Park Predators - The Survivalist

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

A man trying to pull off an intricate and complex double life in Idaho commits an unspeakable triple murder, then takes off into the wilderness of Grand Teton National Park. Investigators realize catching their killer will take outsmarting him in the vast forests and mountains he knows like the back of his hand. After years of searching, this killer remains at large...but is Gerald Bullinger still in the woods alone or has he conned his way back into another alternate identity? Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://parkpredators.com/episode-5-the-survivalist/ Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and our story today takes place in Grand Teton National Park. Grand Teton touches three separate U.S. states, and this park's more than 300,000 acres sprawls over parts of Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah. There is so much ground and wilderness in this part of the country that you can get lost or disappear in a matter of hours. And in 2017, in this exact area where three of the most scenic states converge, three women's lives would end, and the man that connected all of them would become one of the most notorious fugitives in North America. This is Park Predators. In the summer of 2017, 48-year-old Nadia Medley and her 14-year-old daughter Peyton were almost finished moving to a new ranch just outside of Caldwell, Idaho. They were moving in with Nadia's boyfriend, Gerald.

The pair had been dating for almost two years and met in Ogden, Utah. They decided to finally make their life permanent together just over the state line in Idaho. Now, Peyton was super excited about this move because their new home had a ton of land, and she could comfortably take care of her pet birds, her reptiles and rabbits, her dogs, cats, and soon-to-be farm animals. But on the weekend of June 9th, their exciting new adventure turned into a nightmare. That weekend, Nadia was scheduled to pick up some new horses in Utah, and she had given the sellers an approximate time that she'd come by, but they waited and waited, and Nadia never showed up. The calls they made to her cell

phone also went unanswered. Now, this was strange, but they didn't know Nadia. Maybe she was just flaky. Maybe she had a family emergency, but what they didn't know Nadia. Maybe she was just flaky. Maybe she had a family emergency. But what they didn't know is that during those few hours, no one was able to get a hold of her. And by nightfall, no one had spoken to the mother or daughter. Every time friends tried to call them, they wouldn't pick up and they never returned calls or texts. Now, Peyton's friends noticed that the 14-year-old had just abruptly stopped texting them, and that was on June 8th, but at the time, they didn't think much of it. Everyone knows that when you're a teenage girl, you basically are glued to your cell phone,

and you're texting your friends all the time. It's what takes up a lot of your time. So it's really Peyton's lack of response that was unusual to her friends, but they knew she had a lot of animals to care for, and she just moved, so her not texting as much didn't really send off alarm bells right away. Because where Nadia and Gerald had moved to in Idaho was off the beaten path, and it was summertime, so Peyton wasn't going to school regularly every day, her friends not hearing from her or seeing them wasn't that out of the ordinary. The ranch that Gerald and Nadia had moved into needed a lot of work,

and she had told her friends they were outside a lot of the time and rarely went into Caldwell for supplies. The drive to and from town just wasn't worth it day after day. So again, it's not like people immediately thought something was wrong when they didn't hear from Nadia and Peyton. But after a week, one of Nadia's family members got concerned and called the Canyon County Sheriff's Office to report that the mother and daughter were missing. They told the deputies they had been unable to reach them. Now, that call happened just over a week after communication had ceased from Nadia and Peyton. When police take the case, the first thing they want to do

is to make a welfare check at the ranch property. Based on the family member who'd reported Nadia missing, they also wanted to speak with her live-in boyfriend, Gerald Bollinger. They wondered if he'd dropped off the radar too. According to the Idaho Press, Gerald and Nadia started dating sometime in 2015 while she was working as a massage therapist. Gerald had been a customer at the parlor where she worked, and the two quickly became attracted to one another.

From the start, their relationship really made Nadia feel happy. She felt like Gerald really had his life together, and he was several years older than her, and she just got a feeling of security from her new boyfriend. and she just got a feeling of security from her new boyfriend. Gerald told Nadia that he'd been divorced for 10 years, and Nadia had recently become a widow herself after her husband died of a heart attack in 2014. Gerald had a good, steady-paying job. He was a private pilot, which was great, but it also meant that he would often be gone for frequent trips.

But when he was in town, he committed a lot of time to Nadia and Peyton. Gerald would often take the two out for dinners, to go on nature walks, or to events together, you name it, like all of the things a person who was pursuing a long-term relationship would do. When the two of them decided to move in together, Gerald had purchased the ranch property in Idaho, and it's where they decided they would start a brand new life together. Everything seemed picture perfect, but that was only because Nadia and Peyton weren't seeing the whole picture. After that family friend filed the missing persons report with the Canyon County Sheriff's Office,

they sent a deputy to the couple's Idaho ranch to check things out. When the deputy arrives at the ranch, the first thing he noticed was that Gerald Bullinger, Nadia, and Peyton were nowhere to be found. As he looked around, he saw no one was inside the house or working in the area around the property. This deputy quickly notices a strong, foul smell lingering in the air, and he radios in for some assistance. When the other units arrived, they traced that smell back to a shed on the property. As they slowly opened the door, the deputies found a blue tarp covering something on the inside, laying on the floor. And when they pulled that tarp back, they found three decomposing bodies. The victims' bodies were in terrible condition because it's the summertime and there's a lot of heat and that shed had been closed up for a long time. Investigators confirmed in a press conference the next day that the bodies were all female, unrecognizable, but matched the ages of Peyton, Nanya, and another middle-aged adult female.

They saw clearly that all three of the victims had been killed by single gunshot wounds to the head and also strange they found three dogs that had been living on the gunshot wounds to the head. And also strange, they found three dogs that had been living on the property that were shot too. It took a few more weeks for authorities to officially identify the deceased victims as Peyton, Nadia, and a woman named Cheryl Baker. And that's when the pieces fell into place. Gerald was married, not to Nadia, but to another woman named Cheryl. Authorities quickly realized Gerald and Cheryl were not on the brink of divorce in 2017. In fact, Gerald had been happily married to Cheryl for almost a decade. The couple had met later in life when she was in her late 40s and he was in his mid to late 50s.

Cheryl was a dedicated teacher who worked with deaf children and her friends say that work was something she dedicated her life to and felt was her calling. By all accounts, Cheryl and Gerald were happy. She was a committed wife to him and their marriage wasn't one that had any apparent issues or public appearances of major distress. It's right then and there that detectives realized Gerald was leading a double life, and it appeared that Cheryl had no clue Nadia and Peyton existed, and vice versa. The police needed to find him and speak with him now. With the victims' IDs confirmed,

friends in these women's lives began to connect the same dots that police were, and realized the glaring reality that neither Cheryl nor Nadia knew one another existed. Cheryl's friends and family members told In Pursuit with John Walsh that Gerald and Cheryl had met one another on an airplane and began dating not long after that. As authorities looked into the couple's life, they determined that Gerald and Cheryl were married for five years before he began his double life and started dating Nadia. Gerald had covered his tracks well and ensured that the women never crossed paths. Despite Cheryl and Nadia only living a few miles apart, they never ran into

each other or uncovered the truth. This is crazy because Nadia had a very active social media presence and she posted a lot of pictures and information about her, Gerald, and Peyton's outings together. Friends of Nadia's went on to tell reporters that she never would have entered into a relationship with the married man. It just wasn't in her character, and she would never have been so public about their relationship on social media if she knew there was a wife out there who would bust her and Gerald. The whole affair seemed one-sided, according to Nadia's close friends. Gerald had never revealed to Nadia he was still married to Cheryl, and Cheryl's friends never knew Gerald was cheating on her. Even more astonishing was that investigators uncovered the way they believed Gerald had duped his wife into purchasing that Idaho ranch. Leading up to June 2017, he had convinced Cheryl that they should purchase the land together as a retirement home. In the end, the house and deed to the property were entirely

in Cheryl's name, not Gerald's. This promise of retirement together in the outskirts of town was something Cheryl really looked forward to. She had worked so hard in her job and it took a lot out of her. Investigators speculated that Gerald's massive secret came crashing down when Cheryl made an unannounced trip to the ranch property in June of 2017. The Canyon County Sheriff's Office believes that Cheryl hadn't been to the Idaho property in person and that her impromptu trip was because she wanted to see it for herself and check it out. The sequence of events that went down after she arrived at the ranch are still unclear to investigators. Whether Gerald was at the ranch playing house with Nadia and Peyton

and then Cheryl arrived, uncovered the affair, and then all hell broke loose is something police believe only he knows. Based on all of the information and the evidence the coroner provided to deputies, they determined that the murders took place on June 8th or June 9th, which is right around the time Peyton stopped texting her friends and Nadia didn't show up to get those horses from Utah. Police were also able to pinpoint Cheryl's timeline leading up to her arriving at the ranch property. Investigators knew, based on talking to her friends and associates, that she headed out to see the property on June 8th. Realizing that Gerald was gone, he wasn't at the property, and

they couldn't locate him, and every woman he was romantically involved with was dead, they considered him their prime suspect. They put out a bee on the lookout and had a warrant issued for Gerald's arrest that was extraditable nationwide. They also wanted everyone to be looking for Cheryl's car, which was a white Ford Focus with a Utah license plate. Now, this car was important because Cheryl had last left it at a car dealership in Caldwell, Idaho to get serviced. The dealership told police that Gerald had been the person to come and pick it up, so it was likely he was driving that car around wherever he was. When they issued this arrest warrant, the Canyon County Sheriff's Office

said they considered Gerald armed and dangerous and anyone who saw him should call police right away. With him likely on the run, investigators scoured Caldwell for surveillance video that could tell them where he'd gone and where he was last seen. And the video and images they're about to find lead their manhunt far out of town and far away from the crime scene they believed he was tied to. Video the police gathered of Gerald placed him a town over eating breakfast the day after the women were likely killed on june 9th and it's in this town that they believe he took off in cheryl's car after dumping his truck somewhere what sucks is that because more than 10 days

had passed before anyone knew the victims were missing and the police actually found their bodies. Gerald had got a tremendous head start on authorities. The video surveillance they gathered from that restaurant was from June 9th, but they didn't know it existed until the first week of July. That is a huge delay. Right after finding this restaurant video, investigators located surveillance of Gerald that was time-stamped from June 11th. Now, that clip showed him entering Grand Teton National Park, driving his dead wife's car, that Ford Focus with the Utah license plate. Authorities believed Gerald was extremely familiar with the area he was traveling to inside of the national park, because what little information they'd gathered on him so far said that earlier in his life,

he had experience as a horse packer and even at one point was a guide in Yellowstone National Park. Even though they knew they were behind the eight ball, investigators followed this lead of seeing Gerald enter the national park. According to news reports, on July 12th, a campground host at Pacific Creek Campground called in that they believed Cheryl's car was at a campsite. Authorities followed up on this tip and they found the Ford Focus sitting parked at campsite number four. In their interview with police, the campground host said that they noticed the car sitting at the site on June 16th, but they didn't report it to police until now. but they didn't report it to police until now. After that, a witness came forward and told the police that they saw Gerald heading into the wilderness of the National Forest lands on June 20th. That is the last known sighting of him. Investigators say as far as they could tell from

the images of Gerald in town and when he entered the park, he didn't have any outdoor gear or hiking equipment with him to survive in the wilderness. So they developed one of two theories of what had happened to him and where he went. He either made his way into the wilderness on foot and was still out there, or he hitchhiked his way out of the park and was now hiding somewhere else. Despite extensive ground searches using police dogs and helicopters and even infrared technology, investigators found no trace of Gerald for months. Investigators believed Gerald was mentally capable of surviving in the woods. However, at his age of 61 and the possibility that he didn't have survival gear, the concept that he could stay alive for a long period of time in the backcountry, where wolves, bears, and wildlife lurked, was very unlikely, but not entirely out of the question.

In addition to searching the woods, law enforcement from several agencies in the area had looked for Gerald in abandoned homes and farms in the area. Teams had done a sweep, looking through nearby communities and subdiv subdivisions just in case Gerald was squatting and living in one of those homes. Nothing turned up for that, though, so police focused their efforts back on the woods of the Grand Tetons, where Gerald was last seen. In August of 2018, a year after the triple murder, authorities decided to regroup, and they were going to launch a new massive search for Gerald. The effort utilized men and women from the Teton County Sheriff's Office and Greater Idaho Fugitive Task Force. Roughly 20 investigators split up into four groups to cover a four-mile radius of forest

north of Pacific Creek Campground. This was the area that they believed Gerald had passed through and either perished in or was still residing in. They started this new search at a junction of two trails, and it's at that junction that a family hiking in late 2017 said they'd seen a man in his early 60s standing alone. They told police that the man looked disheveled and he wasn't equipped for a hike outdoors. They said he appeared extremely weathered and didn't look like he for a hike outdoors. They said he appeared extremely weathered and didn't look like he belonged on the trail. They said that the guy had no backpack, no water, no gear, and no safety protection. Nothing. He passed by the family walking in

the opposite direction with his head down and he didn't say a word to them. The interaction, or rather lack thereof, made investigators feel that the family had run into Gerald and just not known that he was a wanted fugitive. Now it's worth noting, in the days before this new search started, a gun was located in the water near Pacific Creek, but it was closer to Yellowstone National Park than Pacific Creek Campground. If you ever visit there, you'll quickly see that there is a very thin line between where the National Forests of Grand Tetons and Yellowstone overlap, and it's in this area that the gun was found. Investigators said the gun was in really good shape, and it was unlikely that

it was Gerald's because it didn't appear that it had been in any kind of environment for a long time. It was also fully loaded and not missing any bullets. Now that detail didn't mean a whole lot to me because say it was Gerald's gun. After the murders, he could have been carrying ammo and the shells that were missing that were used in the murders would have been reloaded and replaced. Either way, details about that gun ultimately caused authorities to rule it out as being Gerald's. At this point, authorities were feeling the case stall out, and they began operating on a theory that Gerald was likely dead from suicide or the elements had killed him, and they were looking for his body versus a man

still out there alive. They were so convinced about this that they even put a bulletin out advising hikers and people outdoors to be looking for and paying attention to anything that looked like human remains or scattered clothing. It was part of the police's theory that if Gerald was dead, his body was likely torn and scattered by scavenging wildlife, and this would have happened after the snow had thawed and critters would have ample access to a carcass. They believed if he had wandered into the forest in June 2017, he would have had very few places to go and limited access to resources to survive. It had snowed late in 2017, and the snow line was very close to the perimeter of the Pacific Creek campground.

If by some miracle Gerald had survived that late snow, he would have had to endure a brutal winter, and by 2018, surely he would have been dead. Despite this very public search in August 2018, Canyon County authorities and the U.S. Marshals still kept some information about their case and Gerald's suspected crimes to themselves. They did this to protect their work, and also did it in the event that Gerald was still running around at large. Detectives working the case continued to pour over every scrap of information about Gerald, in the hopes that maybe something in his past might lead them to where he is now. And as they learned more about him, they found some interesting things, things that shed so much more light on his

relationship with women and why he was capable of killing. As police looked closer into Gerald's past, they were surprised to discover that Cheryl Baker was not Gerald's first wife. He had actually been married two times before her. In 2018, a reporter from the Idaho Statesman actually tracked down and interviewed Gerald's first wife, a woman named Jackie Garcia. Now, Jackie says that Gerald had a long history of lying, manipulating, infidelity, and violence. She told the publication that there came a point in their 10-year marriage that she feared Gerald would kill her. Now, I know ex-wives and ex-husbands usually have a bone to pick with their extreme spouses, but in her interview with the Idaho Statesman, Jackie described a very different man than who Gerald appeared to be on the surface to

everyone else. She remembered him as a, quote, very dishonest person who, even when caught in a blatant indiscretion, would lie to no end and never admit the truth. When Jackie met Gerald, he was a self-proclaimed Mormon and had a long history of faith in the Church of Latter-day Saints that dated back to his childhood. Jackie said Gerald was so dedicated to the church that when they met in the 1970s, they quickly got married in the Salt Lake City, Utah temple of Latter-day Saints. Jackie and Gerald had two sons together, but she claims that physical abuse and Gerald being unfaithful to her is what ended their marriage. Gerald went

on to marry a woman whom he'd had an affair with while married to Jackie, and that union also later ended in divorce. Fast forward to the early mid-2000s, and he meets Cheryl Baker. They eventually get married, but they have no children. They joined a Hindu temple, a religion Cheryl practiced. No one in Cheryl's life ever knew her to complain about Gerald or that she ever suffered abuse from him. Friends told Crime Watch Daily that Gerald would change his religious preferences and beliefs based on the women in his life. For example, he was Mormon with Jackie. Then with Cheryl, he joined the Hindu temple where they were both members. But by the time he was in a relationship with Nadia, he had converted to atheism just like her.

he was in a relationship with Nadia, he had converted to atheism just like her. People who knew Gerald for years, even decades, said they didn't believe the police's theory that he just went into the woods and killed himself, overwhelmed by what he'd done or afraid he was going to get caught. No, a lot of the people closest to Gerald described him as having key characteristics of a sociopath. These acquaintances told the Idaho statesman that they thought it was more likely Gerald had made it out of the Grand Tetons alive, and he had manipulated another woman into taking him in. They told the reporter for that publication that Gerald was too egotistical to take his own life. The fact that Gerald has never been found leads me to believe that theory too. You would think that by now there would be some kind of trace of him found if he didn't make it out of that park.

Clothing, shoes, bones, something. The fact that authorities haven't officially declared he's dead also makes me believe that they think he's still alive and he made it out of the park. and he made it out of the park. Even as of 2019, tips continue to come in about Gerald through organizations like Crimestoppers and after the hit TV show In Pursuit with John Walsh covered the case, but still no information about where he is or if he's dead or alive has turned up. The U.S. Marshal Service is leading the search to find Gerald and the Canyon County Sheriff's Office is the agency investigating the triple murder. Authorities have told multiple media outlets who frequently inquire about this case that they're keeping their options open as to where Gerald might be or what happened

to him. If Gerald is out there somewhere alive, it's most likely that he's working as a pilot because he has the skills to do so, and he'll need income. He may be living somewhere outdoors to stay off the grid and away from the public's radar. So be on the lookout. Gerald is 6'1", white, has gray hair and brown eyes, and he's in his 60s. Sometimes he's also known to wear glasses. He is extremely familiar with cities in the western United States and Alaska. If you have information on Gerald Bollinger, call your local law enforcement

or the Canyon County Sheriff's Office. Park Predators is an AudioChuck original podcast. This series was executive produced by Ashley Flowers. Research and writing by Delia D'Ambra, with writing assistance by Ashley Flowers. Sound design by David Flowers, with production assistance from Alyssa Gastola. You can find all of our source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?