Transcript of Episode 3: Tweaker Talk

Before forensic psychology became a podcast trend, LA Not So Confidential was already setting the standard.

The podcast is hosted by Dr. Shiloh and Dr. Scott, real forensic psychologists who bring empathy, science, and first-hand experience to every case.

From cults and criminal profiling to the in-cell movement and moral panics, the docs cover it all with nuance, authority, and real research.

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This was assigned to Homicide Bureau Missing Persons Unit. They were the ones who had to make the decision that this was a suicide.

They said, Well, we think he might have sat on the edge of one of those mines and blown himself into the mind. I'm thinking, Okay, we are really stretching now for an explanation as to why we can't find him.

I would hope the Sheriff's Department would investigate this. I just still want John to be found or his remains.

They told our search teams on day one, John may have stumbled into a meth lab by accident. What happened to that idea? Let's see, Batu, Biker's Coffee, Black Beauty, Blade, Chalk. I made this list from the Internet of all the names that were used to describe crystal meth.

Chicken feed, crank, Christie, crystal- The list is lengthy and handwritten by Mike Bauer. Go fast.

Methly's quick. Methly's quick. That's cute. Tiktok fan.

There's a reason this almost 80-year-old retired cop is trying to expand his drug vocabulary.

I began to understand that the world of trying to find John Ajay involved crystal math. That's why I made this list.

Because Bauer keeps hearing whispers of foul play.

The ruler around the drug scene was that a deputy stumbled onto something he shouldn't have.

The first thing I had heard was he was running in the punch bowl and came upon a meth lab. A meth lab. A meth lab.

Then it was said he tried to be a and that's when he was taken care of.

When Deputy John Ajay disappeared in 1998, there was a meth epidemic ravaging the Antelope Valley. It was a vortex of addiction and crime.

I think meth has destroyed this community.

I think they need to take a bomb and blow it all up.

It's that bad.

Meth is a powerful stimulant that hijacks the central nervous system and causes people to stay awake for days on end.

After the euphoria, experts say, long-time users suffer mind-twisting crashes, jagged nerves, desperation to sleep, a spooky paranoia, and too often unpredictable rage, often homicidal.

The drug can trick the brain into thinking there's a boogie man around every corner.

I've had a patient come back to me after two years of not using it, saying that he was sorry that he hit his wife so hard, but he still convinced that she was having an affair with the extraterrestrials.

Maybe that's how the MethLab rumors got started, as a drug-fueled conspiracy theory. There were a lot of conspiracy theories following Ajay's disappearance, that he was kidnapped by the CIA, and another that he'd started a new life in Alaska. Well, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department dismisses the leads as rumors spread by a hopped-up game of telephone. But we discover a small detail buried in the missing person's report that suggests the rumors have more weight than that. Following Ajay's disappearance, multiple informants came forward with information about a deputy who was murdered while jogging in the devil's punch bowl. Missing person's detectives said these informants can't be trusted, and they opted not to follow up on the leads because the meth lab story was just smoke in mirrors. But where there's smoke, there is sometimes fire. Bauer tells us about a homicide detective who followed the rumors to their source to find out if there was anything to them. And he says, We need to hear this story straight from the horse's mouth. You should go have a drink with Larry Brandenburg at his bar and ask him, What do you think, Larry? I have a few questions for you and see what he says.

And that's exactly what we do. We don't often get to do interviews in people's home bars. Such a cool space. And we ask him, What do you think, Larry, about those tips that came in from local drug informants?

You're not going to get a boy scout or a girl scout that's going to have information about the murder of a deputy sheriff. How would they know? So you got to talk to these people. And then it's your job to figure out who's telling the truth, who's lying.

So we try to figure out who is telling the truth, and who's lying. I'm Betsey Shepard.

I'm Haley Fox, and this is Valley of Shadows. Episode 3, weaker talk.

Okay, let's see what you got here, Mr. Brandenburg. Do you go by Detective? No, Larry's fine. Okay. Can you come show us some of your Sheriff's memorabilia?

Betsey and I are at the home of retired LASD Homicide Detective Larry Brandenburg, poking around his basement bar that doubles as a type of trophy room.

That was a bag one of my old partners got me.

What does it say on there?

I think it says, The best partner a cop could have, or something like that.

Brandenburg's humility stands in contrast to his career highlights displayed on the wall. There's his Marine Corps uniform, a photo from an appearance on the TV show, 48 Hours, an LASD Service Award. And nearby, there's a jukebox, a big screen TV, and a pool table with a giant logo of his Sheriff's badge on it.

Do you have a name for this room?

We just call it the Brandenburg Family Game Room. I try to get the kids to go over for games, and we're all Dodger fans, so we watch the Dodgers.

Brandenburg is a grandpa now, goes by Papa, and he has a shock gray hair to prove it. But he still looks a bit like a detective with his slicked back hair and steely gaze. For more than 20 years, Brandenburg was a Bulldog. That was the nickname given to investigators at the LASD Homicide Bureau.

It was a LA Times reporter said, Yeah, the sheriffs on the side of the deck are like Bulldogs. Once they put their teeth into something, they never let go. Name stuck.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department oversees crime in the unincorporated areas of LA County. It's a massive space, 4,000 square miles, which is about the size of Connecticut. Covering that much ground requires a huge workforce. With its 18,000 employees, LASD is the largest Sheriff's Department in the country. Homicide cops like Larry Brandenburg work out of a bureau located near downtown LA. So when they catch a case, they hoof it to whatever part of the county the homicide occurred in. The Antelope Valley, or AV, as it's sometimes called, was a particularly distant outpost. That's because it's cut off from the city by a mountain range. And Brandenburg thinks that's part of why the Ajay case was handled so poorly.

I think some of it was lack of interest, motivation. I can't explain it any other way.

Because the AV was quite the haul from the Homicide Bureau. Hour and a half drive time.

Nobody Nobody from down in LA wanted to come up here and work because they didn't live up here. You see why? The drive sucks.

La deputies didn't want to move to the desert either, so the Department had to recruit locals to run their AV stations. And that created a schism within the LASD.

They felt they could do their own thing, and they didn't need anybody from down in LA telling them what to do. Hey, this is our valley. We know everybody up here. We grew up here. We live here. We'll handle this shit. But at the same time, the apartment never dedicated the resources to this valley that they should have.

Brandenburg has two sons who are now LASD deputies in the Antelope Valley, and it's become a running joke in the family.

I'd say, You freaking deputies work up here. You guys are stupid. He'd laugh. You guys from town below are a bunch of assholes. You come up here and think you know everything. But that was for a long time the feeling.

Brandenburg heard that Ajay went missing, but he didn't know him or the specifics of what happened. It wasn't a murder investigation. It was a missing person's case, so it was outside his domain. But then a colleague from the Antelope Valley reaches out with an especially persuasive tip.

He said, Hey, Larry, I'm hearing shit on the street, man. Ajay, he didn't commit suicide. He was murdered. He came across a meth lab, and he tried to be a hero. He goes, I'm hearing from more than one person.

There are other details about the Ajay case that don't sit right with him. How many years were you a homicide detective?

A little over 20.

In that 20 years, did you ever have a case like this where...

Nobody? A suicide? Never. Think about it. How would you do that?

So Brandenburg asks to review the Ajay case file.

I went to the captain, Frank Merriman, who was the lieutenant in charge of missing persons who handled the initial investigation. And I said, Hey, Frank, I'm getting some information about Ajay that we need to follow up on. He goes, What are you doing? He goes, That's a suicide. You're wasting your time.

But Brandenburg continues to press his captain. He's a bulldog, after all, and his persistence pays off. In early 2000, he gets permission to look through the missing person's report and finds out new details about the deputy's disappearance from a year and a half earlier. He discovers that the department had received numerous tips that Ajay was murdered, and that some of those tips came in just three days after the deputy went missing, while searchers were still out looking for him and potential evidence was still fresh. If there is some suggestion of possible foul play, multiple people are claiming there's a murder, what typically would happen?

It would be assigned to a murder team, people that are on call for new murders.

But that didn't happen. Because the missing person's team dismissed the tips. What would you say is the main difference between a missing person's investigator and a murder team or Homicide Detective?

Missing persons, they handle a large volume. There are so many people reported missing LA County every day, let alone every month, every year. So they're making phone calls, trying to find relatives. So they're busy doing that stuff. But a lot of it is handled at their desk on the phone. Well, you don't have a murder like that. At least I hope not.

Brandenburg thinks these detectives dropped the ball big time, and he's not the only one. Internal documents from the LASD show that one lieutenant discussed the Ajay case in terms of Murphy's law, which basically means anything that can go wrong will go wrong. We reached out to the missing person's team, but they declined to talk to us. So all we know about their decision to not refer the case to a homicide detective is the one sentence explanation in their report. They read, Due to inconsistencies in their statements, it was determined they were not credible and other leads were pursued.

Well, shouldn't you maybe look into that a little more? I mean, that's just my thought, and that's why I started looking at it.

Randenberg does what he thinks should have happened back in 1998. He treats Ajay's disappearance like a homicide case, and he starts by tracking down two of the names in the missing person's report so he can re-interview the informants. To protect their identities, we're going to call them Sue and Mike. At the time, Sue is in custody on burglary charges, so Brandenburg and his partner head to the jail where she's being held. Sue tells them that after Ajay disappeared, her boyfriend, Mike, went to score drugs from a guy living near the Devil's Punch Bowl, a local dealer named Tom Hinkle. What was he known for in the area?

Meth.

Doing it or?

He did it. He sold it. He cooked it. He did all of it.

Everyone in the area knew Hinkle. He was the Kevin Bacon and his community's 6 degrees of separation. He was only in his 50s when Ajay disappeared, but Hinkle was already known around town, his old man. He had wild gray facial hair and was described by a local Sheriff's deputy as Bearded Metha Claus. He lived in a large A-Frame house up on a hill 6 miles from the Punch Bowl, and his property was a vive of drug activity. Sue the Informant tells Brandenburg that when Mike arrived at Hinkle's home, he led him into a back room where Hinkle kept his knife collection.

Hinkle was showing his knife collection to my obian.

Kind of like showing off a little bit. This is an actual recording of Sue's conversation with Brandenburg. All of a sudden, he brings up the cop's death.

Hinkle does? Yes.

Tom Hinkle brings it up to my boyfriend, tells him basically what happened to the man, that R.

J.

Was on a jog, ran across something he shouldn't have ran across and he had to be taken care of, meaning he was killed. Sue goes on to say that according to Hinkle, Ajay stumbled on a mess lab and tried to be a hero. With slight variations, the story is repeated by Mike in a separate interview, and then in second-hand accounts from a handful of other informants that Hinkle and/or one of his associates had Ajay taken care of. According to Sue and Mike, Hinkle pantomimed what he meant by taken care of.

He made the motion like this. He made a hand gesture like a gun with his finger out and then opened his hand like he was dropped.

The moment plays like a movie scene in my head. Metha Claus is surrounded by a bloom of meth smoke and sharp, shiny knives. He mentions the missing deputy with a knowing look. He draws his hand into a finger gun and then releases his fingers, splaying them out. And just like that, John Ajay disappears down a mine shaft or some other hole out in the desert, where people go to bury their secrets.

Before forensic psychology became a podcast trend, LA Not So Confidential was already setting the standard.

The podcast is hosted by Dr. Shiloh and Dr. Scott, real forensic psychologists who bring empathy, science, and first-hand experience to every case.

From cults and criminal profiling to the in-cell movement and moral panics, the docs cover it all with nuance, authority, and real research.

Hear the experts behind the mic, because in every crime, there's a mind that made it possible. Subscribe to la not so confidential wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back at the Devil's Punch Bowl, and this time we've come for a hike. Oh, I love these. This is where you write your name and the time that you leave so that in case you go missing, people know.

We should do that. We should do that.

So date- Betsey and I write our names down on a sign-in sheet at the main trailhead and enter to the park. Um.

Why? Why are we doing this again?

I honestly, I just really had to get eyes on the punch bowl. I'm having a really hard time seeing how someone could set up a meth lab in LA County Park.

It just feels implausible to you.

Yeah, I mean, it just seems like you would be asking to get caught.

Not to mention like, meth labs are not- Discreet. Discreet, yeah. All right, let's, let's check it out.

Let's check it out. As we start to descend down into the center of the punch bowl, Betsey loses her footing on the steep, dusty trail.

Okay, that's not working.

Do you want me to go in front of you or hold your backpack? So you can break my fall? Yeah.

Holding my backpack like I'm a child's method is working pretty good.

Yeah, here. I got you. But we keep moving, snaking through the switchbacks in a slow zigzag motion.

How hot do you think it is right now? Is it 100? Did it break 100 today?

I don't know. It's definitely close. It's pushing 100 for sure. Being out here, we realize this public park is much less public than most.

It feels like we are on another planet, and we are the last living human beings. So I mean, in terms of discreetness, it's open, but it's also like out in the middle of nowhere. It's on the fringes.

We don't see any other hikers or rangers, and I find myself playing out the lab scenario in my head. We know that Jonathan OJ saw a class of kids on a field trip here, but then we also know that he went totally off trail and off roading. To me, that would be the place where he could stumble upon the meth lab because there is all this land that is not accessible by trail. As we wind our way down the gorge with our phones on SOS mode, the idea of shady things happening out here seems like a real possibility. Hey, dude, I think I feel like maybe we should hit it. We're getting pretty far out in the middle of nowhere here, and no one knows we're out here.

I was thinking It's the same thing. I didn't want to say anything. I didn't want to be the weaning of the group.

Let's go. Let's go.

Let's not beat around the bush. Let's get out of the bush. The second Haley gives me an out, I pretty much take off running. Because I'm always thinking of worst-case scenarios: falling off a cliff, getting attacked by a bear. Now I have to worry about stumbling on a meth lab. I don't have to, but I will, because that's just who I am, a firm believer in Murphy's law. That's why I didn't have any trouble buying into the whole meth lab scenario. What I want to know is how this area became a meth hotspot in the first place. We don't have stats specific to the Antelope Valley, but here in the early 2000s, a large scale drug syndicate was busted. Nearly 300 people were arrested, most classified as career criminals. I grew up in a rural area where there was a a lot of drug activity hiding in plain sight, so I know the Avis remoteness is a factor. But it turns out, so are its big open skies. Since the 1930s, the US government and military contractors have been testing planes, rockets, and explosives over the Antelope Valley. The Edwards Air Force Base was built.

Defense plans moved in, and it turned the area into an aeronautical frontier.

In October 1947, at Newark Desert Test Center in California, history is made by this aircraft and its pilot, Captain Jäger.

And it was over this part of the Antelope Valley where Air Force pilot Chuck Yeager pushed his plane up to 700 miles per hour and broke the sound barrier.

For the first time, a man has flown an airplane faster than the speed of time.

These military experiments over the AV are actually where the principle of Murphy's law comes from. Because these space cowboys got so banged up while pushing their bodies to the limit, resisting the forces of gravity and physics, that an engineer on the project, a guy named Edward Murphy, said something along the lines of, Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. It wouldn't be long before things would start to go wrong across the Antelope Valley. The The JV had a legacy of record-breaking speed, and its residents developed an appetite for the drug version of rocket fuel, methamphetamine. Meth just made life easier out there. Factory workers took the drug to power through long shifts at defense contractor plants. Construction workers used it to keep up with the area's housing boom, and commuters relied on meth to stay awake during the brutal drive to and from Los Angeles. But moderate meth use turned into a full-blown epidemic in the early '90s as the Cold War came to an abrupt end.

The aerospace cutback soon created a domino effect across the Antelope Valley, and the once-thriving economy began to evaporate like so much water in the hot desert sun.

The meth trade became an easy option for unemployed residents to make some cash.

At the time, the Antelope Valley was a cesspool. It was a desert. It was known for manufacturing methamphetamine. So people were getting busted left and right.

This is Chris Tuck.

My dad calls me Christine when I'm in trouble, but most people call me Chris.

Chris Tuck is originally from Massachusetts, but she got stationed in the Antelope Valley while working for the US Army. She left the military after a few years, had a family, and then found work with a local attorney. Because when Matthew skyrocketed, so did the need for criminal defense. What was your position with him?

At first, it was just a paralegal, and then it was investigative. I would go out on the streets and I would talk to the people. I would talk to some cops. I would do whatever to defend the client.

Tuck discovered she had a real neck for it.

Other lawyers started asking my boss if I could work on some of their cases.

She was good at getting people to open up.

Me, I was more on their level. They would all talk to me. My ex-husband, he's the half brother of these other two guys that were involved in a lot of the drug scene.

She had a last name that carried weight with drug users.

Even though it was through marriage, a lot of them would just assume I was part of that family. They were really easy to get information, sometimes too easy.

The attorney Tuck worked for had a meth habit of his own, so his law firm was well connected with the drug scene. Over time, Tuck learned a lot about the criminal ecosystem in the valley, who the big dealers were, where their labs were located, and which cops were making the bus. And she started to notice a trend, that it was just the low-level offenders who were getting picked up over and over again, but none of the heavyweights who were supplying the drugs. People like Tom Hinkle. Hinkle spent decades working in a manufacturing and testing site for explosives. Just a few years before Ajay went missing, a woman was killed in the desert by a homemade bomb near Hinkle's house. According to LASD reports, tire tracks led directly from the explosion to Hinkle's place. Yet he was never arrested or charged in the case. This would become a theme for Hinkle. He seemed untouchable.

He would have been one of the first people I invested. Yet he never was.

Never.

That was never even touched.

By the late '90s, Hinkle had a day job working at a gas station along Fairblossom Highway near the Punch Bowl. That's he'd meet with a range of characters, including local Sheriff's deputies.

He became the guy on the hill, and he became idolized.

And then something seemed to elevate Hinkle, from a dealer to something more mythic.

Everybody would call him God because he had that power. Before Ajay, he was just Hinkle. After Ajay, he was God.

He didn't start calling himself God until after the Ajay disappearance? Yeah. Yeah. There are plenty of people with a God complex, but few are so brazen to actually call themselves God. So when Hinkle takes on the title, Tuck is floored, and then she hears about Hinkle's possible connection to Ajay's disappearance. She hears it from Sue and Mike, who were clients of the lawyer she worked for.

Hi, Tom Hinkle is the one who told all the information about the cop who ran across something he shouldn't have. Everybody calls him God, he's untouchable.

Tuck notifies the authorities because this isn't a low-level drug offense. This is a possible homicide, and she goes straight to the top, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has a field office in the area.

So I went and I talked to these two federal agents about what was going on.

Tuck offers to introduce the FBI agents to Mike, but she says the meeting didn't go so well because when she and one of the agents show up to talk to Mike, he's hitting a meth pipe.

I mean, I'm talking a clouded smoke when we open the door and the FBI agent and I just looked at each other.

We reached out to the FBI to ask about their involvement in the Ajay case, but they give us their standard line that they can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation. So we don't know what came of TERC's tip to the feds. But the info eventually makes its way to Homicide Detective Larry Brandenburg, who does follow up on it.

Chris TERC was involved in that whole meth, drug culture world. So I'd talk to her. If I could get information from her, I'll take it. If it's bull crap, I just discard it.

Determining the credibility of informant statements is a complicated art. There are plenty of reasons that Sue and Mike and others related to the Ajay case may be untrustworthy. Informants are often long-time drug users with fuzzy memories, lengthy criminal histories, and ulterior motives. So Brandenburg says you have to listen to them and suss out their claims accordingly.

If you just discredit everybody and you don't follow up on none of it, you're never going to find anything out.

Brandenburg was skeptical going into his interviews with Sue and Mike, but by At the end, he believed the couple because they had little to gain. Sue already had a release date for her burglary charge and a lot to lose. Brandenburg says it would be incredibly short-sighted for them to lie about a man who had a reputation for being a cold-hearted killer.

That's a pretty dangerous thing to do if you're just making up stories. I mean, that's really dumb. I sure wouldn't consider doing it because if it gets back that you're snitching or even if you're making this shit up, you're going to pay for it.

He also says that Sue and Mike and others would go on to tell the story many times, and the stories were similar and remained largely consistent.

The little details might change, but the main theme of it shouldn't if you're telling the truth.

And one hyper-specific detail that never varied was the description of Hinkle's hand gesture, the one where he made a finger gun. That detail sticks with Brandenburg because there had been talk of a gunshot from another source. In June 1998, a witness reported to missing persons detectives that he heard the sound of a firearms discharged around sunset the night Ajay disappeared.

We had talked about someone saying they heard a gunshot.

Devil's Punch Bull Park ranger Jack Farley remembers hearing this detail during the search for Ajay.

You can't see the house from here, but it's like a half mile below the trail up there where the people live that said they heard that.

And Paralegal Chris Tuck says the gunshot was discussed around town.

There was one shot like that one witness said, because that's when I heard on the street.

Brandenburg tries to track down the witness using the name listed in the missing person's book.

That guy wouldn't talk to me. I tried more than once to go talk to him. I think he worked at the Punch Bowl. He lived right by it. So the gun shots heard near the Punch Bowl, a single gunshot.

These details keep adding up, and Brandenburg starts to see how this scenario might have played out. Ajay was running past one of Hinkle's meth labs.

He saw a bunch of tweakers hanging out there, and then they're all sitting there with their hands in the cookie jar. What the fuck we do now? Gee, we can't let this guy leave. He never left.

Brandenburg decides it's time to send the information up the pole to the Homicide Captain. Tell him what he's hearing from informants. But the captain blows him off.

Oh, that's just tweaker talk. Tweaker talk. That's all it is.

Brandenburg says that term tweaker Tweeker Talk was used to discredit informants like Sue and Mike and undermine the theory that Ajay was murdered.

Well, Tweekers do talk, especially when they get high. They talk amongst each other. Yeah, some of it's embellished, some of it's changed. But if you had a main theme that keeps you getting repeated, there could be something to that.

Tweeker Talk is a term Chris Tuck is also familiar with because it was used to discredit many of the clients she worked with. She doesn't deny why the meth users are often sleep-deprived and paranoid. But that doesn't mean they don't have valuable information, especially when it comes to a subject they know.

These same tweakers that they said were not reliable, you couldn't get information from them, were the same ones that they used information for to bust other people. So you can't listen to them on one hand and not listen to them on the other hand.

When an informant provides leads that pan out for law enforcement, their status changes to a confidential, reliable informant. One of the best ways for investigators to determine if these leads are legit is to keep investigating, see if the intel can be corroborated.

To me, that needs to be looked at real hard, seriously. Not, She's a freaking tweaker. I don't believe a thing she says, especially when it's already coming from some other sources.

But Brandenburg says he couldn't really do that because his captain undermined him at every turn, called him names, and tried to strong arm him into folding his investigation.

I told him, This is bullshit. I don't agree with it.

We heard from you why you're so passionate about it. Why do you think he had such a strong reaction?

I don't know. That's the question I can't answer.

Brandenburg is taken aback by Homicide Captain Frank Merriman's aggressive attempts to put the Ajay matter to bed, especially after he finds a note in the missing person's file from Merriman, which shows the captain may have had his own doubts about the case.

I found a little post-it when I was looking through the original file when I first got it. Yellow post-it, and it was Frank's handwriting and his initials, and it said, Should this go to a murder team?

To me, this feels like a no-brainer. It should have gone to a murder team to thoroughly vet the tips to prove or disprove them. That should have happened three days after Ajay went missing, when the tips first started coming in. If not then, it should have happened as more and more informants came forward, and it definitely should have been investigated in May of 1999, when a large-scale meth lab was discovered near Punch Bowl where Ajay disappeared. Before forensic psychology became a podcast trend, LA Not So Confidential was already setting the standard.

The podcast is hosted by Dr. Shiloh and Dr. Scott, real forensic psychologists who bring empathy, science, and first-hand experience to every case.

From cults and criminal profiling to the in-cell movement and moral panics, the docs cover it all with nuance, authority, and real research.

Hear the experts behind the mic, because in every crime, there's a mind that made it possible. Subscribe to LA Not So Confidential wherever you get your podcasts. A few weeks into Detective Brandenburg's investigation, he gets a new lead from an LASD sergeant working narcotics in the Antelope Valley. He tells Brandenburg about a property they searched the year before, a meth lab that was located right down the road from the Devil's Punch Bowl.

Okay, let me get my bear in this, Matt. Here's the Punch Bowl right here. This is how close it was. And Hinkle lived right over here, too.

There was a meth lab near where Ajay disappeared. It wasn't in the Punch Bowl, technically, but it was close by, just two miles up the road that leads to the Punch Bowl parking lot.

The search warrant was served at Devil's Punch Bowl Road, Pierre Blossom, California. A 40 acre parcel of land located immediately northwest of Devil's Punch Bowl County Park. During the search warrant, a major meth lab was discovered.

Brandenburg's reading the search warrant from May of 1999. That's when the LASD and other law enforcement agencies busted the lab. Brandenburg connects it to the Ajay case in early 2000. And so were you the first person to make the connection between what some of these informants were reporting and the lab that was found near the Punch Bowl?

I think so, because I don't read any of it in these reports earlier on about that.

For Brandenburg, this was outside confirmation that the informant statements weren't just tweak or talk. The lab was located down the road from the Devil's Punch Bowl, a straight shot from the park. But that's not all. It was owned by a good friend of Tom Hankle's, a guy named Rick Carroll. Carroll operated the lab on his property, and he let other people cook there. It was a a meth-making co-op and hangout spot for all sorts of local drug users. The lab had already been dismantled by the time Brandenburg enters the scene, but he sets out to learn everything he can from reports. The day of the lab bus, about two dozen law enforcement officers fan out across the property. They're led by an LA County Sheriff's Deputy who lives and works in Pierre Blossom, where the Punch Bowl and the lab are located.

Rick Ingles was a resident deputy. I'm not sure the area he lived in. He knew this area probably better than anybody.

Deputy Ingles also knows the players in the drug scene and how to navigate the desert terrain. So as he and others search the Carroll property, they discover an assortment of trailers, cars, and storage containers. Law enforcement uses a steel probe to check the ground for buried objects because meth users are known to get creative when hiding their stash. In this case, searchers find something much bigger. The probe strikes metal, and law enforcement uncovers a hatch that opens up into an underground room.

It was extensive. It had underground tunnels They had underground tunnels, they had underground rooms, they had all the hardware, the glassware. This is a pretty big operation.

There is all sorts of stuff down there. A propane stove, flasks, and tell-tale blood-like stains created by red phosphorus, one of the major chemicals used to make meth. Something deputies didn't find was meth. It appears to have been cleared out before the raid, but the lab likely would have been active in 1998 when Ajay disappeared.

The lab equipment recovered was capable of producing hundreds of pounds of methamfetamine. In addition, there was an operational back hole on the property. Also recovered as one shot got along with hundreds of additional pieces of evidence.

There was another notable discovery at the compound.

The southeast portion of the meth lab, which would have been on this side of it, drops right down into the punch bowl. And that's where the shooting range was that they had. And they had silhouettes of cops at that shooting range.

Can you say that again? There were silhouettes of cops that the people that were at this meth lab would take shots at.

Yeah, target practice. So these guys don't like cops too much.

Brandenburg Eric wants to better understand the proximity of the lab to the punch bowl, something best seen from an aerial view. So he calls up a colleague who flies helicopters for the Sheriff's Department. He's a pilot from the Special Enforcement Bureau, the same bureau Ajay worked for. They take off and circle over the Carroll property.

You see right over here is this property, and you can see the outbuildings and the trailers where the meth lab was and all these trails.

Then the pilot makes an offhand comment about Ajay that causes things to click into place for Brandenburg.

He goes, Yeah, I used to run some of those trails right there with Ajay.

Oh, wow. So he knew some of the routes that he would take.

So this lab was located right next to a trail that Ajay had run before, and it was just two miles from where Ajay's truck was discovered, which is almost the finish line in ultramarathon terms. At this point, a lot begins to gel for Brandenburg. He's more convinced than ever by what the informants have told him.

All that stuff just started adding up. All the time I've been an investigator, I tell people this, even younger guys, this cop stuff is not like TV. You go with what makes common sense. Everything looks like this. Well, usually if it looks like that, that's what it is.

So we go to see what it looks like for ourselves. As we approach the property where the Carroll Lab was located, it looks a lot like I imagined it did back in 1999. It's sprawling, dotted with structures and shipping containers, and has a fence around the perimeter.

Seeing how close we are to where Ajay's truck was found and that there is a little road here that leads up to the mountains, it certainly seems possible that he could have stumbled on this as he was trying to return to the park.

Yeah, that theory is starting to hold the more water to me. It's after we leave the property that we discover a new detail about the Carroll Lab, that it's close to another key location in this case. Driving away from the Carroll property, we just happened to spot a mailbox with an address of someone we've been trying to reach for months. It turns out the witness who reported hearing a gunshot, At Sunset, the Day Ajay went missing, was Rick Carroll's closest neighbor. After coming forward with the information, this witness stopped cooperating with law enforcement. He won't return any of our calls either, and we can't door knock him because his house is behind a large security fence. But just seeing where he lived is helpful because his home is just about a half mile from the Carroll Lab in the direction of the Punch Bowl, and that would be well within earshot of a gun going off.

We just Perry Mason this shit.

This changes my whole way of thinking about that theory.

How had the Sheriff's Department not made any of these connections before? Why, when the Carroll Lab was raided in 1999, didn't someone think, Huh, this seems like A pretty big coincidence given all the rumors we've heard about Ajay being killed. And that brings us back to Murphy's law, which has come to mean that anything that can go wrong will. But it's important to note that's a slight mischaracterization of what space engineer Edward Murphy actually said about the flight test over the Antelope Valley. What he said was, If there's anything they can do wrong, they will. It's a small but important difference. The engineer wasn't saying the world is powerless against the forces of chaos and disaster. He was saying that humans are error prone. He said it as a way of explaining why organizations need to have rigorous safeguards to catch their mistakes. Due diligence, oversight, quality control. So that the things that can go wrong don't. In the Sheriff's Department's handling of the Ajay case, it seems like a lot went wrong. A series of system-wide failures and a breakdown of accountability.

With the R. J. Thing, there was too much of the same thing being said. How many times do you have to hear it and not investigate? Where there's something more going on here.

Brandenburg keeps investigating, but it's hard working in a vacuum, and the Sheriff's Department isn't making things any easier for him. The detective pushes on, though, and he discovers Ajay's disappearance may be connected to a bigger criminal enterprise. And as the scope of his investigation expands, so does the pool of suspects.

So the more I looked, the more I started to document shit, in a short time, it started snowballing, and then the DEA got involved to try to tackle this massive methamoephetamine problem in Antelope Valley. It was mostly white bikers that were cooking this stuff.

Next time on Valley of Shadows.

The Outlaw bikers were big out there. If you crossed them, there was a guaranteed death. There was going to be murder. She said that there was a guy in the Bibles Motorcycle Gang, and she said he was involved in this murder of a deputy, and then she had been shown where he was buried.

A body was found out in the remote area, ductaped, bloodied.

You could see it like that imprint of a boot, a motorcycle boot on his face. If you have any information or tips related to the disappearance of John Ajay, please call 213-262-9889 or email shadows@bushken. Fn. Valley of Shadows is reported, written, and produced by us. Haley Fox and Betsey Sheppard. Our editor is Diane Hudson. Our executive producers are Jacob Smith and Alexandra Gareton. Original music by Jake Gorsky, Ray Lynch, Mike Jersich, and Hayden Gardner. Sound design by Jake Gorsky. Fact checking by Anika Robbins. Additional production support by Sonja Gurway. Our show art was designed by Sean Carnie and Betsey Sheppard. Special thanks to nick White for show Art Photography. Valley of Shadows is a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. From Type 2 Fun, we're Haley and Betsey. See you next week. Before forensic psychology became a podcast trend, L. A. Why not so confidential was already setting the standard.

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