Revisionist History - From Valley of Shadows: The Devil's Punchbowl

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

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

I just got back from Jamaica with my family, a week of bliss by the beach. Lots of curry goat and jerked chicken and long walks. I'm going to apply for my Sandcastle architect's license now that I'm officially an expert. We left when it was ten below and arrived to sunshine, and it reminded me how meaningful a change of place can be. And I'm here to remind you that while you're traveling, your home doesn't have to sit empty. Hosting your home could be a simple way to make use of a place that's already there.

your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca. Forward slash host. Malcolm here. I want to tell you about a man named John Age. He was a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy, an ultramarathon runner, a survivalist, and someone who had made a study of how to stay alive in punishing terrain. And one day, he went for a run in a place called the Devil's Punch Bowl, in the high desert of Los Angeles, and he never came back. Some say Age is just another missing hiker,

claimed by the inhospitable landscape of the Southern California desert. Some say he took his own life out there, but there's another theory that many of Age's friends and colleagues are convinced is true, that he was the victim of foul play, and his own department is covering it up. hosted by journalists Haley Fox and Betsy Shepard, Valley of Shadows, explores Aege's unsolved disappearance and the stench of corruption that's followed the case for nearly 30 years.

Through exclusive interviews, revealing wiretaps, and buried police files, Haley and Betsy enter into the criminal underworld of outlaw biker gangs, meth production, and crooked cops in Southern California's Mojavee. desert, exploring one of the state's most mysterious missing person's cases. You're about to hear a preview from the show. If you enjoy it, you can find Valley of Shadows wherever you get your podcast. This series includes content that may not be suitable for all listeners. Listener discretion is advised. Is this okay? Yeah, I'll turn it down just a little bit, because sometimes you get animated. I get pissed off, pissed off old cop. This pissed off old

is Mike Bauer. Okay, my name is Mike Bauer, retired captain, L.A. Sheriff. I retired in 2002. My last assignment was Major Crimes Bureau, Detective Division, L.A. Sheriff. Bauer spent 33 years climbing the ranks of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. And he looks the part of a retired captain.

His white hair and mustache are neatly groomed, and his eyes are permanently fixed in a look that says, do not fuck up on my watch. and he's pissed off because of something that happened to one of his guys on his squad back in the summer of 1998. June 11th started off like a normal day in Los Angeles, June gloom and bad traffic. I got up early out of Long Beach and headed up the 605 and into East L.A., our office in East L.A. Bauer was doing paperwork when a call came into the front desk.

The receptionist answered. Then she hung up and she comes down to get a cup of coffee across the hall. And I said, hey, who was that? It was John Ajae. John Aja was a 38-year-old canine cop. And he was calling to inquire about an upcoming job assignment. I said, well, I've been trying to get a hold of him. And she says, oh, well, maybe he'll call back.

He never called back. John Ajae was working for the unit Bauer headed up at the time. the Special Enforcement Bureau, or SEB for short. Which consists of seven or eight SWAT teams, and the SWAT teams were involved in tactical responses to high-risk situations in the field. SEB handled things like active shooter situations, hostage negotiations, search and rescue.

It was a job that attracted adrenaline junkies like Aj. He was an army paratrooper and a survivalist. and those military skills, along with his buzz cut and square build, made him a shoe-in for the sheriff's department. He was in the Army and Special Forces. He was working at the elite unit of the department. I have to call him a loner, but he was an elite loner because the guy was doing 50-mile runs.

He was an animal. Adjah got his kicks by going on long runs through California's back country. He'd go out deep into the wilderness to conquer the only obstacle course that still challenged him. And that's how Aja was spending his day off. On June 11, 1998, he woke up, put on his running gear, and drove to one of his favorite parks,

the devil's punch bowl. It's a rugged canyon where the Angeles National Forest, the San Gabriel Mountains, and the Mojave Desert all converge. Aja entered the park just before noon, used a pay phone to call into the sheriff's department, and then he took off. running. He never listened to any music, just the sounds of nature as he jogged along a maze of switchbacks

and up a nearly 10,000-foot mountain. By early evening, he looped back towards the parking lot. But as the sun began to set, the shadows of trees and rocks grew, until night engulfed the park. That evening, I got a phone call saying that Depi OJ is missing. that he didn't come back to his vehicle and that they were going to start some more extensive searching for him. It's an all-out manhunt for John A.J. Every search and rescue team in L.A. County has been called in to help. The 38-year-old went hiking Thursday in a rugged section of the Angeles National Forest known as Devil Punch Bulls Park.

It's a beautiful but dangerous area, an area where it may be extremely difficult to find Aalje. It's a pretty unique situation. the sheriff's department is called in to look for a missing hiker, who's one of their own. So the search and rescue team sent out to look for Ajae consists of his friends and colleagues. We took our teams out and deployed in two-man teams over the edges of the trails into the little nooks and crannies and the galleys that he could have slipped and fallen into. But searchers find no trace of Aja. It was as if he just vanished into thin air.

And now, nearly 30 years later, the deputy is still missing. I guess I'll open a box. All that remains from Aja's life is packed into five cardboard boxes. The items are wrapped in plastic, and Bauer wears gloves as he combs through them. This is John's work jacket, and it's an SEB jacket with his name embroidered on it and Bosco, his dog. Bower's preserving Aja's belongings for future developments in the case. Okay, so here's his running shoes with his name on the back. Those should have some DNA in them.

The artifacts also tell us who Aja was. There's a photo collage full of happy memories. Him and his high school sweetheart Deb on their wedding day, a birthday party for their daughter, Chloe, who was just five when he disappeared. And puppy picks of Bosco, OJ's department issued canine. And next to these snapshots of domestic life,

there's a steel ballistics helmet intended to stop rifle rounds, trophies for marksmanship, army fatigues, you know, tough guy stuff. Aja moved at a fast clip, trying to balance the competing demands of home and work.

But his life came to an abrupt and puzzling end. His death certificate says cause a death unknown, manner of death unknown. No body. The deputy's body has never been found, which raises a lot of questions for Mike Bauer. And a survivalist getting lost in the woods,

another big question mark. Over time, the mystery of it all has turned into something else, deep and unsettling suspicion about the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. The only law enforcement agency in this country that I know of, and I've looked around, who has a missing deputy sheriff, and doesn't seem to care, what the hell happened? What's the answer? Who's motivated to find the answer?

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

because she's reported on it for many years. Hey, Betsy. How you doing? I'm good. I'm ready. Yeah, you're going to do this? It's about time. We're going to go on a little road trip adventure. All right, let's do it. We've teamed up on stories before and decided to get the band back together, to find answers about this missing deputy,

and to take on the largest sheriff's department in the country. There's a code of silence in law enforcement. You break that code of silence. You're done. Hey, if they don't fucking kill a cop and bury, what are they didn't do to me? It's an obstruction of justice of a very large scale. I'm Betsy Shepard. I'm Haley Fox, and this is Valley of Shadows,

a show about crime and corruption in California's high desert. Episode 1, The Devil's Punch Bowl. Betsy and I are making the trek from downtown Los Angeles to the Anilope Valley. That's the desert area north of L.A. where Deputy A.J. disappeared. The drives about 60 miles. miles, but it takes an hour and a half to two hours because of the mountainous terrain. So you actually have to take, we got to go north. Yeah, we're going to go north, but this is L.A., dude.

We got to go south, 110 south, 5 north, 14, and then I think there's a 138 thrown in there, but nothing's a straight shot. Spoken like a true Angelino. I was born and raised in L.A. County. Go Dodgers. but this part of it feels worlds away. The Anilope Valley, or the AV, as it's sometimes called, is a 3,000-square-mile stretch of the Mojave. But this part of the high desert doesn't have the same allure and vibiness

as places like Joshua Tree. Instead, the AV is mostly empty space, dotted with defense plants, bedroom communities, and tumbleweed towns. So a lot of just like trailers kind of, kind of just parked out in the desert. Yeah, I mean, power lines and scrubbish. Our story takes place in and around Pear Blossom, California. It has a population of 1,500, and it's where the devil's punchbow is located.

Driving through it, Betsy gets a case of deja vu. I get anxiety coming to places like this, because it reminds me of, like, a towel that I grew up in. There's just, it just, like, I feel the oppressive way. of boredom. Oh, really? Yeah. I moved to L.A. several years ago from South Louisiana. I'd never been to Anilo Valley before, but it was immediately familiar to me.

Because if you were to replace desert with swamp, this region would look a lot like the small town I'm from. It's rural and kind of run down. There's more landscape than real estate. Lots of pickup trucks. And town life seems like a thing in the past. We got an abandoned motel? What's this?

Oh, like an abandoned old restaurant and rec hall. And people getting gas to presumably be all their way. Yeah, I mean, I think the three gas stations in a row tell the story. But the closer we get to the devil's punch bowl, where Aj was last spotted, an otherworldly landscape appears, full of spiky Joshua trees and sandstone columns. It's actually really beautiful out here.

It's not expected to look like this. Are you looking at these huge rocks jutting out of the ground and they're making all those crazy shadows? I've never seen anything like that. I haven't either. I feel like I'm in an old Western movie, you know, where he's got this wide, epic landscape shots. Oh, total.

Endless horizons. Endless horizons. I can see why Josh. Ah, Jai likes to come out here. Yeah, it's pretty humbug. Okay, we are pulling into the Devil's Punch Bowl County Park parking lot. Here we are. We've come here to retrace John Age's last known steps.

And to meet with Ranger Jack Farley. He was working at the Punch Bowl the day the deputy disappeared. But are you Jack Farley by chance? I am. Oh. Are you busy? I'm Betsy. This is my reporting partner, Haley.

Nice to meet you, Hayley. Thank you for meeting us out here. Jack Farley's retired now, but for 35 years he was assigned to work the Punch Bowl. What a cool job. Great for me. Yeah, it was awesome. Good job. It was Farley's job to keep an eye on things, to tend the grounds and patrol the area.

So he noticed when Ajay became a regular at the Punch Bowl. And he clocked Ajay's regular parking space, the one closest to the tree. trailhead. So I can remember seeing him sitting in the back of his truck when you get done with a run in the mountains. So when I'd walk out into the parking lot, I'd see him sitting out there and ask him about his run. Farley remembers that the day Aja disappeared, his white Ford F-150 truck was parked in that very same spot, surrounded on all sides by wilderness. One thing that impresses us so much about this area is that you have a desert landscape on one side, you have mountains and forests on the other, and then in between

it's these really cool rock formations. Right, it's all uplifted from earthquake activity. Oh, wow. That's a punchbow fault, and that runs parallel with the mountains. And then when you came up to hill, you cross the San Andreas fault, which is, of course, the big one that runs through California. Several faults in the area took all this sand that was laid down flat by stream. and tilted it up into vertical relief.

And it creates a bull shape. You can see a definite bull shape coming around like this. So that's where it got the punch bowl name. We're not totally sure about the devil part of it, though. According to local lore, early homesteaders saw grinning devil in the rock formations. We didn't see Satan in the rock face, but we did see something else, thanks to a county park employee named Dave Numer. See this right where the shadow ends.

There's that big rock kind of all by itself. If you look, it's like a forehead is facing us, and there's a nose pointing through. Kind of looks like George Washington. Yeah, it's a natural Mount Rushmore. Cool. So there's all kinds of faces out here because it's like, oh, our brains are programmed to see patterns. Pattern recognition is why we see gods and goddesses in the stars and the man in the moon. It's also a key part of criminal investigations, a way to turn information into a story.

And that's why we've come to the devil's punchbowl to see if we can make sense of what happened on June 11th, 1998. So we pull out a map we printed from the internet because we're prepared journalists and elder millennials, and we present it to Ranger Farley. Let me show you what it looks like. Mine will definitely be better. This would definitely get us lost in the wilderness. Funny with a good thought. Farley proves his outdoor prowess by whipping out some real maps of the area

to help orient us to our surroundings. Okay. Here's the devil's friend. Okay. And there's Burke Hart Trail right there. It goes over toward devil's chair, so that'd be just to the east. It goes to South Fork. One witness reported seeing. Ajae near the picnic tables at the main trailhead sometime before noon.

This witness was a local teacher there on a field trip with a bunch of elementary school kids. Aja stopped to talk to him. He pointed to a jagged mountain in the distance, Mount Baden-Powell, and said that's where he was headed. So the high mountain behind the telephone pole over there? Yeah? That's Baden Powell, and that's where he would go sometimes. Oh, wow. How tall is that mountain?

Jeez, that is one of the higher ones. Let me think, 10,000? I mean, in this range. And he would run from here to that mountain all the way over there and then run up it? Yeah, he'd run over there. And then there's switchbacks all the way to the top of that mountain. Ajae was spotted again later in the day when multiple witnesses say they saw him jogging through a campground just north of the mountain, in the direction of the punchpole parking lot.

But when Farley left his post at 5 p.m., Ajay's truck was still parked in the lot, and it stayed parked there as the evening bloomed over the desert. And then, close to midnight, Aji's wife called the sheriff station to report him missing. I just got back from Jamaica with my family, a week of bliss by the beach. Lots of curry goat and jerk chicken and long walks. I'm going to apply for my Sandcastle architect's license now that I'm officially an expert. We left when it was ten below and arrived to sunshine. and it reminded me how meaningful a change a place can be.

And I'm here to remind you that while you're traveling, your home doesn't have to sit empty. Hosting your home could be a simple way to make use of a place that's already there. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca. Forward slash host. I'm David Remnick, host of the New Yorker Radio Hour.

There's nothing like finding a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters. In print or here on the podcast, the New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and depth and even humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.

As June 11, 1998, nears its end, Debbie Ajae becomes increasingly panicked because her husband, Deputy John Aja, told her he'd be home around dark, and by now he's several hours late. So she dials up one of the shares up one of the sheriff's stations where Aege worked. The call comes into the desk, and it's from Debbie, and it says, hey, my husband, who's the deputy,

he went for a run, and he didn't come home. Vince Burton was a sergeant in the Antelope Valley. He was also Aja's colleague and friend. So it gets on the phone with Debbie. She was just upset. She was crying. She was obviously very concerned. I just, I said, okay, Debbie, we're sending people up there, you know, keep you posted.

Patrol deputies high tail it to the punch bowl where they find AJA's truck, but no Aja. They think maybe he got injured, slipped and fell, or had a run in with some wildlife. So Burton dispatches search and rescue to the site, and he calls in their coordinator, Dave Sauer, to discuss Aja's likely route. And Dave comes in and we pull up a mass. of the area. And I told him at that time, I said, you know, John's a runner. And he goes, yeah. And I said, no, he's a long distance runner.

He's an ultramarathoner. He's like, what? Ultramarathoners are running extremists who power through long distances. In fact, Aja was scheduled to compete in a 100-mile run the week after he went missing. So responders have a hard time wrapping their heads around the scale of the search. I gave them the best information I could give them. You know, don't start your grid pattern so small. This is Randy Meggedly.

He was a patrol deputy for the sheriff's department and one of Ajay's running buddies. He reiterates to the command post that Ajae was a beast. You're running goat trails is basically what I categorize them as. What do you mean by that, goat trails? Well, they're just Megshift trails. Sometimes they'll be covered with snow, sometimes they'd be covered with mud, crossing rivers.

I mean, it's crazy, what kind of stuff that we were doing. There was one that we did, and it was hand over foot trying to get up this mountain. Wow. And so part of the activity was figuring out how to get to the end of it. Yeah, in one piece. Hearing Meggardly talk about ultramarathoners, it sounds like they have no off-switch. So maybe

Ajay just overdid it. Your brain does some lanky stuff when you're dehydrated. And they thought maybe he got on a trail and he was doing the forest dump just kept running. That's a theory,

that Aja was doing the forest gump and just kept running. And got himself into a tailspin of dehydration. Responders take note and fan out across the search grid. I was nice to him. I said, you know, I know the area pretty well if you guys want help. Ranger Jack Farley again.

And the guy goes, no, we're searching rescue. We pretty much know what we're doing, you know. So I go, okay, okay. But it doesn't take long for the pros to realize they're in over their heads. So then they're going, hey, are you the guy that knows the area? You know, maybe you could give us a little help. So Farley leads a few groups of deputies and bloodhounds down the local trails. At one time thought they caught a scent

and it went up on the trail going toward the Burkhart Trail and we had talked about someone saying they heard a gunshot you can't see the house from here but it's like a half mile below the trail up there where the people live that said they heard that. The dogs pick up a scent, possibly Aja's, on a trail that's near a local resident. That guy reported the searchers

that he heard a single gunshot at sunset the day Audeau. It's a detail the sheriff's department registers as a potential clue. So I took a group of deputies over there and we went down really rugged, wooded canyon. They didn't find anything. But searchers do spot some footprints on the mountain where Aj told people he was going. So Aj's captain Mike Bauer takes to the skies to see where they lead. And that was the first time I ever stepped out of a huge helicopter on the, the side of a mountain with one skid touching, and then that helicopter flew off while we examined

the openings of Big Horn Mine to see whether or not it had been broken into. Big Horn is a mine on top of the mountain, left over from the Gold Rush Days. Its entrance has been welded shut to keep out hikers. And when the helicopter lands 90s action movie style, Bowers' crew finds no signs of a break-in. The Jays reported missing late Thursday night. By the end of the day Sunday, the sheriff's department kicks things into high gear. They call in the U.S. Army and Air Force, along with the LASD heavy hitters. It's a specialized squad called Emergency Services Detail, or ESD.

They do search and rescue, underwater search and recovery, and they support the special weapons team with medical skills. Dave Rathbent was one of the ESD members sent out to search for AJA. And the adrenaline that you get from ESD is different from any other adrenaline. ESD deputies are equipped to handle all types of emergency scenarios. But it wasn't just the rocky ledges and wild animals they had to worry about here. The area was full of all kinds of criminal activity. One of the things they told our searchers, teams on day one was John may have stumbled into a meth lab by accident. So that was told to us

when we were out searching. And the reason they told us is they recommended we take weapons. Rathman and his team of searchers come to the punch bowl, armed and ready for action. Because maybe Aj isn't lost or injured or running for the hills. Maybe he's the victim of foul play. The command post doesn't expand on why they thought Ajay may have been taken out by meth-related violence. But to Rathbun, this theory doesn't sound too far-fetched. Because the Aniloh Valley is isolated, outlosh, and on account of its size, difficult to police. There are a lot of people who just don't want to be around other human beings out there, which makes them sometimes dangerous. There's people cooking meth.

It was a little bit like the Old West in a way. I mean, this is a very unusual, strange place. And remember that abandoned mine searchers scoped out? Well, it turns out they're everywhere. And they're a prime location for body dumping. One of the things ESD did was recover dead bodies from mines. And it wasn't just the mines.

corpses turn up all over these parts. You know, if all the dead bodies that were up there from being deliberately disposed of stood up at once, they'd be shoulder to shoulder. It's a chilling image of the area's darker side. Ajie would jog from the devil's punch bowl into the Angeles National Forest, which has been called the most dangerous national forest in America. Around the time of Ajay's disappearance, it's estimated that two to three dozen corpses turned up in the forest every year. and those were just the ones that were found. So Rathman understands the danger he faces,

but pushes on in search of footprints. You have to look at the ground and look at bushes that have been pushed and we walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked. And we generally don't give up until it's just ridiculous. The search is taxing for Rathbun, physically and emotionally, because he and Ajae were friends and back in the early 90s, they were even partners.

If it was me that needed cover, he'd be there. I didn't even think about it. Someone you could definitely depend on. Rathbun and Ajae spent a lot of time driving around together. But they didn't sit around riffing like partners in a buddy-caught movie. He was laconic. Didn't have a lot to say unless you worked on him. And he was always kind of suburb.

serious? Aja was hardly two-dimensional, though. He used his deadpan personality to mess with people. He had this secret sense of humor, but it was really hard to tell which card he was playing, the funny card or the I'm John and I'm Dead Serious card. One time Rathbun and Aja had to chase down a suspect. Rathbun was driving,

and he ends up reversing down a one-way street. They got the guy, but Ajae looked pissed. And he added that, Dave, I need to talk to you. Rathven's gotten pretty good at impersonating John Age's baritone voice. He says he sounded a lot like lurch from the Adams family. What you just did was a violation of California state law. And if you do something like that again, I'll have to write you up. John, we were chasing a suspect and we were law enforcement.

enforcement officers. And so we get exemptions during those things. That may be true, but it was illegal. Is this John being funny? You would not know. And he will never let you know. OJ was hard to read. In fact, there's even confusion over the pronunciation of his last name. His family says OJ. But to his friends... It was OJ. And he never correct. We'll never know why he didn't tell people how to pronounce his name, but it seems fitting for someone who remains a mystery to so many.

Aja was an enigma to just about everyone around him, so when he disappeared, he became an easy target for conspiracy theories. Stories began to circulate that Aja's alive and well living in Alaska, others say Mexico. Some say he was recruited by a mercenary group or join the C.O. These theories were fueled by weird comments Ajay had made to friends like Dave Rathbun. Dave, yes. You guys think you can find people with your searches and you think you're pretty good at it, right? I could go in the mountains and you'd never find me.

And I said, there are people who want to be found that we can't find. So I'm not real impressed with your... put your declaration there. If you don't want to be found, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to find you, so I agree. And of course, that conversation takes on extra meaning as searchers keep coming up empty-handed. I participated in that search until my feet were bloody, as did several of my peers. But day six, they said, well, shut it down. What do you mean, shut it down?

Who said that? Who gave that order? Who shut this thing down? What are you talking about? Day six. The sheriff's department folds the search after six days and gives a statement to the press. Sergeant Sauer, one of the deputies overseeing the operation, says, quote, A good analogy would be someone coming up to you and giving you two to three pieces of a 500-piece puzzle and asking you to guess what the picture is.

Throw into that a few pieces of an entirely different puzzle, and that is what we work with. we might never get it right, end quote. You want to trust the department that they're doing a right thing, but no one asked us if we should shut it down. If I'm the search and rescue guy, and my partners are search and rescue guys, and the helicopter pilots have been on hundreds of searches, why are we asking them what they think and their input?

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

you cancel a search for somebody who can run 50 or 100 miles in the wilderness, really knows the wilderness as good or better than anybody in ESD. Set it down. Why are you shutting it down? The sheriff's department tells the public that AJA disappeared without a trace and that they're ending the search because they're just spinning their wheels. But behind the scenes, they're telling a very different story. Well, they say that they decided he committed suicide.

I just got back from Jamaica with my family, a week of bliss by the beach. Lots of curry goat and jerk chicken and long walks. I'm going to apply for my Sandcastle Architects license. now that I'm officially an expert. We left when it was 10 below and arrived to sunshine, and it reminded me how meaningful a change of place can be. And I'm here to remind you that while you're traveling, your home doesn't have to sit empty.

Hosting your home could be a simple way to make use of a place that's already there. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca. Forward slash host. I'm David Ramnik, host of the New Yorker Radio Hour. There's nothing like finding. a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters.

In print or here on the podcast, the New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and depth and even humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. Internal LASD reports claim that AJA was distraught over his failing marriage and took his own life in the punch bowl. That gunshot the area resident heard. That could have been the sound of Ajay just putting an end to it all. But the sheriff's department makes that determination without a body. They don't find any remains, blood, bullets, or a suicide note. Nothing. The only thing they think they may have found of Ajay's was an energy bar wrapper left on one of the trails.

From what we can tell, there's not a lot pointing to suicide. So we reach out to Ajay's colleagues and friends to get their thoughts. He was obviously down. He was obviously upset, but was it enough to commit suicide? Sergeant Vince Burton is still on the fence. On the one hand, Aj did appear torn up over his marital problems. On the other, he seemed to be coping. Would you be telling me about your ultra marathon if you were just going to end it all? Would you even be planning to go run at the Punchbowl, which is an ugly area anyway. For fact-checking purposes, we want to make clear.

The punch bowl is not ugly. But go on, Vince. None of that made sense to me with the suicide. For Ajay's running buddy, Randy Meggedly, there's no question. Plain simple. I think he killed himself. That's the only way I can explain it. Because he says, Ogey was acting strangely, even more strangely than usual, in the weeks before his disappearance. He says, you know, there's a bunch of caves and stuff out here.

You can pretty much disappear, I think, was the word that he used, and nobody would never find you. Aja said similar things to Dave Rathman. But he didn't put a lot of stock into any of the statements because he says, Aja is just a weird guy. Our unit was next to a big giant duck pond. And one of the ways we used to make jokes about each other is, kind of like, where do you fit in the duck pond? John was, I don't malign him, but he was one of the oddest ducks in the pond,

which is good, right? You need them. You don't want everybody swimming the same. Initially, Rathbin was open to the possibility of suicide, but he's become increasingly skeptical over time. Because if Aja had killed himself, he thinks his body or some trace of him, would have turned up by now. So Ajay's colleagues are divided on what happened to him. It's kind of like those faces seen in the rocks at the devil's punch bowl. Same details, but interpreted in different ways.

And that makes sense, because we feel conflicted about it too. Aja did say some eerie things about disappearing. But this disappearing act would be pretty hard to pull off. I mean, how could he have buried himself and stay buried for almost three decades? Rathbun asked the sheriff's department to explain that one. They said, well, we think he might have sat on the edge of one of those minds and blown himself into the mine. Okay, we are really stretching now for an explanation as to why we can't find him.

I didn't accept it. Just common sense told me, you probably ought to see whether there's any evidence of self-infliction. Pissed-off old cop Mike Bauer is evangelical in his belief that the suicide theory is bullshit. Because he says the sheriff's department didn't arrive at this conclusion. They led with it. And that poisoned the investigation from the start. Bauer says that as early as day three, an LASD official was pushing the suicide narrative during search team briefings.

To Bauer, this was equivalent to telling searchers to lay. let up. I took that person outside and I said, what in the hell did you say that for? How could you possibly know that at this point? How could you possibly discourage them to search for somebody that worked for you? The sheriff's department was even sharing this theory with the press. We haven't ruled out the possibility of suicide, but we don't have any evidence to support that that's what he came here to do.

Bauer thinks it's irresponsible to promote this. the suicide theory without a high degree of certainty. So he prods the department to keep investigating. I kept contacting homicide and saying, something's wrong. I'm telling you, there's a problem. But he says the department ignored the case to such an extent, but he began to question their motives. Nobody was in charge of it,

and nobody wanted any of it once they saw how stinky it was getting. Randy Maggardly represents the other end of the spectrum. So we ask him what he thinks about the possibility of foul play. I refer to myself as a mushroom. They just feed me a little bit of poop every once in a while. I wasn't in the no on that whole thing. I've never heard the mushroom poop metaphor before. Yeah, you know, you feed you a little bit of poop and you grow a little bit.

At first, the mushroom poop analogy went way over my head. It sounded like a southern expression my mom just forgot to teach me. But then it clicked while I was watching The Departed, the Martin Scorsese movie, about corruption within the Boston Police Department. My theory on feds is they're like mushrooms. Feed him shit and keep him in the dark. I think what Meggardley is saying is that he doesn't ask a lot of questions because he prefers to be kept in the dark about things that don't concern him. And who can really blame him? I mean, law enforcement agencies are not exactly known for their culture of transparency. That file, you'd have to get special, special permission to touch that file.

Dave Rathman, Ajay's former partner, says the Sheriff's Department is unusually protective of the Ajay case file. And they don't even like to hear you talking about it. Well, to me, that's what you would call a red flag. So Rathman asked his buddy, a retired detective working cold cases for the sheriff's department, to review the OJ case. Could you maybe grab that case file? And he went, oh, no. I said, what do you mean, oh, no?

Why wouldn't you want to take a look at it? He said, no, that's a hot potato. No one's allowed to touch that. If I started poking around that case, they'd let me go. I said, well, that's interesting. Why? It's a suicide. He said, I don't know.

I just know that that case can't be touched. Those red flags Or another reason Rathbitt and others just can't get behind the party line As my father would say, God bless him, there's some rotten in the woodpile

and it stinks and I can smell it. And that brings us back to the poop mushroom. It might thrive in darkness. But to me, that's not an ideal environment for policing. I mean, the whole concept behind law enforcement, is it watchful eyes deter crime, right? But who is watching the police? There's very little oversight of law enforcement agencies,

and it's hard to hold them accountable since they control the collection and release of information about internal problems. The philosophy of the Sheriff's Department is to hide it. And the philosophy of government, in a lot of respects, is that way now with the terrible way they handle the public records requests and stuff. They just basically stonewe.

all you, they give you the middle finger if you're asking for something that the public has a right to know. Tell me about it, Bauer. We tried with those public records requests and got the proverbial middle finger. Without access to the information, it's hard for us to know how the sheriff's department handled the OJ case. And we'd remain in the dark if it weren't for Mike Bauer and other deputies coming forward. Bauer retired in 2002 and has spent the better part of his retirement in vogue.

investigating Aja's disappearance. And he's uncovered what looks like some pretty damning information about the sheriff's department. They lied to me. They lied to me as a fucking captain of the fucking sheriff's department with 33 years on the job. They fucking lied to me. While I'm in charge of sheriff's intelligence, they're fucking lying to me about what they're doing at homicide to shut this thing up. They don't want me involved in it. Oh, imagine.

That's how offensive that is. We know that law enforcement has its problems, but they're not usually laid out for us by died-in-the-wall cops. People who know this world from the inside and can show us where the bodies are buried, figuratively speaking. We tell Bauer we want to do a deep dive on the Ajae case, beginning with his investigation. You guys have stumbled into a cluster of shit. But he's not as encouraging as we expect him to be. And for good reason. Do you have any advice for us while looking into this disappearance?

I wouldn't do it alone. In the event, somebody did decide that you were getting too close to something. You will not be found killed. You will simply disappear. This season on Valley of Shadows. Early on, I let the suicide theory sit at 50-50. As I've learned more and more, I'm at about 90-95 murder, 5 to 10% suicide. The rumor around the drug scene was that a deputy stumbled onto something he shouldn't of,

and he was taken care of. I'm hearing shit out of the street, man. And, OJ, he didn't commit suicide. He was murdered. I'm hearing more than one person. And I started hearing some rumors that there was a guy. And yet there's no indication that gun was ever booked into evidence. If you ratted or they thought you were going to rat, it wasn't, hey, don't do that ever again, you're done.

They got rid of you. So that's where the murders came in. He was describing with his hands and his arms and his whole body where this cop was buried at. In other words, it's not safe not because of criminals. It's not safe because of law enforcement. And there's nothing worse than that. Hey dude, we're getting like pretty far out in the middle and nowhere and no one knows we're out here. You've got to be careful where you go and who you talk to.

If you have any information or tips related to the disappearance of John Age, please call 213-262-9-889 or email Shadows at bushkin.fn. Valley of Shadows is reported, written, and produced by us. Haley Fox and Betsy Shepard. Our editor is Diane Hotson. Our executive producers are Jacob Smith and Alexandra Garroton. Original music by Jake Gorski, Ray Lynch, Mike Jersich, and Hayden Gardner. Sound design by Jake Gorski.

Fact-checking by Onica Robbins. Additional production support by Sonia Gerva. And our show art was designed by Sean Carney and Betsy Shepard. Special thanks to Nick White for show art photography. Additional thanks to Jeremy Tao. Bally of Shadows is a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. From Type 2 fun, we're Haley and Betsy.

See you next week. I'm David Remnick, host of the New Yorker Radio Hour. There's nothing like finding a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters. In print or here on the podcast, the New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and depth and even humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.