20/20 - Devil in the Desert: Cat and Mouse

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

This week, we're sharing the first episode of our latest narrative series from 20/20 and ABC Audio, "Devil in the Desert." In October 2012, a man is found brutally tortured in the Mojave Desert — setting off a decade-long chase to bring the perpetrators to justice. To catch new episodes early, follow "Devil in the Desert" for free on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amazon Music⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Deborah Roberts. You're about to hear the first episode of our newest podcast series from 2020 and ABC Audio, Devil in the Desert. In this series, ABC News' Matt Gutman will explore the twists and turns of a case that started with a grisly kidnapping and a troubled marriage and ended with an international manhunt and even a prison break. It's a fascinating story you're not going to want to miss. We'll be sharing the entire series right here on the 2020 feed over the next

few weeks. Or you can get new episodes early by following Devil in the Desert wherever you listen to podcasts. Now here's episode one. This episode contains graphic descriptions that may not be suitable for all listeners. On the morning of October 2, 2012, Steve Williams was driving through the desert on his way to work. He was on Highway 14, a barren stretch of road just north of Roseland, California. My shift hadn't quite started yet, or it was just about to start. And it was a crisp, cool morning. Steve Williams was a police sergeant in Kern County, about 100 miles north of L.A.

A third of Kern is covered by the Mojave Desert, an expanse of sun-bleached land, spindly Joshua trees, and scrubby brush. It was early in the morning, around 7 a.m. I think there was just a little bit of a light cloud cover, and I remember that the sun, I don't think it had quite hit the horizon yet, and so it was light but not bright. In the half-light of dawn, something caught the sergeant's eye. A figure standing by the side of the road. It was a woman, mid-40s, blonde hair, yoga pants, but something wasn't right. It was miles to the nearest town and as he

drove closer, Sergeant Williams noticed that she was barefoot and had a blindfold pushed up on her forehead. I initially thought she was holding something behind her back because I could see what looked like plastic coming out from both sides of her. And then as I passed her, I got close enough to identify that it was zip ties. Her hands were bound behind her back. Sergeant Williams made a U-turn and pulled up next to her. As he got closer, he noticed some more strange details. She was covered in dust and she had a small knife clasped in her zip tied hands.

She seemed calm and in control of herself. She spoke urgently but clearly. Her name was Mary. She had been kidnapped from her home along with her friend. The friend had been badly hurt. She gestured to the desert away from the road. That's where my friend is. Please hurry. At that point, I immediately knew that it was going to be a long day.

Sergeant Williams cut off Mary's zip ties, put her in his car, and called for backup. Charter rose into one. 10-14 to a female. Additional male. Outstanding. You know, I had started my audio recorder. I just left the recorder going while she was sitting in the front seat with me. And really, I just kind of let Mary talk. I don't know if they got him from another way. With the woman, Mary, guiding him, Sergeant Williams turned off the main road and onto

a barely marked gravel path leading into the hills. Mary seemed restless. She worried about her friend, who she called Michael. He was injured, she said, bleeding. She directed the sergeant through a series of turns and gates until she told him they'd arrived. Can I get out officer? Hang on, how far down is he? Mary wanted to get out, but Sergeant Williams couldn't see anything. Mary said it's close, walking distance.

It was as though she couldn't wait any longer. She got out of the car and shouted to her friend. The sergeant could hear a man moan in response. It's okay, it's going to be alright. Hang on, Wait right there. The sergeant asked Mary to stay near the car. He didn't know exactly what Mary had brought him to or what he might see. He followed the moaning over a small hill.

Beyond it was a gully where the land dipped down. And in the gully was Michael. I mean, it was a scene like you would see out of a movie. It was still barely light outside but he could see a man lying on his side with his hands bound. The man, Michael, was wearing a t-shirt and his pants were pulled down around his knees. wearing a t-shirt, and his pants were pulled down around his knees. He'd been beaten, badly, with marks all over his body and a bloom of blood on the front of his underwear. Sergeant Williams' professional instincts kicked in. He didn't want to disturb any evidence until he documented what he saw. He had a camera and began capturing the

details. The injuries, the zip ties, the tracks in the dirt. Soon a California Highway Patrol officer who had heard Sergeant Williams call for backup carefully approached Michael. He crouched down, gave him some water and talked to him softly. The CHP officer told me, he said, Steve, you need to come here and take a look at this. And I walked over and Michael was sitting up, his legs were straight out in front of him and he just kind of hunched over. And in between Michael's legs, I could see a black piece of plastic like sticking sticking up and I looked a little bit closer and I realized it was the end of a zip tie

The CHP officer leaned over to sergeant Williams He zip tied and cut his penis off Yeah, okay. I'm leaving the zip tie on because it might be keeping him from bleeding out. Okay, what had taken place is The suspects had taken a zip tie and wrapped it around the base of the penis as far down as they could get and Just above the zip tie they'd cut his penis off Reality hit Sergeant Williams. This was the aftermath of a crime so brutal that he had never seen anything like it before. You just take a deep breath.

To this day, I still can't quite wrap my head around it. This case horrified investigators. It was so cruel, so shocking, and it drew them into a nearly decade long game of cat and mouse with their suspect. A game that started at dawn in the desert and took investigators around the world to catch their man. I'm Matt Gutman, ABC News Chief National Correspondent, and I've been following this story for years. And for a long time, all I knew about the person at the epicenter of this case, the

so-called mastermind of it all, was the trail of destruction he left in his wake. That is, until I tracked him down and spoke to him myself. From ABC News, this is Devil in the Desert, and in this episode, we're going to go back to the very beginning, the night of the crime. We'll return to the hours before Sergeant Williams found Mary by the roadside and replay them to try to understand the big questions of the case as they first appear to investigators. This is episode one, Cat and Mouse. By the time I met Mary Barnes in 2019, I had a picture in my head of what she looked like.

It was based on the pictures of her at the crime scene, a small woman with messy blonde hair and dusty yoga pants. Seven years after the attack, Mary had agreed to talk to me about what happened to her and help me understand how does a person end up zip-tied by the side of the road in the desert? But when I met her, Mary looked polished and put together very different than she had in those crime scene photographs.

Now picture how I must have looked to the people driving by. It's very early in the morning. I have my blindfold pushed up like this. My hands are zip tied behind me and I have a zip tie sticking out from my ankle and I'm screaming, somebody please help. Somebody stop. Somebody please help. Mary's version of what happened is important. It helps us understand the story. But also, although there are two victims in this crime, you'll only hear from her. We'll also only refer to the

second victim by his first name, Michael. And there's one particular part of this story that amazes me. In the audio recorded that morning, you can hear the urgency in Mary's voice, her desperation to get help for Michael. But at the time, she barely knew him. So how long had you been living in this house with this roommate? Let's see, I pretty much moved in Saturday and then Sunday I brought my last bag over and he was around in the afternoon so we got a chance to have a little chat and he was just a super nice guy. Monday night the incident happened so you were there basically three days.

Yes. The house that Mary had just moved into was in Newport Beach over a hundred miles from where she was found in the desert. She just moved to California. Only a few weeks earlier, she'd been living in Florida, when an old friend visited her and invited her to come out west to see if she'd be interested in living there. Mary had been working as a makeup artist in Miami, and she said she felt ready for a change. I thought, well, I've got nothing to lose. So I went out.

It was beautiful. The Newport Beach area is just gorgeous. Beautiful sparkling ocean, sailboats, beautiful people, and I thought I'm gonna give it a shot. Newport Beach is south of Los Angeles right on the coast. It's got that Southern California laid-back feeling that hides just how wealthy its inhabitants really are. It's an unassuming paradise of surfers and celebrities.

After Mary arrived, she started seeing someone, a man named Bill. She'd been having trouble finding a place to stay when Bill said, why don't you come and live with me? The house he offered was a couple of blocks from the beach, nestled in a neat row of dense streets. It was a cheerful yellow two-story villa, complete with palm trees swaying in the breeze across the street, pure California. I thought, why not?

What's the worst that could happen? Bill's bedroom was a big master suite upstairs with its own bathroom. His roommate was Michael, whose bedroom is just down the hall. Michael was younger than Mary in his 20s. And on Monday, October 1st, 2012, two days after Mary moved in, he had friends over. But Mary wasn't feeling social. In fact, she was exhausted. New job, new house, new boyfriend.

She needed space. I grabbed some takeout on the way home. I just said hi as I walked past. I just went up to my room, ate up there, in bed, watching TV. When Mary got to her room, she noticed that her bedroom door, which had been locked, was now open. Someone had used her ensuite bathroom. There was a roll of empty toilet paper in the holder, which she knew she hadn't left behind before work. But Bill was away on business, so it couldn't have been him. She decided it wasn't worth going back downstairs to mention to Michael, so she put it out of her mind

and spent a quiet evening in her room. I just remember going to bed around 10.30 and the house was very quiet. Michael had fallen asleep on the couch in his room. He lay in the darkness, peacefully sleeping, while Mary clicked off her light and went to sleep. The next thing I remember is feeling something cold and metallic pressed against the back of my neck. That's what woke me up. And it was the barrel of a pistol. And right away, a man climbed up next to me in the bed and leaned down next to my ear and whispered into my ear, Don't worry, this is not about you. With Mary lying on her stomach, the man zip-tied her hands behind her back and bound her feet

together. He taped her mouth closed and put a blindfold over her eyes. Completely helpless, she could do nothing but lie there, listening, thinking. This is not about you, he said. What does that even mean? Does that make you more protected or more expendable? She could hear sounds from other parts of the house, sounds of fists meeting flesh and someone crying out.

It sounded like it was coming from Michael's room. Mary felt herself being dragged from her bedroom and taken downstairs. Then she heard something else, something heavy being dragged down the stairs behind her, thudding on every step. Later investigators learned that Michael was woken up where he had fallen asleep on the couch by being hit in the face with the butt of a sawed-off shotgun. He was then beaten in his bedroom. The thudding noise was his head hitting every step of the stairs as they dragged him down to the first floor.

Mary felt Michael being placed next to her. They were both on the floor near the door to the garage. She could make out that there were three men, the one who had woken her up, a ringleader who did all the talking, and the other who barely spoke. Mary remembered a statistic she had once heard, that if you were kidnapped and the kidnappers managed to force you into a car and put distance between you and safety, your chances of survival plummet. And all I could think about was, I hope they don't take us.

But then Mary heard an engine and car doors opening. Mary and Michael were lifted into the back of a van. Two of the men, including the one in charge, stayed in the back while a van. Two of the men, including the one in charge, stayed in the back while the third man drove. The doors closed and the van left the garage. After a few turns, Mary could feel the smooth rhythm of the highway beneath them. Almost as soon as they left, the beatings started. They punched Michael and hit him with a rubber hose. Mary could hear every painful thump and Michael's moaning in response.

I was listening very hard because that was all I had and thinking, if I survive this, I want to be able to tell detectives something that can help them. As she listened, she noticed that the ringleader, the one that talked the most, seemed to be putting on an accent. She said it sounded like he was pretending to be a Mexican gang member. Which would have been ludicrous if we weren't in the situation we were in. Like comedically bad. Comedically bad. Like he clearly knew no Spanish. Maybe three words. The man told Michael that he knew he had money buried in the desert. A million dollars. And I'm lying here thinking, what the hell?

From what little Mary knew of Michael, he didn't seem like a guy who had that kind of money or these kinds of enemies. Mary thought of him as a nice guy, a big teddy bear, she called him. One thing Mary did know about Michael was his job. He ran a medical marijuana dispensary in Newport. It was all legal and above board. The strange thing was their attackers kept mentioning it. He was taking my roommate because he didn't like the dispensary and they were cutting into his business and he was gonna teach him what his Patron wanted to teach him a lesson. They kept ripping off his gag and asking him over and over, where's the money?

Michael wasn't meeting their demands, and as they drove on, their methods grew nastier. Mary could hear a clicking sound and realized they were tasing him. Later, she found out they were also burning his skin with a blowtorch. He kept saying, I don't have a million dollars. He said I have a hundred thousand dollars in the safety deposit box. Like I can get it for you tomorrow. What did they say? Not good enough.

The guy was like he had this very. Taunting nasty tone to his voice the entire time. Mary tried to stay calm and hopeful. She prayed and meditated. She thought about her sister going through a divorce and her nieces that needed her to be around for them. But she was worried about Michael. It had been hours and she wondered how much pain

a human being could endure. Finally, she felt the van turn off the highway, bump along a gravel road, and then stop. And I was just filled with terror. All I can describe it as is a gut feeling of these could be my last moments on Earth. But I had no idea what was about to happen. It was even more horrible than anything I could have imagined. The doors to the van opened. With her blindfold still over her eyes, she had no idea if it was still nighttime or morning.

All she could tell was that they were somewhere outside, where everything was very still and very cold. They pulled us out, and they laid us down about two feet apart, side by side, and I thought, well, this is where they're going to shoot us. The ringleader of the three men said, shoot them in the head, and then nothing. It was as though they were playing a game of chicken, pushing Michael as far

as he could possibly go. But Michael had nothing left to offer them. One of the men knelt down next to him. And then he was kind of singing in this little sing song voice, like, and back and forth, and back and forth. The guy was a total sadist. He's a psychopath. He was cutting off my roommate's penis. And I was sitting, lying right there next to him, and I could do nothing about it.

Mary couldn't know if, after they finished with Michael, they would turn on her. You're in for a treat. You tell him Green Day. I wanna be your underdog I've teamed up with Nachio to fast forward right past Nature's Glory Dogs and get down in the mud. These guys are the grossest, most unlikely stars in the great movie of life. Underdogs from National Geographic. All episodes now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu. On June 24th, Ironheart arrives on Disney Plus.

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We bring in a party, baby. Bachelor in Paradise premieres Monday, July 7th at 8-7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu. The Mojave Desert is a place of extremes. It's the hottest place on earth, but in winter, the temperatures plummet. And it's not just the elements that are dangerous. This desert has been a repository for bodies. The remains often turn up with gunshot wounds

and hands tied behind their backs. Mojave is a place where murder can go unnoticed. It was here that Mary now lay, on the dusty ground, in the cool morning air, and she had no idea what was going to happen next. After the kidnappers mutilated Michael, she heard a sound like splashing. An acrid chemical smell hit her nose. Her first thought, lighter fluid.

She thought they were going to be set on fire. But then she realized it was bleach. They were pouring it all over Michael into his fresh wounds. Then the man doing all the talking, the one who seemed to be in charge, turned to Mary. She was lying on her side with her hands still zip-tied behind her back. He pushed an object into them. It was a knife. And he said, you feel this? And I nodded. He said, I'm gonna take this and throw it. And if you can find it, you can cut yourself free and live. Today's your lucky day.

The man told her to count to a hundred. He said he would know if she didn't before she was allowed to move. Then they left. Mary didn't count to a hundred. She waited until she could barely hear the van's wheels crunching on the gravel, and then she wriggled around. If she couldn't find the knife and free herself,

there was a real risk that neither she nor Michael would survive. I sat up, I pushed my blindfold up with my knees so I could see. The sun was just, it was just before sunrise, so there was just enough light that I could see it glinting on the knife. Mary dragged herself to where the attackers had thrown the knife. She found it and used it to cut her feet free. Now able to walk, Mary rushed to Michael's side. He had cuts all over his body and his limbs were swollen and bloody. Even though her hands were still tied behind her back, she was able to cut off the tape over his face.

He just took a deep breath and he said, oh, that feels so much better. And I thought, oh, thank God he's alive. Mary now saw small beams of light moving back and forth, headlights, which meant they were near a road. I knew that his life depended on my getting to that highway and getting us some help. She set off down the gravel track barefoot. As I was walking toward the highway, the sun came up and all of a sudden, this might sound strange but it was so beautiful, the most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen because I was alive to see

it. When Mary got to the road, Sergeant Williams wasn't the first car she saw. It wasn't even the second. Mary saw dozens of cars pass her, a barefoot, zip-tied, still clinging to the knife before Sergeant Williams finally made his U-turn. He opened the door and got out and I said, officer, my friend and I were kidnapped in Newport Beach and they drove us up here in a van and tortured my friend.

Please call an ambulance now. Mary and Michael were taken to a local hospital where Michael was treated for his many injuries. They were about to take him in for surgery, but Mary asked to see him just for a minute. He was tucked into a clean white sheet. His battered and bruised head rested on a pillow. And you know what he said to me?

Mary, I'm so sorry. Nothing like this ever happens in Newport Beach. While Michael was in surgery, Mary got checked over by the doctors. Physically, she was fine. She had a few cuts and bruises, but that was it. Local police quickly took an official statement from her, and at 7.37 a.m., the phone at the Newport Beach Police Department rang. It was Kern County calling to say, a case is coming your way.

Ryan Peters was a detective in Newport in 2012. He knows that despite what Michael told Mary, there's plenty of crime in Newport Beach. Still, this was especially brutal. We get the homicides, we get the murders, we get the fatal car accidents, but an actual kidnapping, torture case, left for dead in the desert, no, but an actual kidnapping, torture case left for dead in the desert, no, that's a once in a lifetime case. Mary had given a statement to the Kern County police

and now Detective Peters was told the basic details and the address of the victims in Newport. Peters was sent to the Yellow House to start the investigation. At the time, he assumed that it was a robbery gone wrong, that the perpetrators had broken in looking for money or jewelry. He thought that maybe the burglars had discovered the house wasn't empty, panicked, and took Michael and Mary to the desert to get rid of the evidence.

But as he observed the scene, he noticed there was no sign of forced entry. There were smears of blood throughout the house and the beds were messy. But a safe deposit box was untouched and a sports car in the garage was still there. Detective Peters realized this wasn't a run-of-the-mill burglary gone wrong. This was premeditated, and he began to think of everyone involved as a possible suspect, including Mary, suspiciously unharmed. Mary Barnes had just moved into the house. She still had her suitcases out with her clothes in it.

So if you're so new to the house, are you part of this? Are you a potential suspect? Are you playing a great victim right now? And then there was Mary's boyfriend, Bill, who was out of the country while the attack happened, but whose name Peters knew. Bill ran a local poker ring. Nothing illegal, but something Peters would have to look into. He was even suspicious of Michael. If this was a revenge attack, Michael may end up being a suspect in a different, connected case. He knew too little to think anyone was totally innocent. And Detective Peters knew he needed to act quickly. The perpetrators had enough time to drive back to Newport from the desert.

They could be planning their next attack already. So he called Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy. And he's like, dude, we have a crazy one. At this stage of the investigation, Matt Murphy's job was to support the detectives. If they needed a warrant or needed to know how to collect evidence in a way that could later help them in court, they went to Matt for advice. Peters filled him in on everything they knew so far.

The break-in, the kidnapping, the torture. And by now, there was one new key detail. Officers were fanned out across the kidnapping, the torture. And by now, there was one new key detail. Officers were fanned out across the desert, searching for Michael's penis. And, you know, with every update, it's like, they haven't found it, they haven't found it, they haven't found it, and then it occurs to me, these friggin' guys took it with them.

You know, which is like, I mean, think about that. It's not enough just to cut off a guy's penis. They wanna make sure that he has no chance it's ever reattached. And that represents a level of sadism and cruelty that honestly, I prosecuted 13 different cases that satisfied the FBI definition of serial killer.

I never saw anything like this. From Mary's interview, police knew the timeline of the attack. They knew there were three perpetrators who wore masks and had possibly fake accents. They knew those perpetrators believed Michael had a million dollars. They knew the how of the crime, but not the who or the why. So Detective Peters thought Michael might be able to answer some of these questions. He had been interviewed in the hours after the attack by local police. But three days later on October 5th, Peters drove up to the hospital in Mojave to interview him again.

The detective was looking for answers, but Michael didn't have any. Michael is telling me he doesn't know who it is. And Michael is telling me he never had a million dollars cash. And yet they believed him to have a million dollars cash. They interview Michael, who's like, guys, I pay my bills. I have no enemies. I'm nice to people. I've never slept with anybody's wife. Like, and my detectives are looking for any possible angle. Like who did this?

And Michael can't provide anything. Michael was left with chemical burns from the bleach that was poured all over his body. The bleach also destroyed any possible physical evidence the perpetrators could have left on him. Bleach is the one agent that exists that is guaranteed to destroy DNA. So that's something that the crime lab uses to clean their equipment in between tests. So there's going to be no there's going to be no forensic evidence from Michael that's probably going to be of any value. We've got a description that this might be a white truck or maybe a white panel van. Well

that's probably the most ubiquitous vehicle in the world, right? A white truck. They find no fingerprints at a place. There's nothing at the crime scene which indicates who did this. So there's no like, nobody left their ID, nobody, you know, there's no videotape that shows their faces. So at the very beginning of the investigation, basically we had nothing. Matt Murphy says there was one piece of police work the investigators could get started with,

but it wasn't appealing, a canvas. A canvas means you basically, you've run out of leads and you go and you knock on the door of every neighbor in the hopes that maybe somebody saw something. And canvases are a notorious pain in the ass. The reason Murphy doesn't like canvassing is because it can muddle the investigation. Someone might think they know something and police time is wasted chasing down a misremembered moment.

But Newport PD had nothing to lose. The day they started searching the yellow house, they also knocked on doors on Michael and Mary Street. First house, nobody has any information that helps. Second house, nobody has anything that helps. Third house, and they start going down the line. Fourth house, fifth house, then they start all over again, one street over. They knock at the house that shares the back alley with Michael and Mary's house.

A woman answers the door. I always think of Mrs. Kravitz from, from Bewitched. Mrs. Kravitz, this time I saw you do it. I saw it. I caught you red-handed. I was just hanging pictures from 10 feet away. For those old enough to remember that series, Mrs. Kravitz was kind of the neighbor that was always looking out the window,

who was sort of paying attention to the neighborhood. So this woman, we'll call her Mrs. Kravitz, answers the door. And the officers are like, ma'am, you know, we're we're investigating a case. We're hoping that maybe you saw something and you get sort of the typical neighbor, you know, like, as a matter of fact, I did see something. The three men who stole Michael and Mary from their home hadn't factored Mrs. Kravitz into their plans.

She told Newport PD that she saw some unusual activity at Michael and Mary's house hours before the attack happened. And what she tells them will give investigators their first big break. You heard a ladder in the alley. You went out there and looked through your upstairs second floor window and saw the truck. That's what I believe I remember, yeah. Devil in the Desert is a production of ABC Audio, ABC News Studios, and 2020. Hosted by me, Matt Gutman, this series was produced by Madeline Wood, Amy Padula, and Kiara Powell. Our supervising producer is Susie Liu, music and mixing by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Liz Alesi, Katie Dendas, Janis Johnston, Eamonn McNiff, Jake Lefferman,

Katie Maldowney, and Michelle Margulies. Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming. Laura Mayer is our Executive Producer.