[birds chirping]
[horses nickering]
[plastic rustling]
‐ If I could get it off here.
There you go.
This is what people claim they saw,
you know, when they see a Bigfoot.
♪
Gimlin and Roger asked me if I'd wear the suit, you know,
and promised me to give me a thousand bucks, you know,
for 10 minutes work.
What the heck?
That's kinda the way that we got,
you know, mixed up in the Bigfoot thing.
But they said you can't tell anybody anything.
Nothing. No. Nothing.
I said, "Okay, I won't."
So, uh, for 35 years, I kept it, you know.
I denied it that was me,
and I denied it, you know, all those years.
"Well, we know it was you."
"No, you know, you're full of beans."
I put my legs in
and then I put my arms in and then I stood up,
and they zipped it up, and then the head went on last.
I walked across there and it only took one shot
of me going across there.
It was hot, you know. I was afraid of getting shot,
by, you know, a hunter or something out there with a rifle.
‐ For people to say, "Well, it had to be somebody in a suit" and stuff,
I said, "That just‐‐"
I could tell if there was somebody in a suit.
There was no such thing.
I could just see everything moving
underneath the hair and the muscle and‐‐
‐ "Have him look at my right hip."
I had my jeans on. It was my wallet.
He knows it was me.
‐ Bob Heironimus is not a very big guy.
He probably only stands about five‐foot‐nine or ‐ten.
‐ Come to find out, well, you know,
in the last, uh... years,
he just lives down the road from me a ways.
‐ He's my neighbor, but, um, I still wave at him
when I go by and‐‐
‐ He won't speak to me or‐‐
Or he drives by, he won't look at me and‐‐
What?
‐ Yeah, he has waved a few times, but he won't look this way.
‐ The film footage actually speaks for itself.
Not knowing sometimes does create
a doubt if there is such a thing.
If somebody comes up to me and says,
"Well, that was fake," I'll just say, "Well,
[clicks tongue] so be it."
You know?
"If you can prove it, then prove it."
♪
[dog barking in distance]
DAVID HOLTHOUSE: I'd been chasing this crazy fucking story
I heard in the fall of 1993...
[thunder rumbling]
about a Sasquatch
tearing three guys apart on a cannabis farm
in Mendocino County.
And after weeks of trying, finally got a hit
on somebody that had heard the story.
This guy Razor, he keyed in on, "Yeah, that rings a bell."
And he had two critical pieces of new information.
One was the three guys that were killed were Mexicans
and two,
that the location was not only Mendocino County
but specifically Spy Rock Road.
Now, private investigator that I hired
kinda disappeared for a couple weeks,
and then he just came across with this text
that was like, A, saying that he quit
and B, like,
you are venturing into dangerous territory with this investigation.
He won't return my phone calls. He won't return my texts.
He won't answer my emails.
Like, nothing.
RAZOR [on phone]: Hello.
‐ Hey, man, this is David Holthouse.
Uh... I don't know what your schedule's looking like
next few weeks, you know, a month out, something like that
but if, uh, is there anyway we could knock around a bit
together up in Mendo?
RAZOR: Uh, yeah. Yeah.
HOLTHOUSE: The next step is to find out
what was going on with Mexicans working on dope farms
in Mendocino County.
What kind of shit was going on at Spy Rock Road in the early '90s?
♪
You look at local news coverage going back decades,
you know, stabbing on Spy Rock, shooting on Spy Rock,
murder on Spy Rock.
Spy Rock. Spy Rock. Spy Rock.
♪
Tell me about Spy Rock Road
and what makes it different
than other areas in Humboldt or Mendocino.
‐ Well, it's a‐‐ I mean, back then especially,
you're pretty cut off, you know.
So you go up there and make a commitment to grow,
you're not gonna be coming down
every couple of days to get something.
GHOSTDANCE: You go up the mountain a little ways
and it's the Hells Angels controls that part of the mountain.
So it's a rough and tumble mountain.
It's a mountain where there's always been rumors
that why everyone else was getting robbed and home invasions,
it didn't go on up there.
Because it was protected in a way by the locals.
RAZOR: It was one of those areas where there was a potential
for a heightened amount of violence.
It wasn't the first time I heard someone got killed up there.
♪
It's not that hard to grow cannabis.
But to... finish it
and to protect it while it's growing
that starts to add elements
of, uh, danger and skill
that are necessary to, like, pull it off.
I mean, you had to control your farm,
you had to control your area.
You know? If you can't instill respect from your neighbor,
you‐‐ then you gotta instill fear in them.
HOLTHOUSE: Early '90s, it's like full‐on militarization
of the war on drugs, right?
Was it like being occupied by, uh‐‐
RAZOR: Yeah, I mean, there would be armored personnel vehicles,
you know, and‐‐
I mean, I, I remember the word eradication was
the word that they used the most back then.
They, they were hell‐bent on eradicating the cannabis plant.
It was like you were,
you were trying to be a farmer in a warzone.
The interdiction efforts by the DEA and CAMP
put a lot of pressure on the community,
and so there's a lot of community trauma
that's been, uh, just layered
over the years.
[rain pouring]
[thunder rumbling]
HOLTHOUSE: Before I got to the Emerald Triangle in 1993,
I had this vision of it being
this sort of dope‐growing peaceful utopia.
I didn't know the reality of the place,
which was that
they were all carrying guns.
All these Back to the Land hippies,
these guys were all armed.
Heavily armed in a lot of cases.
You know, listening to The Grateful Dead
but packing an AR‐15.
And then
[chuckles] there were the booby traps.
One of the jobs on the farm
was to check, maintain, and install booby traps.
Okay.
And we visited a couple other farms
to help string fishhooks on fishing line about eye level
around cannabis patches.
They also were setting small‐game traps
and installing motion sensors around the perimeter.
This was the era of CAMP and Operation Green Sweep.
The DEA had made weed
a top priority in the war on drugs.
So paranoia was running high.
Um, for those who don't know, what was CAMP?
‐ CA‐‐ CAMP stood for the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting.
And it was a multi‐agency task force that was developed in 1982,
uh, to eradicate marijuana in California.
♪ dramatic music playing ♪
NEWSCASTER: In the same Northern California hills
where the giant redwoods have grown for centuries
are now hidden patch after patch of marijuana plants,
known here as Humboldt Gold. America's most potent
and profitable variety of the illegal drug.
This week, law enforcement authorities have moved into Humboldt County
in a major raid to begin chopping down and clearing out
the clandestine croplands.
MOLLY SINOWAY: The first time I heard about CAMP
was when I saw helicopters landing
in the meadow of the school, where our kids went to school.
That was my first experience,
hearing that whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp,
which is terrifying.
♪
LARRY LIVERMORE: They shake the whole hillside.
They were in full combat regalia with automatic rifles,
hanging off the side of it, just staring back at me.
Sometimes the soldiers would come down the rope ladders
and just demolish everything.
They would just go from one farm to the next.
Your whole year could be wiped out in the space of an afternoon,
and that's what happened to a lot of people.
♪
MAN 1: Welcome to the Emerald Triangle.
MAN 2 : The war on drugs disturbs me.
It seems wrong to me that the government can go to war
against its own citizens.
REPORTER: One drug agent said using the military
to go after gardens planted by a bunch of aging hippies
is like using a Howitzer to kill a gnat.
[indiscernible singing]
‐ You've got these people in armored helicopter gunships, you know.
They're hanging out, you know, with their automatic weapons, you know.
It's like don't hit a bump, you know, and nail my wife and kids.
WOMAN: Some friends of mine were chased out of their house
and across the meadow,
carrying their baby in their arms, by a helicopter.
‐ Their attitude has been we can do anything we want.
If people happen to live in an area
where marijuana is being grown, they don't have rights.
[gunshots]
SINOWAY: I don't know what motivated the camp officers
to dehumanize
a whole huge group of people.
Young families, with children, with animals.
It's a mystery to me.
[indiscernible conversation]
MARK SAIZ: Um, when they work an operation,
we would have patches made.
Uh, "If you plant it, we will come,"
uh, from the movie
the‐‐ with Kevin Costner.
Well, this is the patch we used for one year.
CAMP was outstanding.
I had a lot of fun working for CAMP.
Um... something new every day. Something new every day.
Uh, we had no clue what we were getting into,
but, uh, for the most part, yes, it was fun.
Uh, dangerous, uh, rewarding,
uh, and exciting.
Real exciting.
CHRISTOPHER DIENSTAG: They'd go up there, and they'd be cowboys, man.
Yoo‐hoo! Fly in their helicopters like they were in Apocalypse Now
and come down and cut it down and, like,
decimate the‐the devil weed
and put the farmers out of business
and then smoke their pot.
♪
If you got caught,
you're fucking going to jail for a long time.
So every little grow area that I had in my patch,
a lot of the other guys too,
was handcrafted amongst the manzanita
and the oak
so you couldn't see it.
And it was really hard work.
Back then, you had to carry everything on your back.
You work all year long
and they just swoop in, and they take all your labor,
own all your effort and all your investment,
and you're fucked.
There's no money that year.
There's no, there's no money for food.
There's no money for diapers.
There's no, there's no money.
SINOWAY: After CAMP occurred,
prices of marijuana skyrocketed
because it had been so eradicated.
So families became very protective of who visited
their homesteads.
At one point, there was a security store that opened in town.
As marijuana become more and more,
uh, valuable monetarily,
there was the risk of... of someone stealing your crop.
WOMAN: I carry a gun when I go up there,
because there's been a lot of rip‐offs around.
I was ripped off last year up there.
And we have to have security set up all over the garden
and somebody just constantly watching it.
LIVERMORE: A real cultural sea‐change happened in the wake of CAMP.
It shattered the, the community,
in that almost all of my initial community left.
‐ Having that additional constant stress,
that threat of, "Am I gonna be busted,"
"Am I gonna be ripped off,"
Is somebody gonna lie to me, is someone gonna set me up?"
And some people decide they don't want to live that way any longer.
Uh, and the smart ones took their proceeds
and, like, left the game behind.
But some people just got caught up in it and didn't know when to get out.
You know, money... money changes people.
Ownership, it changes everything.
Because once you own something,
now you have to protect it.
So these hippies turned.
Some of them turned in the sense, because now they had ownership,
and they had something to lose and they had to protect it.
[Holthouse speaking]
[line ringing]
[ringing continues]
MAN: [on phone] Hello. ‐ Hi, is this [bleep].
MAN: Yes.
‐ Is, uh‐‐ Could I come see you,
uh, this afternoon, this evening in Laytonville?
‐ I could meet in about an hour.
I'm in‐‐ I'm close to Ukiah right now.
INFORMANT: Okay.
‐ Which parking lot?
‐ Boomer's?
‐ Okay. All right. Boomer's is a bar. I got you.
Tha‐that was the piece of information that was confusing me.
Okay. Parking lot at Boomer's, uh, at 5:00?
‐ That's classic doper, right?
Fucking‐‐ Meet in the fucking parking lot in a car.
Uh‐‐
You know, I've met probably a dozen or more
old‐time cannabis growers from the Emerald Triangle
who are still active in the area.
They're willing to sit down and talk to me,
but there's no fucking way they were ever gonna go on camera.
Not super‐psyched on this arrangement but I think that it's, uh,
it's, it's worth undertaking the risk, so‐‐
Yeah. We'll go see what's up.
Yep.
My whole career as a journalist
has been built upon the fact
that, for reasons that I don't care to examine too closely,
criminals feel very comfortable with my presence,
and I feel very comfortable around criminals.
I read to them as crooked, as crooked as they are.
That's always been the case, since I was very young.
A lot of the stories that I reported and wrote,
I was chasing monsters in the sense that‐‐ that I was, uh,
you know, pursuing my own demons that lived in my head.
I mean, fuck, the most, the most famous story
that I ever reported and wrote was called Stalking the Bogeyman,
which was about destroying a real monster
that had done something monstrous to me.
Well, it's no secret. I mean, I‐I've been very public with the fact
that I was sexually assaulted when I was seven years old.
I didn't have any sort of concept of sex
or rape or anything like that.
I just knew that it hurt like hell.
‐ What was he saying?
‐ I don't remember him saying anything.
‐ Were you saying anything?
‐ I don't think so. I think I was just crying.
It's a pretty common consequence of that
for, um... people who are victimized
by childhood sexual assault
to come away from the experience
with a, shall we say, a diminished sense of self‐worth.
And that enabled me
to take risks without a lot of fear.
[car passing by]
Come on.
Just leave it. Quit fucking with it.
Rolling around with a, just with a digital recorder going
and with a hidden camera,
you get a much more authentic representation
[horn honks]
[Holthouse speaking]
HOLTHOUSE: I was up with a old‐time grower.
She told me a story about these guys from LA,
you know, and they got killed and buried up there.
And she said, like, one of her dogs went out and found their boots one day.
[Informant speaking]
[Holthouse speaking]
Holy fucking shit!
[exhales forcefully]
I mean, this is a place where overt racism
is as widespread
as it is anywhere in the country, including the deep South.
Okay?
And that was, if anything, even more the case in 1993
when these three guys from Mexico were supposedly killed.
I met this guy named Juan who was from Sinaloa in Mexico,
and Juan was one of about a half a dozen cannabis growers
that are, uh, subleasing land to grow weed on.
They would all talk to me.
They would all be cool with my taking notes.
But as soon as I brought up the idea of doing an interview on camera,
it was like, fuck, no.
And I understand why.
If they get busted, like, their families in Mexico don't eat.
They're vulnerable. I mean, they're, they're outsiders.
If Juan just disappears off the face of the Earth,
I mean, his, his family is not even gonna know
where to start looking for him, let alone where to point law enforcement.
Like the guys that allegedly got killed in 1993.
‐ Up here, they put on this wonderful
"We're enlightened, we're spiritual."
No. This is en‐whitenment up here.
The tension between Latino people
and white people in Northern California is huge.
There's a lot of hatred and bad vibes
and a lot of racism.
Very much.
These towns are actually more or less,
believe it or not, separated.
HOLTHOUSE: Starting in the '80s,
the farmers in the Emerald Triangle hired
Mexican laborers, the same as fruit growers
in Central Valley in California.
DIENSTAG: You know, these immigrants came into this environment
highly motivated to, like, try
to carve something out, to make some money,
to send it back to their family at home, right?
To make ends meet. These are hardworking brothers and sisters, man.
I mean, I've had the experience of working on an organic farm
and I worked with, uh, three guys,
two of them from Guatemala and one of them from El Salvador,
and they worked me under the table, dude.
And they were 20 years older than I was at the time, man!
Those guys were tough.
Those guys were just trying to make a buck,
try to send some money home or survive in this country,
and I can't fault them for that.
I just can't do it.
[vehicles passing by]
[Diana speaking in Spanish]
HOLTHOUSE: Fair to say that criticism of CAMP represented
misunderstanding of what a dangerous business it was?
DALE FERRANTO: It, it seemed in the beginning
of the, uh, CAMP seasons,
some of the growers were local people, entrepreneurs if you will,
trying to make a buck.
And the perception of some of the public was that
the marijuana growers and the marijuana business in general
were, uh, love child, hippie type of operations,
nothing to worry about, no danger involved.
♪ dramatic music playing ♪
In '92 and '93, where we began to see more of the violence,
the weaponry, the booby traps,
we, you know, knew now that we were up against something a little different.
‐ We've had wire, barbed wire.
We've, uh, had one with a bear trap on the trail.
MAN: They're protecting their sites
whether it's fishhooks hanging from leaders,
buried shotgun shells, and you name what else.
‐ When the gold fields of California opened up,
it wasn't the best and brightest that came to pan for gold.
It was, like, people trying to extricate a high profit for a little amount of work.
The same thing happened growing cannabis.
And some of us become bad actors.
You know, you get held hostage, you get tortured,
you pick up a drug habit,
or you do a little bit of time.
You go back up there, you're not the same anymore.
LIVERMORE: A lot of harder drugs started coming in,
and you had people up there that were
probably high on cocaine or amphetamine or heroin constantly.
People started building sheds or bunkers underground
and grew more and more marijuana indoors.
My near neighbor, once he retreated into his bunker,
he started doing either cocaine or amphetamines
to keep himself awake to, to guard it all.
So he would sit there watching his money pile up,
but he could never spend it
'cause, 'cause he couldn't leave
and eventually, uh, I don't know how many years later,
he just died there of a heart attack.
[wind gusting, branches creaking]
DIENSTAG: You know, the guys in the backwoods
uh, they get isolated, right?
And you get kinda desocialized.
You, like, become like an undomesticated animal.
And you come in to town
and it's loud and it's bright and there are rules.
And I have friends that, like, literally disappeared into the woods,
uh, that just became feral.
♪
And that kind of environment, when you're that isolated
it's very easy to enter another kind of mental realm.
‐ I mean, someone doesn't have to be an amphetamine addict
to have been out in the woods maybe too long
and been traumatized by being out there
and fearing for their lives.
I feel like all the Sasquatch stories I ever heard
emanates from that traumatic feeling of, like,
"I might not belong here, and something is gonna take me out."
♪ tense music playing ♪
♪
[insects chirping]
HOLTHOUSE: In the Fall of 1993,
I totally believed
that those guys that came to the cabin
were convinced that there was
a... omnipresent threat.
And one was them was traumatized.
He was like, "No! It wasn't a fucking rip‐off.
All the weed's still there."
Typical marijuana patch at that time,
at that time of the year, we're talking about, you know,
$200,000 to $300,000 worth of, worth of weed,
you know, was there for the taking.
And by this guy's account,
whoever killed these three guys didn't take the weed.
So it wasn't a rip‐off. It was just, you know‐‐
The plants were all torn up,
but they were just left strewn about.
Now, the other thing that I would later figure out
is that he was on crystal meth.
Like, and that a lot of the people I'd been meeting
during the last couple days were tweakers.
I just hadn't any experience, you know,
with the toothless and ruthless up to that point.
I would love to find the guys that came to the cabin that night,
but I think there's a high likelihood that those two guys are dead.
Um, tweakers don't have a long shelf life.
The guy goes out the door still, like, ranting about
how the fact that they got to warn everybody up there.
The guy that owns the place sits down,
and he goes, "Well, that was pretty fucking weird."
And we all just started laughing, you know.
I mean, it was like a release of tension kind of laughter,
but we all just busted up laughing.
And then we didn't say anything more about it.
♪
I reached out to a confidential source.
He absolutely refused to go on camera
and has really good reasons for not going on camera.
He's turned his life around, he's gotten clean.
He got out of the dope game.
He wanted to meet with me in person at a restaurant.
We were there for hours with these retired weed growers,
you know, drinking wine, eating.
He's sitting across from me, and, you know,
I'm not getting anything from this guy.
Until the restaurant closes down and all the other patrons leave
and it's just our table.
He sorta like leans into me, and he's like,
"I hear that you're looking into those three Mexican guys
that [bleep] greased back in '93."
And he says, "Wow, man, that's, that's pretty heavy."
That's a poker face moment.
So, in the moment,
on the inside, I'm like, "Fuck!"
On the outside, I'm like,
"Yeah, that's what I'm doing. Okay."
The way that this source came across with the name was
as if it was common knowledge,
at least in this social gathering.
And, uh, he tells me that [bleep]
worked on a farm that was owned by the Hells Angels.
And now that jibed with other information
that I had been told about what was going on in Spy Rock
in the 1990s is that the Hells Angels had set up shop
around Spy Rock Road.
So, again, it's another one of those pieces of information
that... kinda rises to the top.
It fits.
Hey, man, let me ask you something,
I mean, regarding [bleep].
Do you think he poses any sort of threat to my personal safety?
HOLTHOUSE: I mean, look, with these kinds of investigations,
I'm still alive because I do a constant risk analysis, okay.
And my risk analysis in regards to this individual is
don't put his name out in the public, it's not worth the risk.
As far as I'm concerned, he's alleged killer only,
and alleged killer he will remain.
‐ Oh. Yeah, I don't wanna‐‐
HOLTHOUSE: Okay. ‐ Yeah.
HOLTHOUSE: Um‐‐
‐ Okay.
Yeah, I don't wanna‐‐ I just‐‐
I wanna avoid talking about that guy.
HOLTHOUSE: Avoid talking about [bleep]?
‐ Yeah. HOLTHOUSE: Okay. Um‐‐
‐ He's got long hair,
and he, um, wears a leather jacket with patches,
a couple affiliation patches on it.
He's got a big pickup truck.
Looks like any one of a number of other deadheads, I don't know.
He's a hyper guy. He's a high‐strung guy.
He's a curious character. He was a good neighbor.
And he was very, very nice.
You know, a few years ago,
there was a murder on Spy Rock,
and it was a, it was a guy from another country.
And he got dumped along the side of the road.
And the police swarmed the whole area.
And they harassed [bleep].
And I know he's one of the few people
that stuck in there with lawyers and fought for his rights.
And I know he got all his guns back.
HOLTHOUSE: So what was the murder where he was harassed by the cops?
‐ That's the one that happened way later
where they found the one dead foreigner guy,
and he was a trimmigrant.
He was an outside guy.
And they found him literally in a ditch up there by the road.
And then the cops got pissed and came‐‐
That was when they came up Spy Rock.
And that was way later than when you're talking about.
♪
[Diana speaking]
HOLTHOUSE: December 2013,
Hugo was working as a guard
and garden tender at a dope plot.
He was apparently asleep in his tent,
and someone murdered him by firing a shotgun
through the wall of the tent.
The cops got on to the murder because a family member
called the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office
and said that they were hearing
from multiple associates
that Hugo, uh, had been killed
and gave the cops the location.
[Diana speaking]
[sobs]
♪
HOLTHOUSE: Well, we really wanna meet [bleep].
We're gonna try and figure out a way to get to him.
‐ There's gotta be a way, and I will try
a backhanded way
to do that.
Right?
Um,
I got, I got a back‐‐
A Hells Angel affiliate, I know.
I'm gonna call him.
He may know how to get his phone number.
And I'll call him up. I'll call him up tonight.
HOLTHOUSE: Great. That'd be great.
[line ringing]
♪
HOLTHOUSE: Hey, is this [bleep]?
[Hells Angel member speaking]
♪ dramatic theme playing ♪
♪