48 Hours: NCIS - The Perfect Mine: 4

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

NCIS and local investigators have honed in on a potential suspect for Erin Corwin’s disappearance: Chris Lee. Detectives try to piece together the details of his affair with Erin in the interrogation room, while search and rescue teams comb through the desert in search of Erin.Listen early and ad-free by subscribing to 48 Hours+ on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4aEgENoSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A warning to listeners, this episode contains graphic depictions of violence. Chris Lee was going to be out of the military soon. He was just days away from being honorably discharged. While the cloud of suspicion for Aaron Corwin's disappearance hung over him, no charges had been filed against him. The Lees had planned their move back to Alaska, where Chris was from. But before they left... They won't have a home because they're out of their barracks. That's White Rock Horse Rescue owner, Isabelle Megley. Chris and Isabelle had spent a lot of time together at the ranch, so they had become friends at this point.

When Chris was in a jam, he asked Isabelle if his family could stay at the ranch while they planned their move to Alaska. We made this agreement. I said, well, you can stay at the bunkhouse until you leave, seven days. How innocent was that? But that's not how it turned out. Once Erin Corwin went missing, the police had started to suspect

that Chris might be connected. But they still hadn't found her, and all the evidence against Chris was circumstantial or hearsay. They needed something firm. The police were here. The detectives were here. He had his U-Haul here, and they wanted to go through his U-Haul.

They had him handcuffed to the chairs over at the house. When they did this, they checked my house. They did not think I was involved, but my vehicles were involved because Chris Lee had used them. The police didn't find a literal or figurative smoking gun in Chris's belongings, but they knew a lot about him, that he had been having an affair with Aaron, an affair that continued in secret, even after they were exposed.

Before Aaron disappeared, she'd been texting her friend Jessica, or as she called her, Jessie, about her relationship with Chris. But there was one message that caught the eye of the police, a text that gave them a clue on where they'd find Erin. This is NCIS agent Sean Nash who saw the text. This text message referred to a trip that Erin and Christopher Lee had made the day before she went missing. All Chris told Erin was that this trip

was going to take a couple of hours, and Erin thought this meant she was in for some big romantic gesture. Erin had text Jessica, laugh out loud, I seriously don't know why he would drag to a very special place to be a dumb surprise. Jessica had text back to Aaron some emojis with a ring and a diamond and then kiss symbols. I would assume that would be an engagement ring. with a ring and a diamond and then kiss symbols. I would assume that would be an engagement ring. The detectives knew the trip would likely have been out to the Mojave Desert surrounding Joshua Tree,

but they didn't know which specific part. The search and rescue teams were beginning to look for Erin and learning where she could have gone with Chris could be the key to finding her. I'm CBS News correspondent Natalie Morales. This is 48 Hours NCIS, Episode 4, The Perfect Mind. Aaron's car was found on July 1, 2014, a few days after she went missing. The car was parked just a few miles outside the 29 Palms Military Base, with nothing missing or really any sign of disturbance. There was, however, another pair of tire tracks. When San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department located Aaron Corwin's car,

the tire impressions surrounding the car did not match Aaron's car. This is NCIS Special Agent Clifton Randolph Jr. who worked with the Sheriff's Department and local detectives on Aaron Corwin's case. Special Agent Randolph says that it looked like Aaron drove out to the spot to meet up with someone in a second car, then went out to the desert. It seemed that someone drove out to that location and she got out of the car, got into this other vehicle and went somewhere else with those tracks ending at the black asphalt road out there.

Investigators believed that the tracks were left by a Jeep. And it just so happens Chris Lee drove a Jeep. This was one of the reasons that the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department initially brought him in for questioning three days after Aaron's disappearance. You already heard some of what he said, his issues with memory loss, challenges adjusting to life after deployment, and how he met Aaron.

In video of the interrogation, Chris sat down under the dim hum of fluorescent lights in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. The detective sat across from him at a small table and asked about his plans for the future. I think we're gonna live with her brother because we got our two horses that we're shipping up there. And then I'm gonna use my GI Bill to try to get a chemical engineering degree. Chris told the detective that in the coming weeks his family would be driving cross-country to Alaska,

where he grew up, to start a new life. This interview was a very important opportunity for the detectives on Aaron's case. Chris wasn't named a suspect at this point. He was invited in to answer a few simple questions about Aaron. The detectives had an opportunity to talk to Chris without a lawyer and to get his story on the record. They also could use information to their advantage. Chris did not know what the detectives knew.

That he'd been having an affair with Aaron, her pregnancy, and the possible proposal, and that the two had planned a mysterious trip out to the Mojave Desert just before Aaron vanished. Then they started to talk more about Chris and Aaron's relationship. Chris admitted that he and Aaron became an emotional support system for each other, and that the relationship turned physical. He also talked about his wife Nicole when she found out about the affair and the effect it had on their marriage.

And during the time that you were texting, Erin held your relationship with Nicole. It was under a lot of duress, a lot of strain. She kept trying to let me talk about things and I just kept shutting her out. Our relationship was under a lot of strain, Chris said. She kept trying to talk about things and I just kept shutting her out. He called Erin his make-believe wife. But while recounting their affair, Chris also seemed to downplay it. They only kissed a few times, Chris said. That's where things stopped, according to him. That was

a reckoning point. He broke, you know, I was messed up and I needed to ask for help. Now the detectives tried to get more details. They wanted to get Chris to describe what he was doing in the days leading up to Aaron's disappearance. Chris did not know that the investigators had found Aaron's car and that they believed he might have been out in the desert with her. The detective asked Chris when was the last time he saw Aaron. Wednesday. That was three days before Aaron went missing. But then Chris second-guessed

himself. I'm not 100% sure, Chris said. She and John had come out of the house, but I would usually try to avoid them. When detectives asked for more specifics, Chris's memory got hazy once again. Sometimes I don't keep track of things. I don't really remember," he said. Chris referenced memory problems several times throughout the interview, sometimes blaming shell shock or PTSD. Then, the detective started asking Chris about the desert. While they talked, volunteers were searching the desert for any evidence of Erin. So the detective wanted Chris to piece together his whereabouts.

Where did he go around the time Aaron went missing? Maybe if he told them about his trips out to the desert, he'd give up a piece of information that might help them find Aaron. The detective asked about Saturday, June 28th, the day Aaron went missing. Chris said he woke up that morning and went coyote hunting alone. And then he guided the police along the route he took.

Chris's story had morphed and changed several times over the hours he spent in that interrogation room. But it was couched in hazy recollections and other memory problems, Chris said. Then Chris's story took a wild turn. It's at this moment, as he described wandering around the desert coyote hunting, that Chris said he heard gunfire. Chris said that he heard four booms, claiming that he saw someone out there with a handgun. I got out of there as fast as I could, Chris said. He said he couldn't tell if they were intentionally shooting at him or not. While Chris told this story, he gave detailed descriptions of where he went. Chris talked the

detective through his hiking trails that carved through the mountains and dunes in the desert. He even marked up a map that the interrogators brought in to show them where he went. Just put like an X where your house is at. Okay, and then so you go on that way to the 62, to Gold Crown, did you make any other stops prior? Whether he knew it or not,

Chris gave investigators tons of details to work with, evidence that could help the search and rescue efforts for Aaron that were continuing in the desert. Chris could be telling the police which parts of the vast desert to focus on. The Mojave Desert stretched on for thousands of miles and dotted through it were the landmarks of a literal golden age,

the hundreds of abandoned mine shafts that filled the horizon. The desert is at the edge of two plates of the Earth's crust. That collision meant that this land was rich with minerals, ore for iron and steel, but most importantly, gold. So during the gold rush of the mid 1800s, people started coming from around the world to scour this land for wealth.

More kept coming and making money through World Wars I and II, before the resources started to dry up. The legacy of that time were the abandoned shacks, mills, railways, and mine shafts carved out of the earth that dot this sandy landscape. This is where the investigators were looking for Erin Corwin. She'd been missing long enough that the teams had to prepare themselves for the possibility they were looking for her body.

The first aerial searches via helicopter identified over 100 abandoned mine shafts that were big enough to hide a corpse. The task ahead of the search and rescue teams would be daunting. So they enlisted the help of an expert, a local man by the name of Doug Billings. Doug Billings, who we call the mind whisperer. Experts like Doug Billings. He's also been called the cave whisperer. He knows all about every single mind that is out in the Mojave Desert.

By day, Doug Billings is a soft-spoken owner of his family's hardware store. In his free time, though, he was an experienced and savvy cave diver. The 48 Hours team went out with Doug to the desert, where he showed them the land that he knew like the back of his hand. As I stand here right now, I'm looking at a beautiful turquoise rock, and I'm looking

at another white crystal rock, and I'm looking at the skyline and these black iron mountains and thinking about prospectors who a hundred years ago were with a pick and shovel trying to make a living out here. There's nature, there's history, there's wildlife out here you see. It is beautiful. It's God's country. Doug doesn't like to call himself an expert, but his connection to this terrain runs deep. His grandparents had a homestead here.

As he grew up, Doug started exploring the caves, dotting the very stretch of land where Aaron Corwin went missing. Many of the mine chefs that the search and rescue teams were looking at, Doug had already been in. And spent a decade or more going through every single one of them, reading journals about them, mapping them, taking inventories of what you could find in them. When Aaron went missing, the search and rescue teams came to Doug to get his advice on where to start looking. And he ended up joining them.

The teams went out into the desert in red hats and yellow jackets and traveled in small groups of two or three. Temperatures would swell above 100 degrees in the sun, so their days had to start before dawn. At first, the search was being largely done by volunteers who had to rig safety equipment, lights and cameras just to look inside some of these mine shafts. Doug and the team assigned numbers to every mine they could find, and they color coordinated

which ones had been searched and which ones hadn't. Well, the goal was to basically check every mine until we either cleared them or found her. And there was a lot of jumping around at the beginning. I mean, you just had evidence and you had to decide of the evidence what was worthy and what's not. All the while, the detectives interviewing Chris Lee were relaying information to the search teams. Those stories that Chris Lee told about the desert were coming in handy.

He had a story of the suspect saying he drove up a canyon over here, or some ranger saw something funny in this mine over here. So we were bopping all around. But as days turned to weeks without finding Erin or her body, Doug and the rest of the team had to go back to the drawing board. Which parts of the desert could Erin be in? The answer might be found in Chris Lee's interrogation,

the interview you heard in the beginning of the episode. The detectives spent hours in that interrogation room asking Chris questions and poring over evidence. They had already gone through Chris's phone and computer where they found something strange. One other thing I wanted to ask you about, when we do analysis on your computers and your phones and all that stuff,

are we going to see anything about murder or anything like that? Probably. Chris admitted to something. He said that he had been doing research on the best ways to get rid of a dead body. Chris chalked it up to harmless research he did after an offhand conversation with a friend. I was having a conversation with one of the guys on the duty that it came up randomly.

Randomly, we talked about the best way to expose the body. As Chris talked to the police, a detective asked more about his phone. Remember, the search and rescue team was trying to use cell phone data to find out where Chris may have traveled. And when you took off Saturday, did you have your phone with you? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, but put it in airplane mode.

Chris said he did have his phone with him, but it was on airplane mode to save the battery. Then the detective asked about Erin. Have you and Erin ever met in this area? Have you and Erin ever met in this dirt area? No. Does she know about this area? I mean, maybe. I mean...

She drives down that way, you can see under those roads. It was in this moment that the cat and mouse game between Chris and the detectives in the room changed. Things became more confrontational. The detective pressed Chris on his story. All right, Chris. Here's the deal, man. We've been doing this all the time, OK? We found her vehicle, OK? We found her tire tracks.

We know that you were going to meet her on Saturday. We know that. We know that you were going to go take her for a long drive, and it was going to be a surprise. We know those things. OK? And we also know that you were one of the last people to see her alive.

The detective pulled his chair close to Chris, sitting just inches away from him, while Chris leaned back against the wall, stone-faced. But the police kept the pressure on. Only problem is, is there's so many different versions of your story, that nobody can believe you, honestly. Then the police confronted Chris over Aaron's pregnancy. I don't know what might have been going through your head when you found out she was pregnant.

But I can only imagine if it were me. I'd have a hell of a lot to think about. There'd be a lot of emotions. There'd be a lot of stuff built up inside. And I'm telling you, man to man, any man facing that type of situation has a lot to worry about. At every question he faced, Chris denied any wrongdoing. At this point, it might have felt like they had reached an impasse. But finally, during a long silence several hours in,

Chris revealed a small sliver of critical information. I didn't see her on Saturday. I just saw her vehicle. I was out that way when I was taking on more tires, very tired, and I drove past it to see if she was in there, but she wasn't. He told detectives that he did see Erin's car the day she went missing. I drove past it to see if she was in there but she wasn't, Chris said. I didn't actually ever see it, honestly I did. I was worried that if I told you guys I saw her car because of my previous relationship with her you would have found out have automatically assumed I did something. I was worried that if I told you guys I saw her car, you would automatically assume I did something.

The interrogators tried to give Chris opportunities to confess. I'm not here to play games with you. But I can tell you, something happened out there. Something, something definitely happened. It's only a matter of, was it planned? Was it a cold-blooded killing? Or did something just happen? That's all it is.

But Chris stuck to his story. And without Aaron's body, the police had nothing directly linking Chris to her disappearance. So they were forced to let Chris Lee go with a warning. We're going to find Aaron. Right now the Marine Corps base is helping us. They're gathering as many soldiers as they possibly can to go out and start checking all these areas. We're going to find her."

After his interrogation, Chris left the police department and went to Isabel Magley's White Rock Horse Ranch. His family had been living there as his military service ended and they prepared to move to Alaska. It was an awkward arrangement. Chris and his wife and daughter, all living in a spare room at the ranch. The news about Chris and Erin's affair, and his possible involvement in Erin's disappearance, put the ranch's owner, Isabelle Megley, in an uncomfortable position.

Chris never reacted to anything. From the time she went missing, he never uttered a word to me. Never talked to me. It was the strangest thing I've ever seen. In the days after Erin's disappearance, Isabelle was becoming increasingly suspicious of Chris, and she was thinking back to the odd things Chris would do when he was around. One time, Isabel remembered Chris taking a cattle prod

and shocking people for fun. He also made a garrotte. It's a small handheld weapon made up of a nylon cord stretched tight between two small plastic handles. The finished product looked sort of like a pair of nunchucks. At the horse ranch, Chris even showed some local kids how to use it. He was very proud of it. So he would put it on their necks and show them how to eliminate them.

He found great pleasure in showing them. Chris was no stranger to weapons. He'd grown up hunting, he served in Afghanistan. And back in the States, friends recalled how he liked playing with explosives and shooting target practice with his guns. But something else stuck with Isabelle. Something Chris told her after returning from the desert

about a week before Erin disappeared. He said to me, in a very exciting tone, I found the perfect mine. He said no one will ever find it. The mine was totally isolated. He had to go off-roading for two hours just to find it. And I looked at the pictures that he showed me, but I couldn't tell a mine at that time. It was just rocks to me. And I wasn't interested, to tell you the truth. And then when she went missing, I told the detectives. This was potentially a big lead.

The pictures of this mine that Chris Lee took could be the key to finding Aaron. Cave expert, Doug Billings and the rest of the team were weeks into their search and still scouring the desert for Aaron. I was in the sheriff's office going over some of the evidence, trying to narrow down the search, and we were talking about,

is Aaron really in a mineshaft? And he walks up to me and he pokes me on my chest a couple of times, says, she's in a mineshaft. And he points to me and goes, and you're gonna find her. I said, okay, let's do it. Over the course of the search, Doug dropped down 30 mines himself, but the entire search effort covered more than 100 mines in total.

The teams were fighting 115 degree days, dehydration. Yeah, I mean some of the other hazards we were encountering right from the day one, in addition to the heat, was probably one out of every three mines we went into had a rattlesnake in it. A few of them had giant black widow nests blocking them and you had rock falls and we had even one instance where we had a big colony of Africanized bees basically infest our camp. And the heat, the heat was just terrible, you know, it was just so hot, you know, it slows you down. It was just so hot, you know, and it slows you down. Eventually, Doug was brought into the crime lab to see the pictures that Chris Lee took

during his trip out to the mines. The pictures that Isabel Megley had mentioned. Doug saw them and recognized the area. She has to be in that canyon. And as I started making a list of everything there, I really had a lot of areas where I said, I'm not sure everything in there was searched. So I went back and redrew up a new map

and really highlighted the areas that got missed. The mineshaft itself is small and nondescript, tucked between the desert and a small mountain range. While the search and rescue teams made their way toward this spot, NCIS investigators and local detectives were trying to keep an eye on Chris Lee. He no longer had anything tying him to the 29 Palms Military Base. And because they couldn't charge him with the crime, Chris was a flight risk. Things changed when Isabelle Meggley mentioned something else in passing to the detectives.

She said that Chris borrowed Meggley's car to run an errand. And when he returned, she noticed something in the back. This big metal contraption that she couldn't really make sense of. I said, what is that thing in my car? It's a potato launcher. I said, what is that thing in my car? It's a potato launcher. I said, what's a potato launcher? And out of the blue comes a detective. He came out and he said, what did you say?

And so we repeated it that it was in my car. I don't know what it is. I have no idea why anyone would have a potato gun. NCIS Special Agent Clifton Randolph Jr. again. Potato gun is a high powered destructive device that basically launches potatoes or projectiles of that type. Here's where a small part of California law

became very important to this story. Because in California that potato gun is classified as a destructive device that meant owning one was illegal. Here's Isabel Megley again. He said, that's a felony. We will get him right away. And so Chris Lee was arrested, not because of Aaron's disappearance, but instead because he was in possession of a destructive device, a potato gun. It's a relatively minor charge in the scheme of things, but the important thing is that even if Chris made bail, he'd have to stay in the state of California as a condition

of his bond. It's a plan that investigators concocted to keep tabs on Chris as they kept up the search for Aaron. And as each day passed, the pressure on those investigators was building. This is a person. This isn't a case. NCIS Special Agent Clifton Randolph Jr. again. NCIS Special Agent Clifton Randolph Jr. again. You put that photograph of Aaron in your case and that humanizes the person that you're looking for. You can't forget that this person has a family, has a husband, has a mother, has a brother,

a sister, a friend. They wanted to know where Aaron was. And you can't forget that. Aaron's case only captured local headlines at first. But on August 1st, People Magazine published a six-page cover story, headlined, Pregnant and Missing, Mystery of the Marine's Wife.

The front page featured a picture of Aaron and John. John in his blue Marine uniform and Aaron in a matching gown, pasted next to a picture of Chris Lee in his cowboy hat. These faces were now plastered across magazines from coast to coast. The Corwin investigation had officially captured the national spotlight, so the pressure on investigators was going to be higher than ever. Around this time, NCIS Special Agent Randolph stepped onto an airplane only to see row after row of passengers reading that very People Magazine story. You see a sea of it walking down that aisle.

And I remember, I think weeks after that, I kept seeing that image in my head there, like constantly reminded me, hey, you have a job to do. With the national spotlight on Erin, the search for her continued back in the desert. But six weeks into the search, the sheriff's department scaled back their efforts, saying there was too much ground to cover and not enough manpower.

Doug Billings was helping the remaining search and rescue teams pick up the slack. They were still focused on finding that mine that Chrisley visited before Aaron disappeared. Doug had been leading searches at spots that fit that description. They were wrapping up a search on the evening of Saturday, August 16, when a firefighter took one last look deep down one of the mine shafts—a 10-by- 10 gap in the rocks that looked down into a dark chasm. Flashlights didn't reveal much, but something stood out to the team as they approached it. The smell of gasoline and the smell of decomposition. This is reporter Beth Ford Roth again. She says the firefighters were on high alert. Could this

finally be it, they wondered. Could this be Aaron's resting place? The mines were dangerous. Some didn't have enough oxygen for a human being to survive. So what the searchers were doing, they were taking buckets, putting a camera inside the bucket and then lowering the bucket down the mines. Beth Ford Roth has seen the terrifying video taken during this search. She said you can hear the bucket scraping against rock as it slid down into darkness. All of a sudden you start to see color

and you see a little flash of pink and you see what looks like denim and they realized that it was a body. The firefighters then rappelled down into the dark cavern. There, laying on a ledge 140 feet beneath the earth, was Erin's body, identified by her tattered pink shirt and denim shorts. Then they looked around because other things had been dumped down the mine shaft as well. Basically, the person who killed Aaron used it as sort of a dumping ground for every possible piece of evidence that would tie him to Aaron. There was a propane tank, a makeshift torch,

a bottle of Sprite, some old tires, and a Marine Corps t-shirt. But when they were able to finally pull Erin's body out of the hole, they found something else. Something wrapped around her neck. A nylon cord stretched between two pieces of rebar. A handmade garotte. A Handmade Garant Next time on 48 Hours NCIS, while Erin's family mourns her death, the manhunt for Chris Lee

begins. From CBS News and CBS Studios, this is 48 Hours, NCIS. Original reporting by 48 Hours producer Paul Larosa. Anthony Batson is the senior producer for 48 Hours. Jamie Benson is the senior producer for Paramount Audio. Special thanks to 48 Hours executive producer Judy Tigard, CBS Studios senior vice president Rob Luchow, and Paramount Audio Vice President Megan Marcus. Our podcast was written and produced by Jay Venables, Isabelle Kirby McGowan, Kara Shillen, Max Johnston, Megan Nadalsky, and Ian Enright.

Additional reporting and recording by Isabelle Kirby McGowan, Jay Venables, and Megan Nadalsky. Our executive producers are Megan Nadalski and Ian Enright. Theme and Music by Epidemic Sound. Original music from Goat Rodeo with additional music from Paramount. Final Mix by Rebecca Seidel. Ian Enright is our fact checker.

Our production manager is Megan Nadalski. I'm Natalie Morales. If you're enjoying this show, Ian Enright is our fact checker. Our production manager is Megan Nadalski. I'm Natalie Morales. If you're enjoying this show, be sure to give it a rating and review. It helps more people find it and hear our reporting. If you liked 48 Hours NCIS, check out the rest of our 48 Hours podcast by searching 48 Hours on your favorite podcast app.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.