Original subtitles

Mount Baldy's 35 or 40 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

It's about eight miles up to the top.

And then there's various cabins strewn about the mountains.

You might not have cell service.

You might not see a neighbor for days.

Judy and Marcia wanted to move to the mountain for a quieter

kind of life.

Unfortunately, that just didn't happen.

These strange events have been plaguing the cabin.

How can anybody in their right mind do this?

There are bad people in the world

that have ill intentions, and it's just tragic.

It was probably about 6:30, 7. It was still light, summertime.

I was up on top of Glendora Ridge Road,

because there's a big, vast area that had been bulldozed

to put houses up there.

I was walking my dog.

My dog ran loose, and I was running after him.

I ran into these two women, and they had my dog,

and I was like, "Oh, thank you for getting him."

Judy Gellert was in her late 40s, and Marcia Johnson was

a bit younger, in her late 30s.

Marcia was the more outgoing, gregarious type,

where Judy was a little bit more shy, a little bit quieter.

The neighbor had rented them that little space.

They had their trailer parked up there for a while,

and I don't know how long.

They just seemed nice, and I thought

maybe we could be friends.

Judy Gellert and Marcia Johnson met in the late 1980s in

a substance abuse rehabilitation center,

where they were both seeking help.

The two developed a close friendship.

And as their relationship deepened,

they developed a sexual relationship

and ultimately became partners.

They were able to get sober together.

Judy secured a position as a substance abuse counselor

while Marcia was working in computer programming.

And they begin a life of their own, really, a future.

Judy and Marcia spent about ten years traveling in

an RV together.

They had lived in a number of places around California.

And by 1998, Judy and Marcia had settled on a campground

near Mount Baldy.

In the 1990s, it wasn't the same as now.

Gay couples didn't have the same comfort level being

open and honest about their relationships.

In moving to Mount Baldy, they were probably hoping to

escape the outside world a little bit.

The first time they met, Judy and Marcia were telling

Kerri how they really wanted a permanent home.

The thing is, real estate on Mount Baldy is pretty hard to

come by because the residents don't leave.

They stay there.

Kerri said, well, it just happened to be good timing

because she knew of a cabin that was for sale.

And the cabin was being sold by 71-year-old Jack Irwin.

Jack had lived on the mountain several years.

His cabin was like a mile up, this little road that wasn't

well maintained.

Jack was a Korean War veteran.

He was a loner and was very frugal.

He was the type of guy that slept on a cot.

He had one knife, one fork, one plate, one spoon.

Very minimalist.

What actually led him to being up on Mount Baldy,

he didn't say,

other than the fact that he did like to be alone,

and that's a good place to be alone.

Once in a while, my husband and I would have Jack down for

dinner because he has no relatives, and no friends

as far as I know.

He didn't talk a lot, but he would sit and just be

with our son.

He was a very private person.

I'm thinking that there was more to his life that

he never talked about.

He loved his cabin, and he kept it immaculate.

But Jack was having a harder time as he got older.

You look at the cabin, and it's got to be heated by

chopping firewood.

As he was aging, that was becoming

more and more of an issue.

He was looking for a little bit more comfort.

Marcia and Judy had met Jack and asked if they could

buy the cabin.

When newcomers come onto Mount Baldy, they're greeted with

a little bit of skepticism.

They are regarded as outsiders, and I think it takes a while to

kind of penetrate that wall.

He wanted to make sure that the people who were going to

buy his cabin could be trusted.

And they felt this need to impress Jack.

They would meet up at the store and pick up mail together.

They tried to do the best they could for him.

You know, be part of his life.

They were only in Jack's life for a few months,

but they became friends.

And then Judy and Marcia began to spend more and more time

with Jack.

He had these two people who were interested in him,

and he liked that.

Early on in 1999,

Jack had told me that Marcia and Judy could hone in on what

was going on in the village and what the people were like.

Jack really believed that they would take care of

the property, and that they would fit in with

the community as well.

He sold the cabin to Marcia and Judy, gave them some great

terms, and should've been a very wonderful life for those two.

Jack moved to a home about a half an hour down

the mountain in a suburban town called Upland.

It was at the base of the mountain where he could

still have the beautiful view, but enjoy, I think,

more creature comforts.

Judy and Marcia saw Jack quite frequently still.

Material things were not important to him,

But that cabin, that's what he loved.

He was so insistent every day going up the hill

to check on it.

There was one day I was hiking, going down by the cabin,

and I hear this heated argument.

And Marcia was saying, "I'm sorry, Jack, I'm sorry."

And Jack, I couldn't make out what he was saying.

There seemed to be something about this cabin

that Jack wouldn't let go of.

They were fighting,

and then it stopped.

I heard the car start up, and so I watched

Jack's car drive by.

And he drove on down the mountain,

and I called Marcia. I said, "Is everything OK?"

And she said, "Oh, yeah, it was just a misunderstanding."

I didn't know what to think.

This really piqued the curiosity of the neighbors,

because all of a sudden, they're hearing arguments,

and there's a tension.

And I think everybody was wondering what in the world is

going on with these three.

Well, it turns out, prior to the sale of the cabin,

Jack didn't realize they are a gay couple.

This was a real change and a surprise.

Marcia and Judy had said that was not something that Jack

could handle.

I mean, long back in the '40s and the '50s,

it was something you never talked about.

And he was very much against them being in that situation.

So he was verbally not nice to them.

And then, kind of cut it off at that point.

He left and never returned.

By the end of the summer, Jack's trips up the mountain had

come to a complete end.

I had called Jack to Thanksgiving dinner at

our house a month or so ahead of time.

I kept calling,

and I couldn't get in touch with him.

We always were in contact, and with not hearing from him

for days and days and days, it was not like Jack.

Mount Baldy is a community of people that all knew each

other, and if you don't see somebody, you check on them.

I had put a sign of Jack missing on the front of

the post office.

Everybody up there has a PO box.

So they would come in and ask about Jack.

When Marcia and Judy came into the post office, I asked them

if they had seen Jack.

They did acknowledge that it had been some time since

they heard from Jack.

And there was definitely some question.

Sometimes you just get a feeling, or an aura

about a person.

And I had such a terrible feeling that he was in danger.

And I said, well, you need to call the police.

On October 3, 1999, the Upland Police Department

received a call from Marcia Johnson,

reporting Jack Irwin missing.

And she said she lived in a cabin on Mount Baldy.

So after the initial report was made, one of our police

officers responded to her home and got some additional

information from her.

When the Upland Police interview Judy and Marcia,

the pair describes a relationship in which

they are very close with Jack.

But by the end of the summer, the relationship between Jack

and Judy and Marcia began to change.

He came to the cabin, but Jack was very

rude and belittling.

Despite the tension there, they explain that they really

care for Jack very much.

And they wanted the police to find him.

There's no crime involved in being a missing adult.

There's no obligation to contact your friends or family.

Our objective is to find out that the person is safe.

They go search the Upland house.

There was nothing in the house

that showed that there was any foul play.

Didn't seem like there was anything out of the ordinary.

Jack had no relatives here in California, no phone,

no credit cards.

We had spoken with other people from Mount Baldy, and they all

indicated that he didn't make a lot of money, but he had

a lot of money.

He bought the house in Upland for cash.

And the other thing is,

Jack didn't hide it.

They said that it was not unusual for him to pull

his wallet out and tell people,

"I'm OK. I've got plenty of money."

They said that he just spent so little, that it accumulated

over his life.

So certainly there was a possibility that Jack had

actually gone off in some city because he had had

the resources to do that.

He could have taken a vacation, and he is where

he has chosen to be.

We put out the national feelers.

We've contacted the LA County morgue.

There's no unclaimed bodies that match his description.

There is nothing to indicate where Jack might be.

So they felt that Jack was still alive,

out there somewhere.

So his information was in a national computer system

where any law enforcement officer in the country were to

run his name, we would be contacted.

Marcia and Judy knew that Jack simply didn't want them there.

They were trying to build a quiet nest for themselves

where they felt comfortable being in

their open relationship.

Being alone in a mountainous area,

there aren't a lot of people around.

While that might have a beautiful side,

it also has a very dark side.

It would be very difficult if somebody were

in trouble up there.

You just wouldn't really hear somebody yelling,

screaming,

unless you were right there witnessing it all.

Just by the nature of living in such a place like Mount Baldy,

without having company,

or without there being lots of people around,

you can become an easy and likely target for a crime.

There had been a burglary.

A computer and a lot of material things were taken out

of the cabin.

The Sheriff's Department in San Bernardino County came out.

The police did not have any witnesses.

There's no signs of forced entry.

There's no forensic evidence.

They believed that the person or persons who committed

this crime could be from inside the community.

And that brought up all these questions about Jack.

I thought about when Marcia, Jack, and Judy were

fighting outside. Jack was obviously upset.

That whole thing was weird.

Jack disappears and nobody sees him.

Nobody knows where he's at.

And then the cabin is burglarized.

It was possible that Jack wasn't missing,

and, or decided he wanted to come home to his cabin.

Marcia and Judy felt afraid for their safety.

And at that time, they decided it was time to

pack up and leave.

And they gave me their phone number and said,

"Don't give this to anybody else.

We're gonna be staying with some friends."

Anytime somebody leaves, you always let your neighbor

know, "Hey, I'm going to be out of town for a week, keep an eye

on my cabin."

So I said I would keep an eye on their cabin when they left.

In Southern California, peak season for wildfires is

late summer and into the early fall.

The fire happened in August of 2000.

I ran up the street to see what was going on...

...and I see this plume of smoke

and it was just black.

It was a terrible fire.

The fire department from all different counties were there.

The community was saved,

and so we were very lucky.

Nobody was inside the cabin. Nobody was injured.

Unfortunately, the cabin was destroyed.

Just a shell of a house.

The insurance company hired a private fire investigator.

But this wasn't the result of a wildfire.

The fire came from the cabin.

When I talked to the fire inspector guy that day,

after the fire and everything was out, and he did his,

you know, report,

and he told me that there was an accelerant.

I thought, oh my god.

So that kind of leaves only one thing, and that being arson.

Judy and Marcia would have to be asking themselves, "Why us?"

That made me very scared.

Because anybody starting a fire up here, it'd be like starting

a fire in their own backyard.

That could have spread real quick.

I can never

imagine someone doing that.

It was evident that someone didn't want them there.

And at that time, Marcia and Judy decided it was

time to leave Mount Baldy for good.

And so they moved to the Alpine area.

Then they started a new life.

Jack has been missing for over a year and a half.

And the Upland Police Department had really

hit a wall.

These strange events that have been plaguing the cabin where

Jack Irwin used to live.

There had been a break-in, a burglary.

And then shortly after, there was a suspicious fire.

And the police think that these crimes are connected to

Jack's disappearance.

We made a decision as an agency to bring in the San Bernardino

County District Attorney's Office to investigate further.

Morey Weiss was already up on the mountain, and so he wants

to see the remains of this cabin that's at the center of

all this controversy,

to look for any piece of evidence,

no matter how small.

I went to the cabin alone. It was a mess.

It was burned. It was really burned.

There was a deck on the front of the house, and there was

a storage area underneath that. I found a box

that the fire investigator didn't say anything about.

When Morey Weiss unlocks this box, the investigation went in

a direction that was much more sinister.

Morey Weiss was down where Jack's cabin had burned down.

There was a box

that was sitting outside.

I'm not sure how long it had been there,

but there was a number of different types of

paperwork in it.

And I remember going through it and thinking that we may be

starting to look for something a lot more detailed.

Before he went missing, Jack had signed a trust that

named Marcia and Judy as beneficiaries and also gave

them power of attorney.

There's every reason to believe that Jack

voluntarily, and with knowledge signed the power of attorney

knowing exactly what he was doing, which was empowering

Marcia and Judy to spend his funds to support

and benefit him.

I went to the neighborhood. I started talking to neighbors.

Everybody in the mountain knew who Jack was and there were

a lot of things that came out.

That really started to light things up.

After Jack made them his power of attorney, he was complaining

to me that the girls had never made a payment on the house.

Both Judy and Marcia had declared bankruptcy.

So the arrangement they had is that they would pay him $582

a month for ten years, at which time Jack would turn over

the title of the cabin to them.

But in eight months time, they had only made two payments

to Jack, and he wanted his money.

Then I saw new cars parked up at the house.

They had bought a new Jeep and a new Corvette,

a new motorhome.

I mean, these women, when they first came to town,

really didn't seem to have anything.

And so when you started hearing that they were buying all these

things, that made us wonder, OK, where is Jack's money?

I was able to write a search warrant for

the banking information.

And I just started putting spreadsheets together that had

each transaction

and where it went and what it went for.

They took Jack's money, and they immediately spent it

on big purchases--

a Corvette, the Jeep Wrangler.

After that, there were multiple withdrawals from Jack's account

to Marcia Johnson.

She's taken another $7,500.

Then she's taken another $10,000.

And she kept on just taking more and more and more

until she took it all.

And that led them to me, and Sergeant Bobby Dean.

This is very shocking that these two women thought it was

appropriate to purchase these big items as Jack's trustees.

So at that point, I called Marcia and Judy and said,

"OK, what in these expenses is for the benefit of Jack Irwin?"

Marcia said they had spent a lot of Jack's money buying

computer equipment because she and Jack intended to start

a computer business, and that she bought that Corvette to

take Jack to and from the doctor.

It's something that we didn't believe.

Marcia or Judy made a statement.

"We're on the trust. We didn't do anything wrong."

This was trade fraud, theft.

They were just there to take advantage of him.

I had had some elder abuse cases in my background

that I'd worked.

I told them the attorneys were reviewing the matter,

and I would be in touch with them to let them know if there

was a decision made to file charges or not.

It's difficult for Morey at that point because he can't

dispute Marcia and Judy's statements to prove that those

withdrawals were not authorized.

We've just gotta find Jack.

Jack was very conscious of his money.

He knew how much he had.

And if his money was missing, he was going to be knocking on

somebody's door to find out why.

And we suspected that Jack put the pressure on Judy and Marcia

and wanted to retaliate.

I learned about the burglary.

I knew about the fire.

These crimes went unsolved.

They could never find out who the actual

perpetrators were.

That made us wonder if they had anything to do with Jack.

At that point, Bobby looked at both Chris and I.

He said, "This would be a great case for a telephone wiretap."

A wiretap on Marcia and Judy could elicit some statements

that would reveal more information.

This has to be authorized by the courts.

And once it's granted, investigators will use

a strategy that we call "tickling the wire."

Every three days, we were going to initiate some type of

contact with Marcia and Judy

when Marcia and Judy are separate.

They're not aware they're being recorded.

We didn't have a warrant.

I had a charging letter from the District Attorney.

I was parked right around the corner from her house

in Alpine.

So I just drove right around the corner, knocked on

the door, and handed her the letter.

There were a number of charges.

Grand theft, fraud, elder abuse.

On that charging letter, it said that they needed to

surrender themselves to the court in two weeks.

I got back in the car and left, and she's on the phone to Judy.

Marcia, she was pretty shook up about the whole thing.

We were hoping to get more information as

the wires continued.

At this point, the investigators turn up

the heat on Judy and Marcia.

After they had moved from the cabin and were living in

Alpine, Judy had been working at the California Department

of Corrections.

The whole place was run by cops.

Me and my partner, Detective Perez, went down

and seized her car, astounded her.

"What do you mean? What are you doing?

Why can't you do this someplace else?"

It was all the plan.

We knew that that was going to require a phone call,

because now Judy needs a ride home.

You try to give them anxiety, because people that are anxious

make mistakes.

On the ride up to get Judy, Marcia called her aunt.

We were monitoring the wires,

and I was in the office when the call came in.

I was in the office, and one of my detectives called me

and said, "Hey, you got to hear this."

Marcia Johnson indicated that she'd killed Jack Irwin.

It was like, wow.

It wasn't like Marcia and Judy took all his money in one day

and left and took off.

They did it over a period of months.

And that would lead trained investigators to say,

they knew he wasn't going to come back.

We hoped that she would turn herself in.

Did we believe it? No.

At that time, the team decided to make the arrest.

She was cooperative.

The main thing she wanted to get across was

Judy had nothing to do with it.

Judy had nothing to do with this.

By the time we get back to San Bernardino,

it's two, three in the morning.

In the interview room, she just

lets it all go.

The reason Jack went to the cabin was because he was

not getting paid.

And there was an argument.

It's really quite remarkable how matter of fact she was.

It's really one of the most

cold-blooded things I've seen in 33 years of police work.

She took all of these body parts down to various parts of

the mountain where she was discarding them.

We spent many days up and down the mountain, but it was so

vast without having an exact location.

It's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

No part of his body has ever been found.

How can anybody in their right mind take a chainsaw,

fire that thing up, and cut somebody up?

I mean, I-- I-- that to me, is just...

...sick.

And then her attitude afterward, it's like,

I can do whatever I want.

And in addition to confessing to Jack's murder, Marcia admits

that she set fire to the cabin.

She burned the cabin down to make it look like that

they were victims.

Marcia also reveals that this burglary that supposedly took

place in July of 2000, it never happened.

She had hidden the things that she reported as being stolen.

It was done for the purposes of getting insurance money.

Between the money from Jack, insurance claims,

everything they got

came out to around $470,000.

Marcia was charged with murder

and 34 other counts.

She was found guilty of murder,

arson,

grand theft, grand theft auto, insurance fraud,

elder abuse, and false report of a burglary.

She was sentenced to life without possibility of parole.

The District Attorney's Office had determined that they were

going to use Judy Gellert as a witness against

Marcia Johnson, and that she would get a plea deal.

Judy knew about the money. She was there.

She spent it too.

She was part of the whole thing,

so I was very upset about that.

She only wound up pleading guilty to one count of

receiving stolen property.

She was sentenced to 180 days in jail and restitution in

the amount of $150,000.

When I heard that Marcia had been

arrested for Jack's murder,

It was something that I couldn't believe happened.

People in the community all knew that Judy and Marcia

were a couple.

And nobody put them down because of that, not even Jack.

The investigation revealed that Jack was very fond of

Judy and Marcia.

Jack had told me that they had said that

they were family to him.

They were very convincing, and I don't think

he doubted them.

It was all about money,

and he was easy pickings to them.

I just think that's the worst thing you can do to an older

person, because all he wanted was friends.

They tried to be

like they cared about him, and they were not people that

cared about him at all.

There are bad people in the world that have

ill intentions. And it's just tragic.

I was privileged to know Jack. He is godfather to our son.

He was very much a part of our family,

and it wasn't just us.

It was a community that loved Jack and missed him.

More than anything, I remember the love he gave to us,

and that'll never go away.