, you know, I know the area pretty well. If you guys want help.

• 28:08Speaker 05

  Ranger Jack Farley again.

• 28:10Speaker 10

  And the guy goes, no, we're search and rescue. We pretty much know what we're doing, you know. So I go, OK, OK.

• 28:18Speaker 05

  But it doesn't take long for the pros to realize they're in over their heads.

• 28:23Speaker 10

  So then they're going, hey, are you the guy that knows the area? You know, maybe you could give us a little help.

• 28:29Speaker 05

  So Farley leads a few groups of deputies and bloodhounds down the local trails.

• 28:33Speaker 10

  At one time, thought they caught a scent, and it went up on the trail going toward the Burkhart Trail. And we had talked about someone saying they heard a gunshot. You can't see the house from here, but it's like a half mile below the trail up there where the people lived that said they heard that.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  The dogs pick up a scent, possibly Ajay's, on a trail that's near a local resident. That guy reported to searchers that he heard a single gunshot at sunset the day Ajay vanished. It's a detail the sheriff's department registers as a potential clue.

• 29:08Speaker 10

  So I took a group of deputies over there, and we went down that really rugged, wooded canyon. They didn't find anything.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  But searchers do spot some footprints on the mountain where Ajay told people he was going. So Ajay's captain, Mike Bauer, takes to the skies to see where they lead.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  And that was the first time I ever stepped out of a huge helicopter on the side of a mountain with one skid touching. And then that helicopter flew off while we examined the openings of Big Horn Mine to see whether or not it had been broken into.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  Big Horn is a mine on top of the mountain, left over from the Gold Rush days. Its entrance has been welded shut to keep out hikers. And when the helicopter lands 90s action movie style, Bauer's crew finds no signs of a break-in.

• 30:03Speaker 05

  Ajay's reported missing late Thursday night. By the end of the day Sunday, the sheriff's department kicks things into high gear. They call in the US Army and Air Force, along with the LASD heavy hitters. It's a specialized squad called Emergency Services Detail, or ESD.

• 30:23Speaker 15

  They do search and rescue, underwater search and recovery, and they support the Special Weapons Team with medical skills.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  Dave Rathbun was one of the ESD members sent out to search for Ajay.

• 30:37Speaker 15

  And the adrenaline that you get from ESD is different from any other adrenaline.

• 30:43Speaker 05

  ESD deputies are equipped to handle all types of emergency scenarios. But it wasn't just the rocky ledges and wild animals they had to worry about here. The area was full of all kinds of criminal activity.

• 30:59Speaker 15

  One of the things they told our search teams on day one was, "John may have stumbled into a meth lab by accident." So that was told to us when we were out searching. And the reason they told us is they recommended we take weapons.

• 31:19Speaker 05

  Rathbun and his team of searchers come to the Punchbowl armed and ready for action. Because maybe Ajay isn't lost, or injured, or running for the hills. Maybe he's the victim of foul play. The command post doesn't expand on why they thought Ajay may have been taken out by meth-related violence. But to Rathbun, this theory doesn't sound too far-fetched. Because the Antelope Valley is isolated, outlawish, and on account of its size, difficult to police.

• 31:52Speaker 15

  There are a lot of people who just don't want to be around other human beings out there, which makes them sometimes dangerous. There's people cooking meth. Uh, it was a little bit like the Old West in a way. I mean, this is a very unusual, strange place.

• 32:13Speaker 05

  And remember that abandoned mine searchers scoped out? Well, it turns out they're everywhere, and they're a prime location for body dumping.

• 32:23Speaker 15

  One of the things ESD did was recover dead bodies from mines.

• 32:29Speaker 05

  And it wasn't just the mines. Corpses turn up all over these parts.

• 32:34Speaker 15

  You know, if all the dead bodies that were up there from being deliberately disposed of stood up at once, they'd be shoulder to shoulder.

• 32:43Speaker 05

  It's a chilling image of the area's darker side. Ajay would jog from the Devil's Punchbowl into the Angeles National Forest, which has been called the most dangerous national forest in America. Around the time of Ajay's disappearance, it's estimated that two to three dozen corpses turned up in the forest every year. And those were just the ones that were found. So Rathbun understands the danger he faces, but pushes on in search of footprints.

• 33:11Speaker 15

  You have to look at the ground and look at bushes that have been pushed. And we walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked. And we generally don't give up until it's just ridiculous.

• 33:24Speaker 05

  The search is taxing for Rathbun, physically and emotionally. Because he and Ajay were friends, and back in the early 90s, they were even partners.

• 33:34Speaker 15

  If it was me that needed cover, he'd be there. I don't even think about it. Someone you could definitely depend on.

• 33:43Speaker 05

  Rathbun and Ajay spent a lot of time driving around together. But they didn't sit around riffing like partners in a buddy-cop movie.

• 33:51Speaker 15

  He was laconic, didn't have a lot to say unless you worked on him. And he was always kind of severe, serious.

• 34:03Speaker 05

  Ajay was hardly two-dimensional, though. He used his deadpan personality to mess with people.

• 34:10Speaker 15

  He had this secret sense of humor. But it was really hard to tell which card he was playing. The funny card or the "I'm John and I'm dead serious" card.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  One time Rathbun and Ajay had to chase down a suspect. Rathbun was driving and he ends up reversing down a one-way street. They got the guy, but Ajay looked pissed.

• 34:35Speaker 15

  And he added that, "Dave, I need to talk to you."

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Rathbun's gotten pretty good at impersonating John Ajay's baritone voice. He says he sounded a lot like Lurch from The Addams Family.

• 34:48Speaker 15

  What you just did was a violation of California state law. And if you do something like that again, I'll have to write you up. John, we were chasing a suspect and we are law enforcement officers. And so we get exemptions during those things. That may be true, but it was illegal. Is this John being funny? You would not know, and he will never let you know.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  Ajay was hard to read. In fact, there's even confusion over the pronunciation of his last name. His family says OJ, but to his friends...

• 35:30Speaker 15

  It was Ajay, and he never corrected us, and he's not very bashful.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  We'll never know why he didn't tell people how to pronounce his name, but it seems fitting for someone who remains a mystery to so many. Ajay was an enigma to just about everyone around him. So when he disappeared, he became an easy target for conspiracy theories. Stories began to circulate that Ajay's alive and well, living in Alaska. Others say Mexico. Some say he was recruited by a mercenary group or joined the CIA. These theories were fueled by weird comments Ajay had made to friends like Dave Rathbun.

• 36:10Speaker 15

  Dave? Yes? You guys think you can find people with your searches and you think you're pretty good at it, right? I could go in the mountains and you'd never find me. And I said, there are people who want to be found that we can't find. So I'm not real impressed with your, with your declaration there. If you don't want to be found, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to find you. So I agree.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  And of course, that conversation takes on extra meaning as searchers keep coming up empty-handed.

• 36:47Speaker 15

  I participated in that search until my feet were bloody, as did several of my peers. But day six, they said, well, shut it down. What do you mean shut it down? Who said that? Who gave that order? Who shut this thing down? What are you talking about? Day six?

• 37:07Speaker 03

  The sheriff's department folds the search after six days and gives a statement to the press. Sergeant Sauer, one of the deputies overseeing the operation, says, quote, "A good analogy would be someone coming up to you and giving you two to three pieces of a 500-piece puzzle and asking you to guess what the picture is. Throw into that a few pieces of an entirely different puzzle, and that is what we work with. We might never get it right." End quote.

• 37:35Speaker 15

  You want to trust the department that they're doing the right thing, but no one asked us if we should shut it down. If I'm the search and rescue guy, and my partners are search and rescue guys, and the helicopter pilots have been on hundreds of searches, why are we asking them what they think and their input?

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Rathbun says searches for missing hikers typically last seven to 14 days, depending on the viability of the person. Ajay was not your typical hiker, and given his personal and professional connection to the sheriff's department, it seems like the LASD would go the extra mile to find him.

• 38:14Speaker 15

  So it's six days. You cancel a search for somebody who can run 50 or 100 miles in the wilderness, really knows the wilderness as good or better than anybody in ESD. They said, shut it down. Why are you shutting it down?

• 38:30Speaker 03

  The sheriff's department tells the public that Ajay disappeared without a trace, and that they're ending the search because they're just spinning their wheels. But behind the scenes, they're telling a very different story.

• 38:43Speaker 15

  Well, they say that they decided he committed suicide.

• 39:10Speaker 00

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• 42:07Speaker 05

  Internal L A S D reports claim that Ajay was distraught over his failing marriage and took his own life in the punchbowl. That gunshot the area resident heard, that could have been the sound of Ajay just putting an end to it all. But the sheriff's department makes that determination without a body. They don't find any remains, blood, bullets, or a suicide note. Nothing. The only thing they think they may have found of Ajay's was an energy bar wrapper left on one of the trails. From what we can tell, there's not a lot pointing to suicide. So we reach out to Ajay's colleagues and friends to get their thoughts.

• 42:46Speaker 16

  He was obviously down. He was obviously upset, but was it enough to commit suicide?

• 42:53Speaker 05

  Sergeant Vince Burton is still on the fence. On the one hand, Ajay did appear torn up over his marital problems. On the other, he seemed to be coping.

• 43:03Speaker 16

  Would you be telling me about your ultra marathon if you were just gonna end it all? Would you even be planning to go run at the Punch Bowl, which is an ugly area anyway?

• 43:14Speaker 05

  For fact-checking purposes, we want to make clear, the Punch Bowl is not ugly. But go on, Vince.

• 43:20Speaker 16

  None of that made sense to me with the suicide.

• 43:24Speaker 05

  For Ajay's running buddy, Randy Megerdly, there's no question.

• 43:28Speaker 14

  Plain and simple. I think he killed himself. That's the only way I can explain it.

• 43:34Speaker 05

  Because he says Ajay was acting strangely, even more strangely than usual, in the weeks before his disappearance.

• 43:40Speaker 14

  He says, you know, "There's a bunch of caves and stuff out here. You can pretty much disappear," I think was the word that he used, "and nobody would ever find you."

• 43:53Speaker 05

  Ajay said similar things to Dave Rathbun, but he didn't put a lot of stock into any of the statements, because he says Ajay is just a weird guy.

• 44:02Speaker 15

  Our unit was next to a big giant duck pond, and one of the ways we used to make jokes about each other is we'd kind of like, where do you fit in the duck pond? John was, and I don't want maligning, but he was one of the oddest ducks in the pond, which is good, right? You need them. You don't want everybody swimming the same.

• 44:24Speaker 05

  Initially, Rathbun was open to the possibility of suicide, but he's become increasingly skeptical over time, because if Ajay had killed himself, he thinks his body or some trace of him would have turned up by now. So Ajay's colleagues are divided on what happened to him. It's kind of like those faces seen in the rocks at the Devil's Punch Bowl. Same details, but interpreted in different ways. And that makes sense, because we feel conflicted about it, too. Ajay did say some eerie things about disappearing, but this disappearing act would be pretty hard to pull off. I mean, how could he have buried himself and stay buried for almost three decades?

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Rathbun asked the sheriff's department to explain that one.

• 45:12Speaker 15

  They said, "Well, we think he might have sat on the edge of one of those mines and blown himself into the mine."

• 45:20Speaker 15

  "Okay, we are really stretching now for an explanation as to why we can't find him."

• 45:29Speaker 04

  I didn't accept it. Just common sense told me, "Hmm, you probably ought to see whether there's any evidence of self-infliction."

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Pissed-off old cop Mike Bauer is evangelical in his belief that the suicide theory is bullshit. Because, he says, "The sheriff's department didn't arrive at this conclusion. They led with it. And that poisoned the investigation from the start." Bauer says that as early as day three, an LASD official was pushing the suicide narrative during search team briefings. To Bauer, this was equivalent to telling searchers to let up.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  I took that person outside and I said, "What in the hell did you say that for? How could you possibly know that at this point? How could you possibly discourage them to search for somebody that worked for you?"

• 46:25Speaker 03

  The sheriff's department was even sharing this theory with the press.

• 46:29Speaker 07

  We haven't ruled out the possibility of suicide, but we don't have any evidence to support that that's what he came here to do.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  Bauer thinks it's irresponsible to promote the suicide theory without a high degree of certainty. So he prods the department to keep investigating.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  I kept contacting homicide and saying, "Something's wrong. I'm telling you. There's a problem."

• 46:52Speaker 03

  But he says the department ignored the case to such an extent that he began to question their motives.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  Nobody was in charge of it. And nobody wanted any of it once they saw how stinky it was getting.

• 47:09Speaker 05

  Randy Megerdly represents the other end of the spectrum. So we ask him what he thinks about the possibility of foul play.

• 47:17Speaker 14

  I refer to myself as a mushroom. They would just feed me a little bit of poop every once in a while. I wasn't in the know on that whole thing.

• 47:25Speaker 05

  I've never heard the mushroom poop metaphor before.

• 47:27Speaker 14

  Yeah, you know, you feed you a little bit of poop and you grow a little bit.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  At first, the mushroom poop analogy went way over my head. It sounded like a southern expression my mom just forgot to teach me. But then it clicked while I was watching The Departed, the Martin Scorsese movie about corruption within the Boston Police Department.

• 47:49Speaker 17

  My theory on feds is they're like mushrooms. Feed them shit and keep them in the dark.

• 47:54Speaker 05

  I think what Megerdly is saying is that he doesn't ask a lot of questions because he prefers to be kept in the dark about things that don't concern him. And who can really blame him? I mean, law enforcement agencies are not exactly known for their culture of transparency.

• 48:11Speaker 15

  That file, you'd have to get special, special permission to touch that file.

• 48:17Speaker 05

  Dave Rathman, Aje's former partner, says the sheriff's department is unusually protective of the Aje case file.

• 48:25Speaker 15

  And they don't even like to hear you talking about it.

• 48:29Speaker 15

  Well, to me, that's what you would call a red flag.

• 48:36Speaker 05

  So Rathman asked his buddy, a retired detective working cold cases for the sheriff's department, to review the Aje case.

• 48:44Speaker 15

  Could you maybe grab that case file? And he went, oh, no. I said, what do you mean, oh, no? Why wouldn't you want to take a look at it? He said, no, that's a hot potato. No one's allowed to touch that. If I start poking around that case, they'd let me go?

• 49:02Speaker 15

  I said, well, that's interesting. Why? It's a suicide. He said, I don't know. I just know that that case can't be touched.

• 49:13Speaker 05

  Those red flags are another reason Rathman and others just can't get behind the party line.

• 49:19Speaker 15

  As my father would say, God bless him, there's some rotten in the woodpile.

• 49:25Speaker 15

  And it stinks, and I can smell it.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  And that brings us back to the poop mushroom. It might thrive in darkness, but to me, that's not an ideal environment for policing. I mean, the whole concept behind law enforcement is that watchful eyes deter crime, right? But who is watching the police? There's very little oversight of law enforcement agencies, and it's hard to hold them accountable since they control the collection and release of information about internal problems.

• 49:57Speaker 04

  The philosophy of the sheriff's department is to hide it. And the philosophy of government, in a lot of respects, is that way now with the terrible way they handle public records requests and stuff. They just basically stonewall you. They give you the middle finger if you're asking for something that the public has a right to know.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  Tell me about it, Bauer. We tried with those public records requests and got the proverbial middle finger. Without access to the information, it's hard for us to know how the sheriff's department handled the Augej case. And we'd remain in the dark if it weren't for Mike Bauer and other deputies coming forward.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  Bauer retired in 2002 and has spent the better part of his retirement investigating Augej's disappearance. And he's uncovered what looks like some pretty damning information about the sheriff's department.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  They lied to me. They lied to me as a fucking captain of the fucking sheriff's department with 33 years on the job. They fucking lied to me. While I'm in charge of sheriff's intelligence, they're fucking lying to me about what they're doing at homicide to shut this thing up. They don't want me involved in it. Imagine. That's how offensive that is.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  We know that law enforcement has its problems, but they're not usually laid out for us by dyed-in-the-wool cops. People who know this world from the inside and can show us where the bodies are buried, figuratively speaking. We tell Bauer we want to do a deep dive on the Augej case, beginning with his investigation.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  You guys have stumbled into a cluster of shit.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  But he's not as encouraging as we expect him to be. And for good reason.

• 51:45Speaker 05

  Do you have any advice for us while looking into this disappearance?

• 51:51Speaker 04

  I wouldn't do it alone. In the event, somebody did decide that you were getting too close to something, you will not be found killed. You will simply disappear.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  This season on Valley of Shadows.

• 52:12Speaker 04

  Early on, I let the suicide theory sit at 50/50. As I've learned more and more, I'm at about 90/95 murder, 5% to 10% suicide.

• 52:26Speaker 18

  A rumor around the drug scene was that a deputy stumbled onto something he shouldn't have, and he was taken care of.

• 52:36Speaker 09

  I'm hearing shit on the street, man, that Ajay, he didn't commit suicide, he was murdered. I'm hearing it from more than one person.

• 52:42Speaker 19

  Then I started hearing some rumors that there was a gun.

• 52:47Speaker 13

  And yet, there's no indication that gun was ever booked into evidence.

• 52:52Speaker 08

  If he ratted, or they thought you were gonna rat, it wasn't, "Hey, don't do that ever again, you're done." They got rid of you. So that's where the murders came in.

• 53:02Speaker 20

  He was describing with his hands and his arms and his whole body where this cop was buried at.

• 53:08Speaker 04

  In other words, it's not safe, not because of criminals, it's not safe because of law enforcement, and there's nothing worse than that.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Hey dude, we're getting like, pretty far out in the middle of nowhere, and no one knows we're out here.

• 53:20Speaker 09

  You gotta be careful where you go and who you talk to.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  If you have any information or tips related to the disappearance of John Ajay, please call 213-262-9889, or email [email protected]. Valley of Shadows is reported, written, and produced by us, Haley Fox and Betsy Shepherd. Our editor is Diane Hodson. Our executive producers are Jacob Smith and Alexandra Garrington. Original music by Jake Gorski, Ray Lynch, Mike Jurcic, and Hayden Gardner.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Sound design by Jake Gorstey. Fact checking by Annika Robbins. Additional production support by Sonya Gurwani. And our show art was designed by Sean Carney and Betsy Shepherd. Special thanks to Nick White for show art photography. Additional thanks to Jeremy Tao. Valley of Shadows is a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. From Type Two Fun, we're Haley and Betsy. See you next week.

• 55:19Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 56:03Malcolm Gladwell?

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