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She went to Crestone, Colorado, which is known to be a big spiritual gathering place. It's just such a tiny, isolated place. It's way out in the mountains. After a couple of days of not hearing from her and I was calling her and no reply, I definitely had a bad feeling. The closest policeman when you pick up a phone and dial 911 is in Swatch, a 45-minute drive away. So for the first 45 minutes that you're dealing with some nutcase, you're on your own.
No one really knows what happened to Crystal. We want to know. We all want to know. The majority of the people up here, I think, are very good people. Came up here for the peace and tranquility of this area. But we do have, I'm going to say, the trust fund kids and things like that that have come up here that are not responsible, that mommy and daddy didn't want them around them because there's such a pain in their ass. So they send them down here for everybody else to deal with.
She was late for rent, and that's when I went upstairs. And at first she didn't answer, but I knocked a few more times, and then she peeked out, and she came in the hallway. Her whole face was blotchy and red, and she'd been crying and looked like a mess. I asked her what was wrong. She said that she had gone to a party the night before, and she was pretty sure that someone had drugged her, and she was pretty sure that she'd been raped. There was only one person
There's a drug culture that's hidden in Crestone. Why are these guys hiding? I would like to hear from these guys, man. If there's any way you can find them, get a hold of them, question them, ask them some questions.
She told me that she was out there against her will. She thought she might have gotten raped.
Once I started poking around, I figured out that she went back to catfishes. Mama said, don't go down to the river and stay away from Catfish John. John, you know, his name is Catfish John. That's what they call him. A catfish is trying to distance himself from Crystal. He was trying to distance himself from anything to do with her. And he was definitely a person of interest and should be until he's absolutely cleared.
Underneath her post, some guy got on there. I don't know. He apparently was here and he's like, "I don't understand why we're still talking about this." I told Wayne Clark that that girl was murdered and she was loaded in this vehicle by catfish and driven to this area and thrown in a mine shaft. I told them. We've all told them what happened to her that day. And they haven't done shit. And I don't get what's wrong with Sewatch Police Department.
There are hundreds of mine shafts and crevices. Unless somebody gave law enforcement very specific intel, the chances that somebody would find her are very limited. Brian told me the backstory of their relationship. And their backstory of their relationship is when Crystal was teaching at Western State College,
She had Akasha. And when she had Akasha with her, Brian was watching Akasha for her, and he lived with her. He ended up crashing her car. Crystal was very upset about that, and they had a falling out.
Brian showed up and he said to me, "You need to call Crystal." And he goes, "She's very upset. I totaled her car." He totaled her car out there in the Baca. He thought it was real funny. She says, "I think he did it on purpose." He did it on purpose.
Shortly after Crystal went missing, an anonymous person had a phone call with Dreddy Bryant. I could have swore she was at the last drum circle. We weren't like super close. I wouldn't know where her specific spots would be, you know what I mean? She did go over to Catfish's, we talked about that, where like it was four or five days and they had to get up at like three in the morning or whatever, but she did go to Catfish's after that. The same anonymous source received a message from Catfish.
I was shared the messages and was able to validate their authenticity. The anonymous source says this. Have you heard any rumors? What do you think happened to her? Catfish says, I heard so many rumors. It is interfering. Brian, that's all I can say at the moment. Other than I will do anything to help. The source says, Oh, wow. Why do you say Brian? Catfish says, He told me he did it. I told the CBI and he showed his confession on Messenger. Do do do.
From Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta, this is Up and Vanished. I'm your host, Payne Lindsey. Well, we got a minute. I'm going to buy that truck I've been wanting. Wait, don't you need, like, weeks to shop for a car? I don't. Carvana makes it super convenient to find exactly what I want. Hold up. You're buying a car on your phone? Isn't that more of a laptop thing? You can shop wherever you want.
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Of the many stories we've heard, there's one that seems to stand out the most. The story about a gold van. This story originated from a Facebook message sent by a Crestone local to Wayne Clark, the Sewatch County deputy in charge of the case. To refresh your memory, here's the original message. Hi, Wayne. I know we haven't met, but I know you're the local cop in Crestone, which my girlfriend and I really appreciate.
About an hour ago tonight, my roommates and I witnessed something we felt was suspicious enough to report to you. We lived down Enchanted Lane and passed our neighbor coming home from town tonight, and I believe his name is Catfish.
though I have never personally met him. He was out in the middle of the pouring rain by his car and appeared to have a shovel leaning against a golden 1980s or early 90s minivan. He also had a bundle laying on the ground that appeared to be something human-sized next to the open back door of his van. We don't know what this bundle was, but it was certainly suspicious.
Since hearing that story, I've received numerous accounts of other sightings of gold bands. Everyone seems to be on high alert.
Nobody goes up there. That's the first time I've ever seen anybody there. And I've been there several times. Yeah, and I just saw a van. I mean, it just kind of rang true because a lot of people were saying like an Astro style van with like curtains and stuff. And I was like, oh, I saw one of those next to a mine.
My friend owns a cabin up in the valley. He knew about it and was taking me there to go try to find crystals. And it's called Crystal Hill Mine. We left the cabin. We went to go mine for crystals. And when we pulled up, there was a van parked just outside of the gates for the mine.
I mean, it's like an Astro style. I don't know. My friends said that they remember having out of state plates like Arizona, but I don't remember that. There was definitely people inside of it. The curtains were moving around and there was people like peeking out at us, but we never saw them. But they were they were looking at us like they didn't want us there. We just kind of like.
Like felt it out. Like walked past the van and they didn't get out. They kind of hung out inside the van the whole time we were there. It was like a hundred degrees outside. So I don't know how they were in that van.
For months now, Crystal's family has been hearing the same stories.
Here's Eli. A couple of the neighbors that were neighbors to one of the suspects, they said that the night that this all happened, they had seen him take out what looked like a body rolled up in a blanket, put it in the back of his van, and then he drove off in the direction where there's known to be mine shafts. He was gone for three hours was what I believe, and then when he came back, he was empty-handed. He didn't have that no more.
Here's Rodney. When I read that post, it just doesn't quite jive with what they're telling me. Catfish was standing out behind his van with a shovel and what looked like a body wrapped in white in a pouring rain. And what I've been trying to get is corroboration for some of these things that we're hearing about. After months of seeking an official comment from the witness of this gold van, he finally got back to me. And to the best of his recollection,
This is exactly what he remembers. He sent me this in a message. "I've got a statement I'm going to copy and paste to you. If you've already read Wayne's message from me, you should already know most of this. Just give me a sec, it's kinda long. I'm driving home from picking my roommate up from work at the bar, and we're heading back home to our house. This is probably around 9ish. This guy named Catfish was our neighbor.
We pass his house, and it's in the middle of the night pouring absolute balls. There's a golden, maybe dark silver older 90s or so squarish van. Looked like an old Mercury or something with a hexagonal logo. It wasn't new or nice at all. There was one person standing outside of it with a lantern, and another standing over something wrapped in bed sheets and duct taped. I mean it was exactly the same size of human body.
There's a shovel literally leaning against his van and again it's in the middle of the night pouring rain. We got suspicious, went back to my house, split into two cars and tried to follow him. He booked it up to this road called Twin Trees or something like that. It's at the end of Camino del Rey. When we got there, we were a couple minutes late because we had to jump in cars at my house.
He was flying back down that road into the valley. We tried to follow him, whoever the fuck was in the van, but we couldn't catch a minivan and a sports car. This person was doing like 90 miles per hour downhill in the rain. It was nuts. The next day, people that Catfish had hired
and his girlfriend were over at Catfish's house cleaning everything out of it. I mean everything. All the furniture, ripped up all the carpets, every piece of anything that had ever been in his house. It looked like a barren wasteland when they were done, which took about a week. Look, this is all I saw and all I knew.
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Since episode one, in many ways, the podcast has reignited the search for Crystal. Even people like Mikey, Crystal's best friend, have taken it upon themselves to go to Crestone to find answers.
I went up there to try to not step on too many toes and I told people I went up there for closure, not to ask questions. People can understand closure a little bit better. I've been like depressed and then happy and then better. Me going up there gave me closure to snap out of my depression because I felt like I haven't done much because for two years it was really hard. So going up there and meeting the people that she connected with and the people that cared about her made me feel a lot better.
That town again, it has so much light, but then there's like such a dark. I told my mom about this. I told her, I was like, I don't trust anybody. You know, all these people are scared and I'm not fucking scared. I want this to be settled. I also felt bad that I didn't know that she was doing drugs. Ever since we've been friends, she would party, but never like hardcore drugs.
I've dealt with knowing that Crystal's dead, but there's a part of me now that's like, "I don't know anymore." She could be in the sex trafficking. Who knows? Like, we haven't gotten enough evidence, but there's enough people saying that something bad happened to her. So, yeah. It's been crazy the last two weeks. I feel like Crystal's been inside of me, you know? So my dreams have been a lot more intense. It's been pretty, pretty crazy.
While in Crestone, Mikey overheard a new rumor that's been circling around. In a small town, everybody talks. I was going up there thinking Catfish was there. I didn't know that he already left. Rumor has it that Catfish has skipped town after being there for almost two decades. He just moved out a month ago. That's what I grasped from it. One story is that the dad came down there and made him leave. And then the other story is that Catfish was willing to leave. So I don't know. They already gutted his house out.
So that's what I was told. Well, if it was true, there was only one way to find out. And that was to go there myself. Okay, right here. Is this really a road? Enterprise is like, where did you go? Maybe just go as fast as you can. No. The roads far out in the Baca Grande aren't real roads. They're mostly gravel and rocks. That's the gutted one. It's gutted.
After a long bumpy trek, we found the house we were looking for. Looks like this rumor was true.
Investigative reporters and detectives do some similar work, but rarely is it all right. That's part of the process. You go down this path and it may be a dead end or it's not true or it's just a rumor and then you move off to the next thing to the next thing. You have to add up a lot of truths in order to get to facts. There's so many rumors to weed through. These kind of cases are super, super difficult.
Isn't it a little frustrating that you know the names of the people everybody in town believes had a hand in her disappearance, yet you have detectives who for some reason either haven't got that same information from those individuals, maybe they just aren't sane. But it's frustrating to not see some transparency in how the detectives are working this case.
There are reasons to keep secrets and they do it all the time, right? There are surprises during interviews. They have a piece of information. They want to see how that suspect reacts. So there's things that they hold, but it is frustrating from the outside looking in to not understand the process. They should know more than you know. And maybe they do, but it isn't apparent. So it's a conundrum for sure.
Since the beginning, there's one detail in Crystal's case that's always puzzled me. And throughout this series, behind the scenes, I've been looking into it. It has to do with Crystal's cell phone. You may remember early on that Crystal's father, Rodney, gave me a cell phone from her apartment in Crestone. But there was a catch. This wasn't her most recent phone. It was an older one. And the phone itself reflected that. The last outgoing calls and messages were from April 2016, and Crystal went missing in July.
So what about her other phone? Wouldn't that be a key piece of evidence in this case? Her last outgoing calls and messages? Her state of mind? You would certainly think so. But since the first time I examined this case, I've received many conflicting stories about this cell phone. Today, I'm going to walk you through exactly what I found. Aura McDonald was Crystal's landlord. She was the first person to enter her apartment right after she was reported missing. I called up the police station. I reported her missing.
Where's her phone?
Her phone was on a counter over by the kitchenette, and we couldn't find the charger. When Rodney and Eli learned Crystal was missing, her cell phone was one of the first things on their mind. Rodney and I were really trying to find out where that phone went. That was like a big piece of the puzzle. We just wanted to know what was the last thing on her phone. Maybe there was something there. And I remember that was one of the first things we were asking.
Then Aura told me a strange story about an unknown man that stopped by Crystal's apartment right after she was reported missing. He's a young kid. He's really young and handsome, has long straight hair. He's the kid that showed up in the courtyard. He was genuinely really, he was the one friend that was genuinely really concerned that kept on coming back. And I could tell he was
But when Rodney and Eli became involved, they started hearing strange rumors. Apparently someone had broke into her apartment and stole her phone.
That didn't sound like something Aura would do. It's like Calder. So I was actually downstairs in my courtyard and he showed up drunk in my courtyard and he'd been drinking and he wanted to know where Crystal was and he was upset. He was almost crying.
saying that he said he was pretty sure something bad had happened to Crystal and he wanted to know if I had seen her. I said no. Then I mentioned to him that she had told me that she went to that party and that she'd been given a bunch of drugs and she said that she'd been raped and he said, "I know that party that she went to." He kind of alluded, I wasn't clear on what he was saying, kind of sounded like he was at that party.
Maybe earlier on in the party rather than later on in the party, I have no idea. But he did say he didn't know what kind of drugs he had given her that night. I said, can I call up the sheriff's department and report what you're telling me? He said, yeah, I'll even talk to them myself. And I could tell that he really was afraid to and didn't want to, but he was willing to do it for Crystal.
And I said, hold on, do you care if I call up the sheriff's department? He said, no, I'll even talk to them myself. I called the offline number and I said, I've got a guy here who says that he was at the party that she said she was at and he knows what they had given her. And I listed, I mean, literally word for word, he told me exactly what they had given her. It was a whole long list. It was like eight or nine different things.
Tyler was the deputy on duty in Crestone at the time, and Jeremy was Crystal's neighbor.
Wayne is another deputy from the sheriff's department, who, according to the sheriff himself, has been the one in charge of Crystal's case and investigation since then. This would be Rodney and Eli.
But there was something else that one of Crystal's neighbors witnessed.
But what about that unknown guy that stopped by Crystal's apartment? He kind of...
Kind of a weird joke if you ask me. There's only one way in and it's on the second floor. There's only one way in and out.
And according to Rodney: I did not see the computer or the phone. At first we were freaking out. We were like, well, whoever has the phone is clearly deleting evidence. This guy had it. The same guy. He's good with computers, I guess. If memory serves me correctly, and I'm pretty sure it does in this case, he mentioned he had somebody that he was having try to break into the computer or get into the computer or something to that effect.
Then all of a sudden, Ora remembered the kid's name. Matthew. Matthew. The kid's name. Matthew. And who's he? The kid that showed up in the courtyard who was super upset about her being missing and told me a bunch of information about what drugs she was on and where that party was at. Rodney remembers Matt too. We followed him out to where Matt lived. Matt lived in a small motorhome.
He was having Matt try to break into the computer, which I thought was kind of funny. And this is Wayne. Rodney recalled a time when Wayne, the local deputy, took him and Eli to Matt's house to retrieve Crystal's phone and computer.
According to Rodney, Wayne drove him and Eli out to his trailer. He remembers Wayne saying something along the lines of...
He also remembers Matt acting very strangely. A suspicious-looking behavior ever.
Now, could that be because of the Crystal situation? Is he somehow connected to it in some way, shape, or form? I think he knew of Crystal. That's my understanding.
And I don't know if they were friends or what. I just remember thinking it was kind of weird that they're having someone other than their own law enforcement people try to get into the computer. And I remember asking them, how come you're not having TBI? I never really got any answers. I just never could get a firm answer on something like that.
The story that Matt had Crystal's cell phone was seemingly everywhere. Even friends knew about it. He's a computer guy, too. Like, you know, it's out of, like, fake shit. And you know what? That's crazy. I can't believe that you know that, but I totally even— I forgot about that, that he did get let in the apartment and got the phone. If I remember right, I was at the bar, and somehow that did come up, and he was like, oh, I want you to go get the phone to try and, like, you know, find evidence or some shit. I think I remember hearing that.
That definitely is strange. Very strange. When you start putting some of these things together, the conspiracy stuff can start getting a little wacky there. They're either lying or telling me something different. When we went to visit Matt, it was because Wayne had said that he was having him try to get into or break into her computer.
It raised flags for me. Why is he doing this? You know, it's going to be kind of hard for Wayne to say, oh, no, because then all he'll do is ask me, and I'm under oath. I'll answer that question. I mean, the best thing for Wayne would be to say, yeah, I did that. You know, I fucked up, but, you know. The cover-up is usually worse than the crime. I don't want to think bad about anybody there, but, you know, after a bit, you start letting the stuff run around your head, and it'd be very easy to say,
I called Wayne to ask him about this strange story. What did he remember? According to Wayne, he has no knowledge of anyone besides law enforcement ever having possession of these items. I asked him about the trip they made to Matt's house with Eli and Rodney. Why'd they go there?
Wayne does recall this event, but he remembers it differently. He told me that he made a personal trip to Matt's house about a completely separate phone issue, something he wanted him to work on. And while he was there, Rodney and Eli sat in the car. When I pressed for more details in this story, Wayne kept referring me to another officer, Tyler, who coincidentally no longer works on the force. I've reached out to Tyler on multiple occasions, but I still haven't heard back.
Regardless of what happened to Crystal's phone or computer, we now know they are currently in possession of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. After all these crazy stories, I called the CBI to confirm for myself, and they do have it.
In a missing persons case, the last calls or messages on their phone can be crucial evidence. And though I have never seen the phone myself, Aura, Crystal's landlord, recalls what she saw on her phone the first time she went into her apartment. We borrowed a charger from Jeremy next door and plugged it in and he put all the messages on speaker phones so I stood there and listened to all the messages. He skipped through a lot of them. Most of the calls to Crystal in the front were people being worried about her.
It had this voice identification robot voice that says, this call is to or this call is from. The last bunch of phone calls that she put out, this call was at 8.35 p.m. from Catfish. Up and Vanished is an investigative podcast told weekly, produced for Tenderfoot TV by Payne Lindsay, Mike Rooney, and me, Meredith Steadman, with new episodes every Monday. Executive producers Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright.
Additional production by Resonate Recordings, as well as Mason Lindsay, Rob Ricotta, and Christina Dana. Our intern is Hallie Bidal. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set. Our theme song is Ophelia, performed by Ezra Rose. Our cover art is by Trevor Eiler. Special thanks to the team at Cadence 13. Visit us on social media via at Up and Vanished, or you can visit our website, upandvanished.com, where you can join in on our discussion board.
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