Original subtitles

Okay.

Should I just go?

Monsters aren't born, they're made, we make them.

All of our monsters are human-made.

The... We make them out of the things we're afraid of,

we make them out of the things we hate.

In our past, we, we became fearful as an evolutionary mechanism

for survival.

Don't go in the cave. It's dark.

There could be something in there that will eat you.

It's a human coping mechanism.

This notion of things that are out of control,

things that we can't control.

It just seems to be hardwired into the human psyche.

Did, did kinda tell you why I was calling?

He mentioned that,

you know, that you'd be a good guy to talk to

about kinda Spy Rock and Mendo and the scene.

A confidential source told me

that in 1993

word on the mountain was that

had a hand in the murders

of three farm workers from Mexico

at a dope patch off Spy Rock Road.

Subsequent to that,

Ghostdance told me that was pulled in for questioning

by the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office

regarding a different murder at a dope farm

off Spy Rock Road that occurred in 2013.

How long have... Are you still based, like...

Are you still based in, in Mendo now?

Yeah, how... When did you first get there, man?

Would it... Would Spy Rock be a dangerous place

for my crew and I to just, like, go and start trying to get interviews

came across to me

like somebody who's experienced with handling interrogations.

Somebody that knew how to issue a veiled threat.

Okay, let me ask you one more,

one more thing, man. I mean, one of the stories,

one of the stories I heard when I was working at that farm

was about a, a triple homicide

around Spy Rock Road in October or November of 1993

where one version of the story is that

an actual Sasquatch did it.

Do you know anything about that?

Okay.

All right, man. Well...

Just got out of a meeting with a source on Spy Rock

and, um, dealing with all these dopers up here,

it's, it's such a nest of vipers.

It's hard to know what to believe or how to gauge the truth.

One quality I'm looking for is, consistency of information.

There are certain things that keep coming up

Three guys from Mexico, Hells Angels.

From sources in different towns, from different generations.

These common threads keep coming up.

Now, twice in the last 72 hours,

from two different individuals, I've heard that, yes,

three men were murdered on Spy Rock in the fall of 1993.

And they were murdered on orders from a powerful grower

up here on Spy Rock.

The, first source says the guys had gotten killed

because they had gotten a local girl strung out

on heroin and meth.

The source today just said, you know, quote,

you know, "They, they fucked with the wrong guy's daughter,

and it got 'em killed."

So that's just another angle to explore

and keep an eye and ear out for.

Thanks for agreeing to do this, man.

I appreciate it.

So I met with this Mendocino County investigator

who is only willing to talk to us if his identity is protected,

because... he's got a contract out on his life

because he killed a cartel operative in a shootout.

I asked you when we met I wanted to make sure about a guy named.

Okay.

I wasn't there when these events took place,

but from people I knew there,

they told me the story

that probably one of the first people here

to run a bigger operation

was a guy they called Bigfoot

who was up on Spy Rock.

A legendary guy.

- Interesting. - Yeah.

Had all his family riding around in off-road vehicles

with, you know, had football fields of pot.

He was the legendary big man on the mountain.

So there was a common terminology,

anything that went awry, "Bigfoot did it."

I'm realizing that

if was involved in the triple homicide

up on Spy Rock in the fall of 1993,

one possibility is that

he was following orders or acting on behest

of somebody or maybe just trying to curry favor

with someone much higher up the food chain.

By reputation, would Bigfoot have been the kind of guy

that would get somebody else to do a killing for him?

I... Once again, I don't know,

but that's not at all what I got from the people there was,

it was totally copacetic,

but it was like, don't come up here and mess with us.

I was thinking back to that night in the cabin in 1993,

and did I hear them say

"a" Bigfoot killed those guys,

or did I hear them say Bigfoot killed those guys?

Because memory's tricky like that

and I-I-I.

I don't know.

Could they have said, "I'm telling you, Bigfoot killed those guys"?

Yeah, maybe.

Maybe.

So, have you ever heard of an old-time grower

who also had property on Spy Rock in the early 1990s

who goes by the nickname Bigfoot?

When I lay this story on this cop

about an old-time grower on Spy Rock

known or nicknamed as Bigfoot,

without missing a beat he's like, "That sounds like Bigfoot Gary."

Um...

Right now, there are snitches

in and around Laytonville, California,

who are asking around on my behalf

about, about Bigfoot Gary,

about Hells Angels, about murders.

One thing that would make me feel a lot better

is if I were able to find somebody

that put and Bigfoot Gary together.

If I find somebody, whether cop or crook,

that says, "Hey, yeah, when was a young guy in the early '90s.

He worked for Bigfoot Gary."

Fuck, man, that would be huge.

One other thing I would really like to know is

why they pulled in

and searched his property

in relation to the 2013 murder

of Hugo Olea-Lopez.

Okay? Why did they key in on him?

Did they actually think that he had anything to do with it?

I'd really like to know that.

There is some parallels between his murder

and the original case in 1993,

in that he was a Mexican national

on Spy Rock Road.

And in both cases,

you know, there were harvested plants cut down but not stolen.

So it didn't look like a rip-off.

Granted there's no indication that a Sasquatch did it

but you strip that away, and there's a lot of similarities.

Okay.

David?

- Hey, how are you? - Good. Thanks.

- Nice to see you. - Likewise.

- Come on in. - Welcome to.

Okay. Thanks.

I came in in the fall of '13

after this case had kind of slowed down

and the next group of cases came in, as they always do.

I've been in communication with the family

I began to get in communication in '14

when I started to follow up on the case.

I was the only Spanish-speaking detective at the time,

so when she would call, I'd be the one that would talk to her.

Um... and that's his wife.

And, you know, we've talked a bunch, and she had some information she provided.

There's obviously some suspicions of, of close contacts with him,

but there was never any, any ability

to tie anybody down to anything.

I think so. I think that's how it played out.

There was no discovery of his, death.

There was, "This is where he's at, and he's dead."

And then they go up and they discovered him in a tent.

If you know Spy Rock, I mean, you're so far out there,

you gotta know where you're going.

We don't randomly fall on a tent.

So whatever it was, it was a target,

because it wasn't like that was the only doper around.

There were other ones in the area.

- He was targeted. - It had to have been.

Um...

How hard is it for you to investigate a homicide

when the victim is from... is an undocumented, you know, worker...

It's difficult.

With the growers' cases where you have Hispanic workers,

it's extremely difficult.

We thought there are more bodies than we could even count right now

up in the hills.

Lot of unreported murders?

I'm sure there are.

And a lot of unsolveds. It's pretty bad.

And it's not because we're not trying. It's because we don't have

that cooperation from the community, a lot of them.

Especially with marijuana growers, you know,

who's going to be willing to talk to us.

How are the Mexican immigrants

perceived in Mendocino?

What's like the level of just out-and-out racism

in Mendocino County?

There's a voice that's being put out there right now

all Hispanics are dope growers, well, that's not true.

My dad came here back in the late '60s.

Where I grew up, my family and a couple others,

we were some of the first Hispanics in the Valley.

There was definitely racism then.

And I don't know who you talked to.

I can imagine that the Hispanic growers may not be

as open and forthcoming to you as the old white hippie dope growers.

You know? They don't talk to me and I'm Hispanic.

I've got another Hispanic deputy.

We try our best,

but there's that fear of being in the black market

and not wanting to get in trouble for what they are doing.

Right.

Hugo's murder's going to be a tough case to solve

because of what he was involved in, because of where it happened.

I have no doubt that there are a number of people

who live and grow dope on Spy Rock Road

that know exactly... who killed Hugo and why.

Um, I am of equally little doubt

that none of those people would ever give it up to law enforcement.

Unfortunately, in our county

the last time I looked, there were at least six,

not only unsolved homicides,

homicides where we don't know who the victim was,

because there's no fingerprints on file with the Department of Justice.

In America, they've never been reported missing.

We've collected the DNA on these people,

but DNA only works

if you have something to compare it to.

I have walked into marijuana gardens

where there's a dead Hispanic on the ground

with no identification,

no tattoos,

and nobody in the area knows who he is or how he got there.

We have a guaranteed anonymous tip line,

that we would welcome information on.

Because solving a homicide is important.

For the family, for law enforcement,

and for the victim.

- Okay? - Okay.

This Mendocino County Sheriff's Office investigator

put me in touch with longtime resident of Laytonville,

longtime small-time grower on Spy Rock.

As I got within about 10 feet of the pickup, I could smell... meth.

Meth has a very distinctive

sickly sweet, sort of burning plastic smell to it.

Offered to buy her a drink at Boomer's.

She said no, she didn't want a drink, then she offered me a hit of meth.

So I said, no, thanks.

And then she said that she wanted to get in, get in my car and talk.

Well, I keep coming across the name of a guy nicknamed Bigfoot.

Why is he nicknamed Bigfoot, do you know?

He, um... Do you... Have you...

There was a guy by the name of Hugo Olea-Lopez

that was killed on Spy Rock, in 2013.

Um... he was a Mexican guy that was shotgunned.

He was, like, guarding a farm up there.

I don't know. I don't know.

Trying to find out more about that

and, the connection

between that case and, um, a triple murder

that I've heard about

that happened in 1993 in Spy Rock

near Iron Mountain.

I think that's why he wanted us to talk, yeah.

And that was one of the guys that got killed?

It's about, three a. M.,

about 10 hours after I met with in a parking lot at Boomer's,

and, maybe a contact high,

like a tweaker contact high, because I can't sleep.

Sorta tossing and turning, my mind's spinning in circles,

going over what she, laid on me in the car

and looking over the notes I scrawled down

as soon as she and I parted ways.

Could this be the one? Could we be talking about the same murder?

I mean, obviously, Spy Rock Road,

1993, is a very violent place, okay.

There's probably multiple homicides that have gone unsolved.

The biggest discrepancy of course being that

she said that it was two men that were killed

rather than three.

But the location's right.

The one other detail that she seemed certain on

was that the name of one of the men that was killed was Martinez.

I don't know. I mean, I guess the next step is

to really pin her down on the date.

You want to tell me about the,

crime that your son witnessed in the 1990s?

Are you sure that he told you it was two guys?

Do you remember what year that was?

'96? You sure?

Fuck, man.

You know? Once I started probing further,

it turned out that it was off by a couple years.

So different multiple homicide on Spy Rock Road.

Unsolved, unreported bodies buried in the woods.

Why are there so many missing people in Mendocino County?

This place is fucked up beyond belief.

People pass through here, and they just see how beautiful it is

in terms of the natural environment.

They have no idea of the shit that goes on in this area.

The rate of missing persons cases in Mendocino County

and all throughout the Emerald Triangle is per capita the highest

in the United States by far.

You hang out in these dope towns, and all around you are signs

about missing people.

Billboards and fliers in coffee shops

and grocery stores and bars.

I mean, just dozens, hundreds of them.

And all those missing persons fliers are literally signs

that there are monsters among us.

Look, I learned when I was still a little boy that monsters are real

and they will hurt you, okay.

But real-life monsters aren't huge and hairy with fangs.

They're smiling and friendly, until they're not.

So I'm attuned to monsters.

And the more time I spend in the Emerald Triangle,

the more I sense a lot of them up here, hurting a lot of people.

I mean, you go asking around

about three dead men, and the question you get back the most is,

"Which three dead men?"

Over time, the big cry was,

we want to stop the violence in cannabis

by legalizing it.

In truth, since legalization,

the violence has escalated hundreds of folds,

not a little bit.

The laws and the way they've carried them out

have been so draconian.

The black market

is five times bigger than it was a couple years ago,

and the white market's a mess.

When you take the lifestyle away

and you crush all the little people for corporate,

it becomes something different, and it has that curse on it.

And so all of this has created feuds and violence.

You guys know a guy named Bigfoot Gary who lives around here?

No? All right.

Now I've kinda got a target lock on Bigfoot Gary.

I really want a meeting and to, like, look in his eyes

and put this story to him, because I feel like I'd know.

I'd know whether or not

he was involved.

Okay.

How's it going?

Okay, cool.

Bandana works.

You're not a snitch, you're a source.

Um, when did you first meet Bigfoot Gary?

How many, how many seasons did you work for Gary?

What was he like to work for? What kind of a boss was he?

- All right, let's start over. - Play a little different tack.

Wher... How, how high up the, the food chain is he?

Like, where does he fit in around here?

You think Gary is capable of killing somebody or having them killed?

Which circumstances?

Take me through what you've heard.

They're probably still on the hill,

meaning their bodies.

If he had those three guys killed

because they raped his daughter,

fucking good for him, you know.

As far as I'm concerned, every rapist in the world

deserves to die screaming and alone in pain in the woods.

So, good on Bigfoot Gary if that's what he did.

If he killed these three guys because he's a racist fuck,

you know, then he deserves more than he's gonna get.

'Cause that means he knew a lot of white people up here would buy

into the bullshit stereotype of Mexicans being rapists.

And he'd get away with murder.

I really want to, meet him

and get a gauge of what kind of monster he is.

Okay, so I just came down off the mountain,

and I didn't have any cell service.

So, as soon as I got back on the grid,

I had two text messages pop up, bang bang.

Both of them sent in the last couple hours

from one of Bigfoot Gary's neighbors

who is relaying a message to me from Bigfoot Gary's wife.

Okay.

This is David.

Yeah.

Hi, Carolyn.

Okay, he didn't... He was...

He didn't have any business in Spy Rock or Mendocino in the early '90s?

He wasn't growing dope in Mendocino in the 1990s?

Any idea why people would be telling me this shit?

Okay.

Could you ask Gary if he's, if he's had a business partner

or he knows anybody named.

I'm...

Listen, is, is Gary sitting next to you?

Could I talk to him or are you the intermediary here?

Hey, Gary.

I'm looking specifically at the fall of 1993,

harvest season 1993.

All right, a version of the story I heard was that,

the guy on Spy Rock named, nicknamed Bigfoot

had kill these guys

because these guys had sexually assaulted Bigfoot's daughter.

No?

You didn't have a... You did not have a daughter in 1993, Gary?

And you didn't kill anybody in 1993?

Three, three guys from Mexico.

And you didn't kill anybody in 1993?

The rumor mill on the mountain

is that Bigfoot Gary arranged to have murdered

three guys who'd raped his daughter.

The problem with that is that.

Bigfoot Gary didn't have a daughter in 1993.

He's telling the truth about that. I checked.

Okay?

So there's a disconnect between the word on the mountain and reality.

And within that disconnect

is reasonable doubt and then some.

So, you hold my feet to the fire, I'm gonna say,

he's not our guy.

Bigfoot didn't do it.

There is this elusive truth

that I glimpsed, you know, through the trees.

And it's like the same obsession

that drives Squatchers

to spend half their lives in the woods.

They do it because they're obsessed.

They're convinced that they're always just

one step away

from getting the proof they need. Right?

Am I just doing the same shit?

Am I just, like, out there running around the woods,

like, convinced that I'm just one move away

from, like, really cracking this case

and being able to explain exactly what happened in 1993?

Finding Bigfoot

would probably fill a hole in my life.

My wish is for the world to finally have proof

that this creature actually exists.

I would give anything to see one.

As scary as some of these stories are

and how fearful we are

of that, you know, "monster in the closet,"

we still want to figure it out.

To have that, "See, I told you I'm not crazy."

"I told you when I was 10"

"what I saw out the window."

"You know, those eyes."

"And this is why.

It's right there."

The story of Sasquatch or of man-like monsters

has been with us from the very beginning.

Some of the earliest literary traditions in the west

and, well, in the east for that matter,

have included this wild-man figure.

A representation of perhaps our alter ego,

our lost connection to wild places.

I think it's fair to say that these stories

or mythologies about wild men

are really more about humans?

Yeah, it's always about humans.

It's never not about humans.

It's not about the giant beast.

And it gets back to this notion

of things that are out of control,

things that we can't control.

Wild people are beyond our control.

They live out in the woods.

They live very different lifestyles from us.

If you get too close to them, they might injure you.

There are people who behave outside

of what the mainstream considers normal behavior.

And that's where the wild man comes from.

With these kinds of investigations, you get a lead, right?

Or you see a path that you want to follow.

And then you start following that path away from square one. Okay?

And then you wind up, like, pretty far deep into the labyrinth,

and sometimes that path dead-ends.

And when that happens, that's when you need to go back to the beginning.

You need to go back to square one and be like, what have I missed?

I've gotten the name of two people that I think have the number

of the guy that owned the farm in '93,

and I've been jamming them to pass on a message to him

for the better part of a year

that I'd like to talk to him.

Finally, word comes back, like, "What about?"

I was like, "About a Bigfoot story that I heard"

"at his A-frame cabin in the fall of '93."

Word comes back, "Yeah, he'll talk to you about that."

Hello, this is David.

Okay.

Don't fucking put in the movie, whoever is editing this.

I'm serious, this is gonna fucking...

Any... Okay, if I'm scared about it, trust me.

I've a reason to be. I get a bad vibe from that guy.

Of all the people, honestly,

tha-that we've been deal... That I've been dealing with,

he's the one that has me the most concerned.

I remember two tweakers that stopped by the cabin.

Yeah.

They were freaked out. They said they'd seen some bodies.

They said that they'd seen Bigfoot tracks.

It's true.

What he tells me is that

those three guys needed to go.

Okay.

He proceeds to tell me

that Mexican workers would get jobs on farms,

but really it was kinda part of a campaign

to... you know, not take over, but to move in on the territory.

So what they were doing is, for example,

they would... a bunch of them would get jobs,

would hire on with, like, an elderly farmer

and just essentially just take over his operation.

Just be like, "This is ours now. What are you gonna do about it?"

Somebody at this meeting made the comment of, like,

"Fuck, I wish we had, like, Chupacabras around here

which would scare these guys off."

And then immediately, someone was like,

"We got something better than Chupacabra."

And so they started introducing

into this rumor-based information ecosystem

of the Emerald Triangle

stories about... ferocious Sasquatches

terrorizing farmers.

And so those were the stories

that I was hearing secondhand from all these farmworkers,

and I and everybody else that was in that scene

at the time.

And so that's another piece that falls into place.

Things make a little bit more sense now.

I'm like, okay,

how do you make it look like a Sasquatch murdered three guys?

He's like, bolt cutters, pickaxes,

you know, and forklifts.

Meaning chop 'em up, run 'em over,

bash 'em in.

Were you involved in that decision?

Let me just ask you straight out.

Just for, like, kind of for the record, okay.

Three men actually died in October 1993.

Is that what you're saying, okay, that the bodies that those guys

who came to your cabin said they saw that night,

those were actual dead bodies?

They basically framed Sasquatch for the murder.

These dope growers framed Sasquatch for a triple murder

to terrorize guys from Mexico

that were on their turf.

He said that what they did is they arranged

for chatterboxes, as he put it,

to see the bodies

and that that guy that had come to that cabin that night,

the guy that was on crystal meth, he was one of the chatterboxes.

All right? Because that's the way that the story would get spread.

Okay?

The other guy was in on it too, took him up there.

"Holy shit! They're fucking dead.

Look at their bodies. Look at these tracks."

Okay?

"Fucking Bigfoot killed these three guys, man."

What are some of the motivations why people would make up

a Sasquatch story?

Well, the... and this may lead us back to Spy Rock.

People want to scare other people away.

I know in the Amazon that many times

people come up with terrible stories

of monsters and ghosts and stuff,

and it's to scare people away.

There's something of value, it's a good fishing ground,

it's a good hunting ground.

So they do that to keep the other people away.

Myth is super-powerful.

People are afraid of the unknown.

It's an ancient story from the beginning of time.

Look at the propaganda in this country.

Look at the propaganda around the world.

I mean, we create stories. We identify the other,

the immigrants, we demonize them

so we can empower ourselves

and maintain control over the culture.

I could see that happening,

just in how I knew people from that area to behave

when they felt threatened by outsiders.

But this was obviously like a killing

where people witnessed the aftermath of it

and were then told to go tell people about it.

And that's why I heard about it.

'Cause if it was just about killing these guys for what they had done,

no one would have heard about it, right?

Plenty of people have been killed up there

and buried in a shallow grave on a mountaintop and never found.

They really did these guys in to send a message.

There's exploitive people out here

and exploitive situations waiting to happen, you know.

That darkness from the mining camps and from the first logging camps

that, you know, took the land away from the indigenous people,

that trauma never stopped, and it just snowballed

into trauma for everybody that's come since then.

It gets paved over and painted over

and developed over constantly,

but in the more rural areas, like out here,

it's there, you can feel it, you know.

I don't think you can stop it or erase it at this point.

This started as

a ghost story about three guys getting killed on a dope farm in 1993.

I have moved with every step

of this endeavor towards believing that

these three murders actually occurred.

This is, like, not an easily solvable case.

I mean, there's no police report, there's no bodies.

I think it's impossible that I would ever,

with absolute certainty,

feel like I knew exactly what had happened and why.

At least I have a story that I tell myself that makes sense now.

No, I don't fucking think Bigfoot did it.

No.

I don't believe in Bigfoot, but I sure as hell believe in greed.

And that greed turns people into monsters.

It's not Bigfoot making all those people disappear in the woods.