Malibu Creek State Park is an eight-thousand-acre wilderness in the Santa Monica Mountains, stretching along the western side of Malibu Canyon, between the coastal city of Malibu and the San Fernando Valley. At the edge of one of the most densely populated urban areas in the United States, it’s remarkably pristine, with oak savannas, volcanic rock formations, and a fourteen-mile creek that feeds the Pacific Ocean at Malibu Lagoon, near Surfrider Beach. Before opening as a state park, in 1976, the land contained a “movie ranch” owned by Twentieth Century-Fox. Relics of its history still litter the park. The “M*A*S*H” camp, where the TV show was filmed for years, is a popular hiking destination, and Mr. Blandings’s dream house is an administrative office.
Tristan Beaudette always wanted to take his daughters camping there. An avid outdoorsman, Beaudette was slowly inducting the girls, who were two and four, into his love of nature, teaching them about the constellations and testing his theory that all kids really need to have fun are sticks and rocks. The campground, a meadow tucked into a wooded area and surrounded by the jagged peaks of the Santa Monicas, is an idyllic spot, packed with families, especially in the summer months.
One Thursday in late June, 2018—it was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year—Beaudette decided to make the trip from Orange County, where he lived. His brother-in-law Scott McCurdy joined them, with his two boys, who were three and five. It was a dads-and-kids trip, to say goodbye.
In a week, Beaudette and his wife, Erica Wu, were planning to move their family to the Bay Area. Beaudette, a polymer chemist, had already had his last day at Allergan, the pharmaceutical company where he worked. Wu, an ob-gyn, was completing her fellowship. She had a medical-board certification exam that Friday, and Beaudette’s trip would get the kids out of the house so that she could study.
Wu is slim, with shoulder-length dark hair and a deliberate manner. She and Tristan started dating during their senior year of high school, in Fresno, after being set up for his winter formal. She was reserved, the fourth of five girls born to immigrants from China. When I met Wu, in the spring of 2019, she told me that she was attracted to Beaudette’s confidence and ease. “He was a happy guy, and he was very sort of just uncomplicated,” she said. “He wore everything on his sleeve.”
At thirty-five, Beaudette was accomplished—he had published widely, and held a patent related to vaccine delivery—but, Wu says, compared with her, he never looked as if he was working that hard. He devoted a lot of time to adventures: camping, hiking, mountain biking, backpacking. “Camping trips for him were not just the camping trip,” Wu said. “He just loved the whole process, like getting all the stuff together and planning out the meals.” Wu was less enthusiastic, but he met her where she was. “When we did go, he would bring a blow-up bed,” she said. “He would try to minimize the roughing it as much as possible for me.”
The morning of the trip, Wu watched him pack the car, a black Subaru Forester: a camp stove; a tent; a small bicycle, with training wheels, on the roof rack next to his large one. It was the first time he’d taken the girls camping without her, and she had secretly been hoping he would cancel. “Whenever he would go on long business trips, or the girls would leave, there was always part of me that was a little bit anxious,” she said. But she was also grateful that he was the kind of father who would take their daughters camping when she needed to work. She put the girls’ hair in pigtails. “The one thing Tristan couldn’t do was anything with their hair,” she says. “I remember braiding both of the girls’ hair, and I’m, like, ‘O.K., just leave it like this till you guys get back.’ ”
At Malibu Creek State Park, Beaudette and McCurdy checked in with park employees, who assigned them a campsite. They followed a one-way road around the meadow to the site, but Beaudette, a camping perfectionist, didn’t like it. The ground was uneven, and it was too close to the bathrooms. McCurdy went back to negotiate for another spot, and they settled in at the northern end of the meadow.
During the long dusk, the kids ran around, looking for bugs, while the dads made a fire and cooked dinner. Beaudette had brought Manhattans, premixed, which they sipped. By the fire that night, they discussed Beaudette’s move. “He was so excited about this next chapter in his life,” McCurdy told me. “I kind of guilted him a little bit. Like, ‘Well, we had a good run, buddy. I’ll miss you, you know.’ I remember at the end of the night we decided, O.K., well, it’s late, let’s go to bed. We put out the campfire, and I gave him a big hug and told him I loved him.”
Just before sunrise, McCurdy was awakened by a sound that he thought was fireworks. Then he heard one of the girls crying. She wouldn’t settle, which was strange. Why wasn’t Tristan helping her? He went over to Beaudette’s tent and opened the flap. The girls were whimpering, and one of them was saying, “Wet, wet.” He could hear the four-year-old shushing her sister, trying to comfort her. But he couldn’t see anything. He reached for Beaudette and tried unsuccessfully to rouse him. This was normal; he was a heavy sleeper. Groping around in the dark, he found Beaudette’s phone and used it as a flashlight. McCurdy rolled him over, and, by the light of the phone, saw that he was covered in blood. The girls, kneeling beside him, were in a pool of it.
Beaudette had been shot through the head. The autopsy report, which was released nearly a year later, showed that a copper-jacketed lead bullet had entered just below his hairline and penetrated his brain. It was a homicide, but an utterly baffling one. The weapon’s make and model were unknown. There were no eyewitnesses, no suspects, and no motive. Rumors flew around Malibu. Had his vaccine work made him a target of “Big Pharma” or “the government”? Was the perpetrator a disgruntled former park worker? Someone associated with an illegal marijuana grow? None of it made sense; it felt both terrifyingly random and shockingly precise. Beaudette had been killed while he slept beside his children, and no one knew why.
Locals sometimes call Malibu “the pink bubble.” The nickname suggests privilege and safety, a self-enclosed universe, where everything is tinted the color of the sky at magic hour. One recent headline-grabbing crime in Malibu: the brazen theft of two amethyst “purifying” crystals, worth a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, from outside a shop called Sorenity Rocks.
Malibu’s population is wealthy and overwhelmingly white, with a history of privacy enforcement that surpasses the familiar walling off of natural beauty for the enjoyment of a few. Exclusion is Malibu’s founding principle. In 1892, Rhoda May Rindge, with her husband, a sickly, rich New Englander, bought Rancho Malibu, a former Spanish land grant that stretched from the mountains to the coast, then erected gates and locked them. After her husband’s death, Rindge stopped the Southern Pacific Railroad from running tracks through Malibu, and nearly bankrupted herself trying to prevent the state from building the Pacific Coast Highway. In need of funds, she started renting cottages to celebrities and built the Malibu Movie Colony. In the decades to come, celebrities used Malibu as a retreat from paparazzi and as a strategic background for bathing-suit shots.
These days, Malibu is a tourist town, with more than thirteen million visitors a year and only thirteen thousand residents—people like Lady Gaga, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Barbra Streisand, who, along with the beaches and the hiking trails, are part of the appeal, though the day-trippers will likely never glimpse them. Khalil Rafati, a co-founder of SunLife Organics, Malibu’s swankiest smoothie bar, told me, “The first thing tourists say—I mean, I’ve had this question asked to me, no joke, a hundred times—is ‘Where is Malibu?’ I’m, like, ‘This is it.’ Like, ‘Yes, Lady Gaga lives here, but she doesn’t want you to know that, and you’re never going to see her house.’ The Malibu that we get to experience is not available for the public.” Malibu is a walled garden. Bad things are not supposed to happen there.
The morning after Beaudette went camping, Wu woke up at home and got ready to take her test. She was surprised when her oldest sister showed up at her door, and disbelieving when she heard why. Her sister put her in the car and drove to Malibu, while Wu called family members. “I remember arguing on the phone,” Wu told me. “Just, ‘How do you know that he’s dead? Why isn’t he at the hospital? Who said he was dead? How do they know?’ ”
When Wu arrived at the park, she tried to get to the campground. She told me, “One of the rangers or somebody there said something like, ‘This never happens, you know. This kind of stuff never happens here.’ ”
It was a callous thing to say to a person whose husband had just been murdered; it was also untrue. Over the previous twenty months, multiple victims had reported to authorities that they’d been shot at in Malibu Creek State Park or on the nearby canyon road. There had been six near-misses, two of them in the campground where Beaudette was killed. One person was injured, requiring surgery.
State Parks officers had taken reports, as had deputies from Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station, the local branch of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. But neither the sheriff nor the California Department of Parks and Recreation issued a public-safety warning. Between the third and fourth shooting, State Parks posted an enticing picture online of someone free-climbing a rock wall at the park, with the hashtag #InventYourAdventure. The campground remained open to visitors.
Not long after Beaudette’s killing, when the campground was finally shut down, I went out to the park and walked around. There was just a small paper sign informing people of the closure. I looked at all the kiosks I came across: nothing was posted about Beaudette, or any of the near-misses—no request for information, no suggestion to remain vigilant. On my way out, I stopped by the administrative office. When I introduced myself, Tony Hoffman, the public-safety superintendent, asked me to step outside. He was visibly uncomfortable. He said he wasn’t “free to talk.” Then he added, tantalizingly, that Beaudette’s death “began to lift the veil of ignorance.”
A few weeks later, I met Jimmy Rogers in a parking lot at Tapia Park, a day-use area of Malibu Creek State Park. He is thirty-one years old, with long, dark hair and a swimmer’s build. He looked at the sky, where two specks were bobbing and weaving. “A raven bombing a red-tailed hawk,” he said.
We walked into a grove of decaying oaks. In the fall of 2016, Rogers told me, he was a graduate student in environmental biology, working at R.E.I. on the side. He decided to take a three-day solo trek on the Backbone Trail, a sixty-seven-mile route along the spine of the Santa Monica Mountains. He had been hiking parts of the trail for a decade, but he wanted to complete it in one go. Not many people attempt this, as the trail has few official campsites and plenty of mountain lions.
On his first day, Rogers hiked twenty-five miles, reaching Malibu Creek State Park around 9 P.M. Staying in the campground seemed extravagant: it cost about fifty dollars, and required a reservation. Rogers was planning to eat a peanut-butter sandwich and an energy bar for dinner, sleep for several hours, and get up early to resume hiking. He decided to hang a hammock close to the trailhead, in the grove in Tapia Park.
Rogers bundled into a down jacket and a sleeping bag and cocooned himself in the hammock, but it was hard to sleep. He could hear the traffic rushing by on the canyon road. After midnight, he dozed off, listening to Cat Power on headphones. A few hours later, he was startled awake. He can’t remember the sound, just that there was one, and a sudden drop, when his hammock split and he fell to the ground. His right arm was stinging, and when he looked at it, he saw that the underside, near the triceps, had thirty or forty small holes in it.
His first thought was that he had been attacked by a rabid animal. He cycled through the list of candidates: coyote, fox, dog, skunk, rat. There was a thin layer of blood covering his wound. That indicated a vampire bat, pushed north from its usual habitat in Mexico by climate change. He held still, listening. He knew how to be silent in the wilderness; while working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on a study of California condors, he had spent thirteen-hour days observing nests. “I didn’t hear anything, and I didn’t see anything,” he told me. “So I thought, What are the chances somebody’s just hiding in the dark?”
Rogers proceeded, without a flashlight, deeper into the grove. After several yards, he heard something. “I wanted to keep going, because if it’s a mouse, it’s going to make more sounds to get away,” he said. “But I didn’t, because I literally thought, I don’t want to get shot in the face.”
He retreated, shouting insults into the silent woods just in case, then left the park, walking along the dark canyon road until he finally had cell-phone service. He called his girlfriend, and she hurried him to the hospital, where he was treated for rabies. A few weeks later, he told me, he noticed that a sphere was rising to the surface of the wound. “I was playing around with my nephew at the time and it just popped out,” he said. “It was metal. You drop it on glass and it goes tink, tink, tink.”
Rogers’s girlfriend squeezed out a few more metal balls before he decided to get an X-ray. The balls, it turned out, were bird shot, and he needed surgery to remove them. At that point, he knew for sure what kind of animal had attacked him. He was furious. He kept thinking about the way he had been sleeping, inside his sleeping bag, with his right arm thrown over his forehead. Whoever shot him seemed to have been aiming for his head.
Rogers drove over to Malibu Creek State Park and filed a report with a ranger. “He told me some interesting stuff,” Rogers said. “He said that none of the State Parks employees go out there on patrol, because they’re afraid. He said, ‘There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in this area.’ ” The ranger, Rogers says, urged him to call Lost Hills Station, and he talked to a couple of deputies, but nothing much came of it.
Beyond the “21 Miles of Scenic Beauty” that represent the coastal city of Malibu, there is a vast, wild, and thinly populated zone. Most of the park is in Malibu’s unincorporated outskirts; its entrance is in Calabasas. There are steep canyons and long stretches where cell phones don’t work. Bluntly descriptive place names suggest an unsettled frontier: Dark Canyon, Cold Creek. In these areas, Malibu can feel liminal, a no man’s land at the far-western edge of Los Angeles County. Wildfire scientists call places like this the W.U.I.—the wildland-urban interface.
The abundant unclaimed space is inviting to drifters and loners. “There are the Jeremiah Johnson–type guys,” a retired Lost Hills patrol deputy told me—the hermits who live in the hills. The people of Malibu are generally inhospitable to them. Though the area has only about a hundred and fifty homeless people, they occupy disproportionate psychic space. At one community meeting I attended, a resident bemoaned the R.V.s parked along the Pacific Coast Highway and the encampments in the canyons. “This homeless scourge, epidemic, whatever you want to call it, has impacted our ability to use our public lands the way they were meant to be used for all,” she said. “I don’t hike anymore, for God’s sake.”
At the northern end of Malibu Creek State Park, behind the Lost Hills Station, is a scruffy patch of wilderness, where the brush, crisscrossed with deer trails, can grow to overhead. There, on a steep slope facing the canyon road, is where Anthony Rauda lived, in a tarp-covered dugout under the canopy of a large oak tree.
Rauda, who is forty-four, with dark hair and green eyes, spent years in and around the Santa Monica Mountains. He preferred nature and solitude to people, and he didn’t get much news. But, he told me, “I heard a lot of gunshots around the time of the Beaudette killing.” He thought he’d been shot at but wasn’t sure if it was intentional. “I just heard the bullets fly by.”
Rauda’s life was lonely, by design. In the hills, he froze at night and hiked during the day. He was close to the park’s entrance—it was just across Mulholland Highway, where lots of people leave their cars to avoid paying the parking fee. If I’d ever seen “The Dukes of Hazzard,” I’d recognize the terrain, he told me. Early mornings, he took pictures of the fog coming off Mulholland. He saw foxes, bobcats, eagles. Baby lizards crawled on him as he sat in the sun. After I mentioned that I had once written about the mountain lions in the Santa Monicas, he showed me a drawing he’d made of two mountain-lion cubs, snuggling. I recognized it as a painstaking copy of a famous photograph published by National Geographic.
Avoiding people was a habit, and also a way of escaping scrutiny. Rauda told me, “I worried every time I left the wilderness, as the sheriffs would usually try to stop me. Question me about being around such exclusive neighborhoods.” After the Beaudette killing, he heard their sirens wailing through the canyon. He sensed that he was being followed when he hiked.
Lost Hills is known as a “slow station,” an outpost in the boonies, covering a vast and varied terrain. It has a “beach team,” which patrols the sand on quads in the summer and tries to break up the flash mob of drunken teen-agers at Point Dume each Fourth of July. There is also the Malibu Search and Rescue team. M-SAR focusses on man-tracking and wilderness rescue—finding lost hikers, pulling people out of cars when they plunge off the side of the canyon, and, occasionally, helping on homicides and other criminal investigations. The team is largely made up of reserve deputies: entertainment lawyers and emergency-room doctors and yoga instructors, who receive training but are not full-time employees of the sheriff’s department. They get paid a dollar a year.
Sergeant Tui Wright spent most of his three-decade career with the sheriff’s department at Lost Hills Station, working as a narcotics detective and then running M-SAR. When I interviewed him, in 2019, he had just retired. He is sixty-one, sturdy and tall, an ex-marine with incongruously jumpy energy. He spent his early childhood in Fiji—tui is a Polynesian word for “king”—and grew up in Topanga, a couple of canyons away from Malibu Creek State Park. He’s a bow hunter and, except for what he kills, mostly vegan.
Wright told me that he first heard of the Malibu shooter in January of 2017, from Lieutenant James Royal, who oversaw the Lost Hills detectives. Tony Hoffman, the State Parks superintendent, had reached out. He was worried about a series of unexplained shootings in the park.
Several days after Jimmy Rogers was shot, in November of 2016, a man named Ron Carson was in a camper, parked close to where Beaudette was later killed. Between three and four in the morning, he got up to use the bathroom, turning on the light. Then he got back in bed and turned it off. He was lying in the dark when the camper was rocked by an explosion. “It felt like a bomb went off,” he testified later. He looked around; there was bird shot everywhere, and the wadding from a shotgun shell was lodged in the wall right next to where his head had been.
Two months later, Meliss Tatangelo and Frank Vargas were sleeping in her Honda, two sites over from where Carson had camped. Between four and five in the morning, they heard a bang. Later, after they’d left the campground and were pulling into a parking space at Starbucks, Tatangelo heard a rattling sound and discovered a hole in the trunk. She went back to the park, and State Parks officers found a shotgun slug in her car.
Wright says that, when he and Royal learned of the attacks, they notified their station captain. But the captain, who was close to retirement, brushed them off, saying that it was State Parks’ problem. Wright disagreed. He said, “It’s right down the street, and it might technically be in the State Parks jurisdiction, but who’s to say it couldn’t spill out into ours?”
Soon it did. That summer, two cars were shot while driving through Malibu Canyon. The canyon is a major thoroughfare, connecting the Pacific Coast Highway with the 101. The road is spectacular and harrowing, with steep drop-offs on one side and towering rock faces covered in oaks and chaparral on the other. Some twenty thousand cars drive on it every day, passing through Lost Hills’ jurisdiction.
Across the canyon road from the Malibu Creek State Park campground is a large Hindu temple. That’s where a white Porsche was hit with bird shot, then a white BMW. The BMW was being driven by a teen-ager, Nicole K.; another, Nathan G., was in the passenger’s seat. They were on their way to a surf competition at Surfrider Beach. When the car was hit, they pulled over. A back window had been shattered, and the side panels were riddled with holes. Nicole called her dad, who told her to call the police.
Wright says that the timing of the incidents (“in the wee morning hours”) and the M.O. (a single shot, with shotgun ammunition) suggested a lone perpetrator, as did the location. “The state park is huge, but this was one particular campground,” he told me. “Then on the highway, adjacent to the campground, in the same spot. Those were consistent patterns that I think indicated a serial shooter. I think it’s only common sense.”
J. T. Manwell worked under Royal, until he retired recently after twenty-five years as a detective. He told me that the similarities between the crimes were pretty obvious by the fourth shooting. “A lot of us believed there was a pattern between three and four,” he said. “Definitely by five, we knew we had a shooter out there.”
There weren’t many leads, but Royal started developing a list of possible suspects. When a new captain took over, later in 2017, he was more sympathetic to their views. He and Royal went downtown, to sheriff’s-department headquarters, and met with the division chief and the commander, urging them to mount an aggressive response. But that meeting, too, was fruitless. “They didn’t want to scare the public,” Manwell told me. (The sheriff’s department, asked to confirm facts for this article, claimed that there were “unsupported” assertions, but declined to offer specifics, citing an ongoing investigation.)
Even after multiple shootings, the supervisors seemed to think that Royal and Wright were blowing the threat out of proportion—perhaps a side effect of working at a slow station. Wright was galled. “To be told by other investigators or the department there was no evidence, or there was not enough information to link these crimes—I just thought it was ridiculous,” he told me. He acknowledged that the presence of a sniper in the area would have been a “shit sandwich”—a mess that no one comes away from with clean hands. But, he said, “the park probably should have been closed. And had we warned the public—I mean, maybe the highway would be shut down during the early-morning hours. It sounds pretty extreme, but would that have saved people from being assaulted? Probably.”
The people who did know about the shootings—law enforcement—took measures to protect themselves. “We all knew where this shooting ground was,” Wright says. “And I had heard rumors that some patrol cars would go by there at high speed, with their guns out the window pointing in that direction. I believe that people knew, and warned their family members not to drive by there.” Manwell told me that he instructed his daughter, who worked at Pepperdine University, at the southern end of Malibu Canyon, to take a different route.
After the teen-agers in the BMW, there was an eleven-month lull in shootings. Then, on June 18, 2018, Ian Kincaid was driving his car, a white Tesla, through Malibu Canyon on his way to work. It was around four in the morning, and there was no one on the road. He caught himself speeding. He remembers thinking, “I’m going to get there too early. There’s no hurry.” Right by the Hindu temple, a bullet hit his car.
I went to see Kincaid at his house, in the Malibu hills. He is in his early sixties, with young kids, and has worked as a gaffer on six Quentin Tarantino films. On the long driveway onto his property, facing panoramic views of the ocean, is a playhouse built out of repurposed sets from “The Hateful Eight.” He pulled the Tesla out of the garage and peeled back a piece of white electrical tape from over a gash in the hood. The gash is like a memento mori, hidden, so his kids won’t see.
That morning in the canyon, Kincaid was headed to the set of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” He heard a strange sound. “I thought, Did I leave a coffee cup on my roof again?” he told me. He looked down, and his cup was right in its holder. “I thought, Well, maybe it was an acorn, because I was driving near some oak trees.” Then his car alarm started going off, so he pulled over, and saw that the front hood had popped open. He closed it and continued on to work.
A quick-draw world champion happened to be on set that day, and when he saw the gash in Kincaid’s hood, he said, “Son, that’s a bullet hole.” Kincaid called Lost Hills Station and was told that he could stop by on his way home. A deputy photographed the damage and handed him a slip of paper with a number on it. “She said, ‘This is your crime report, if you ever need it,’ ” he told me. “There was nobody expressing any kind of serious interest.”
Four days later, Tristan Beaudette was killed. Suddenly, Kincaid told me, “My phone just lit up. Within a half an hour, I probably got twenty calls—from sheriffs, from L.A.P.D., from Lost Hills, from rangers, from newspapers, from reporters—and I just thought, What is this?”
Sergeant Wright was one of the people calling. When he heard about Kincaid, he felt a “sickening concern,” he told me: “Here’s another one. It happened at the same time, in darkness, in the same area.” Several days later, a Lost Hills deputy found spent ammunition on the roadside—not bird shot, but a bullet. This was disturbing, a suggestion that the shooter had upgraded to a weapon that was far deadlier and far more precise. “When you shoot at a car with bird shot, it’s very difficult to penetrate the vehicle and get somebody inside,” Wright said. “But when you shoot a vehicle with a solid-projectile weapon, it’s going to penetrate through the window, through the body, through the door. It will go inside.”
Kincaid brought his car to the station again, and, as he tells it, deputies ushered him around to the back. Wright and the others ran dowels through the hole, to confirm the size of the bullet and determine its trajectory. “It really threw us for a loop,” Wright told me. “There was a change in weapons.”
Beaudette’s death horrified Malibu. But when, in the days after his killing, stories of earlier victims began to surface, a different emotion emerged: outrage. “Police don’t do anything here,” Cece Woods told me at the time. She’s a self-described Malibu “big mouth,” with a Web site called the Local, who prides herself on knowing what is going on in town. “I take public safety very, very seriously,” she said. “So now I’m finding out that there’s two years’ worth of shootings?”
On Facebook, Woods shared a screenshot containing details of the Tesla shooting. In a comment to that post, Meliss Tatangelo wrote that she, too, had come close to getting hit, but that the State Parks officers were nonchalant. “When the police came (which took over 2 hours to show up) they told me, ‘things like this don’t happen out here,’ ” she wrote. “I asked what they were going to do about it and they told me they couldn’t do anything.”
As far as the public could tell, Malibu was being terrorized by an elusive killer, the Canyon Shooter, who already had a string of victims. But law enforcement seemed, almost willfully, to resist that interpretation. Press releases from the sheriff’s department hewed to a strict narrative, which seemed to justify the decision not to warn the public before the murder: “Homicide detectives are advising, at this time there is no evidence to suggest the past shootings are related to the June 22, 2018 homicide.”
Inside Lost Hills Station, the faction that had long believed there was a sniper at large was frustrated. On the morning of the murder, Manwell reported to the campground. “When we found out that Mr. Beaudette was killed, I can tell you I was angry as hell,” he said. “My belief was, we should have warned the public, giving them a choice of whether they wanted to drive through the canyon, stay at the campground, or anything else.” He went on, “I felt very much like we had failed this family.”
The pressure intensified to come up with a suspect. Manwell told me, “It was focussed on a lone-wolf type of guy.”
That summer, a rash of mysterious burglaries of commercial buildings began near the periphery of the park. Someone was stealing breakfast sandwiches and cinnamon rolls, leaving valuables untouched. A burglar was caught on camera: dressed in black, carrying a black backpack with what appeared to be a rifle sticking out of it. Sergeant Wright was on vacation at the time, but Lieutenant Royal sent him an image. Wright says that he recognized the weapon as a pistol-calibre carbine: a lightweight semi-automatic weapon that takes a 9-millimetre handgun round. Metal detectorists from his Search and Rescue team had found five 9-millimetre shell casings in the campground a week after Beaudette died. Wright thought that the carbine could be the weapon that both fired on the Tesla and killed Beaudette.
Major Crimes, a bureau that focusses on serial crimes, took over the investigation in early October. There were large-scale manhunts, with helicopters, bloodhounds, and a special-weapons team. The stated purpose was to find an armed burglar—one who seemed primarily focussed on eating—but the public assumed that the real objective was to find Beaudette’s killer. “We’re not getting a clear picture of what’s happening,” a resident of the area told a local news station. “But I sense that what’s happening is worse than what we think.”
On October 9th, there was another break-in, at the Agoura Hills/Calabasas Community Center. Using a rock, someone had smashed a glass front door, and then a vending machine, taking snacks. The community center is next door to the Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station.
Wright went to investigate, along with Steve Sullivan, a member of the Search and Rescue team, whom he considered his “best man-tracker.” In a planter in the parking lot, they found a distinctive boot print, which they recognized from the site of one of the previous burglaries. “It wasn’t your typical waffle sole,” Wright told me. Next to it was some broken glass. The prints and the glass formed the beginning of a trail; with the help of a dog, Wright and Sullivan followed it into the hills behind the station. On the way, they were joined by investigators from Major Crimes and Lost Hills Station. “We tracked that person until it got dark, where it was no longer safe or feasible,” Wright said.
The next day, Major Crimes organized a sweep of the park. Assigned to the command post, Wright ruminated on the last boot print that he had seen in the hills. It was in the middle of nowhere. He knew, based on the time of the break-in at the community center, that it must have been placed just before dawn. Why would someone be there at that time? He figured that there had to be a camp. Scanning the area with mapping software, he saw tree canopy and what looked like a streambed. Cover, water—these were clues, to a former narcotics detective, that a camp could be there. That afternoon, a team went out to the site—Major Crimes investigators, along with Royal, Sullivan, and two Lost Hills deputies.
They split up, with Royal and one deputy heading south and the rest heading west. The westward team trudged through overgrown brush toward a ridge that was already steeped in shadow. “It was a very eerie quiet,” Steven Arens, a Lost Hills deputy, later testified. “You just hear the wind slowly howling through the canyon.” Suddenly, Arens said, he heard a strange clanging noise from the ridge. He got down on one knee and looked through the optic on his rifle. Zooming in, he saw a man in black, with a backpack. A gun was sticking out of the top.
“Freeze,” Arens yelled. The man argued, but the deputies had their guns trained on him. They ordered him to toss his backpack, and handcuffed him as he lay face down in the brush, right by his camp. “It was what we call a hooch, which is a military term for a homemade tent made from a tarp,” Wright told me. The man was Anthony Rauda, and the gun in his backpack was a carbine.
Rauda describes his living situation as a principled retreat from civilization. In 2016, he says, he made a pledge to live without money—no handouts, nothing from the government, no more contact. He wanted a light footprint, no tent. “I have not used tents in Years 1) so I can travel anytime lightly 2) so I can learn to survive outdoors with as little as possible,” he wrote, in one of a series of letters we exchanged after his arrest. He wanted to prove something to himself, “and maybe write about it.”
According to his father, Oswald, Rauda had been a meticulous child, shy and gentle, who loved playing baseball. When he was young, the family lived in Highland Park, on the Eastside of Los Angeles, close to cousins and to the elementary school. After Oswald and Anthony’s mother divorced, he says, she and her new husband moved Anthony and his two older siblings to Tampa, and he lost touch with them. Anthony dropped out of high school, got a G.E.D., and briefly joined the Army, training in infantry. By the time he showed up back in L.A., Oswald felt that he’d changed.
Anthony Rauda says that he had a hard time adjusting to a stable life. He made music and wrote poems; he tried to make it as a d.j., then, when that didn’t work out, as a movie extra. He spent time drifting up and down the coast, dipping into transient communities, before he decided to live apart, in a society of one.
To prepare, Rauda followed the advice of Ragnar Benson, who has written dozens of books, including manuals on how to survive a coming apocalypse and get ready for the “next economy.” Benson advocates opportunism: survivors may need to scrounge and steal, poach game, trap muskrats. His followers should cache weapons, ammunition, hydrogen peroxide, kitchen matches. Benson’s brand of self-reliance is adversarial: “David’s Tool Kit: A Citizen’s Guide to Taking Out Big Brother’s Heavy Weapons,” “Ragnar’s Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives.” Pity the Mormons, he writes, who’ve broadcast to everyone that they have good canned food.
In “Live Off the Land in the City and Country,” Benson tells the story of Bill Moreland, a “ne’er do well” who couldn’t get along with people. After years of train-hopping and trouble with police, he writes, “the Wildman” walked into the Idaho wilderness. For the next thirteen years, he lived in hollow logs, caves, and dugouts, and spoke to another person only twice. He stole what he needed from Forest Service lookout towers; when he was finally caught, with a .22 and ammunition, he was wearing a sweater taken the previous summer from one of the rangers who arrested him.
Rauda’s life followed a similar trajectory—frequent skirmishes with authorities—but in a region far more heavily trafficked than the mountains of northern Idaho. In his twenties, Rauda started breaking into buildings, stealing stuff, lighting fires. In 2003, he broke into a high school and set a fire, and was convicted of second-degree commercial burglary, a felony.
Soon after, Rauda was arrested for public drunkenness and fighting in Agoura Hills, a suburb that backs up to Malibu Creek State Park. In a letter to the county ombudsman, calling for an investigation, Rauda claimed that a deputy attacked him. On a dark road, he wrote, “I was approached by a sheriff cruiser who asked me to stop, I did so on the second command. I told the officer I did no wrong.” More cruisers appeared, he claimed, blocking off the road. “A deputy attacked me by placing both hands on my neck and choking me.”
The charges against Rauda were dismissed, but the conflict with Lost Hills reverberated. In court documents, Rauda claims that he feared for his life, and, although he was on probation for the incident at the high school, he began avoiding his probation officer. His father, with whom he stayed briefly, told me that he was acting strangely. He laughed joylessly, and he had no friends. He received a lot of mail from the N.R.A.
In 2004, he was arrested in a warrant sweep at a motel; when officers noticed a fuse lying on top of his backpack, they got a warrant to search his father’s house, his sister’s house, and a P.O. box he rented. They found evidence that he had purchased more than four pounds of explosives. They also found two guns: a double-barrelled derringer and a .44 revolver, muzzle-loaders that take black-powder ammunition. In California, it’s illegal for a convicted felon to buy a handgun of any kind. But, according to Greg Block, a weapons trainer and expert witness I spoke to, these guns, as antique replicas, are essentially considered decorative—“wall hangers”—and sellers don’t often check a buyer’s criminal history. Among the evidence that investigators collected were Benson’s book “Guerrilla Gunsmithing” and George Hayduke’s “Get Even,” which is devoted to the art of revenge. In court documents, Rauda argued that he needed the guns, to protect himself from the Lost Hills deputies. During the proceedings, he took a swing at a deputy, which he explained later by saying that he was tired of being “harassed” by law enforcement.
Rauda went to state prison, and was released on parole less than two years later. His mental health deteriorated, and he drank: sometimes he’d pass out, and sheriff’s deputies once found him unconscious in suburbia, dressed in black and wearing a backpack full of contraband. Judges mandated therapy and treatment, but he didn’t always complete it. “I’m just going to go through counseling and try to get a residence and, you know, try to get my health better,” he told the court after a D.U.I. arrest in 2012. “I should have went to the classes, but they are a little rough for me. I can’t stand being around people.”
As Rauda’s behavior grew increasingly troublesome, Oswald, who is sixty-six and lives in the San Gabriel Valley, struggled to stay in his son’s life. He told me that he once made a plan to give him an A.T.M. card, but Anthony didn’t show up at their meeting place. He seemed to want to disappear. A few times, Oswald tried unsuccessfully to find Anthony in his camp. When he arrived, the place always seemed neatly maintained, as if the brush had been cleared with a machete. But the choice of location was odd. Despite Rauda’s antipathy toward law enforcement, and the thousands of acres of nearby wilderness to choose from, he had decided to make his camp in the desolate terrain right behind the Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station.
In January, 2019, Rauda was charged with murder, for killing Beaudette, and with attempted murder, for his daughters, who were in the tent when he died. He was also charged with eight other counts of attempted murder, for the shootings in the park and on the canyon road, and with five second-degree commercial burglaries. He pleaded not guilty on all counts. “I have been wronged by the system and other people,” Rauda wrote to me. “I am not a violent person & I would never want to be known as someone who hurt innocent people or children.”
In Malibu, those who felt that law enforcement had been hiding the existence of the Canyon Shooter are not entirely convinced that they arrested the right person. Karen and Arnold York, the publishers of the Malibu Times, a community newspaper, told me that they “take it with a grain of salt.” Karen said, “The fact that this guy was a homeless guy, it was so easy to say, ‘His fault.’ Who knows? It may be a perfectly preppy-looking guy, who’s got issues with guns, who did this, but we’re not going to look for him. We’re going to focus on somebody that threatens our vision of what Malibu should be.”
Even Sergeant Wright, who firmly believes the serial-shooter theory, admits that the Rauda story is a little neat. “I would think it would take some nerve to commit a burglary directly next door to the station,” he told me. “I mean . . . why would somebody commit a murder and then hold on to the same weapon? And then do burglaries on videotape, making very little effort to hide, other than putting a mask on part of your face? There’s an assumption that most criminals would think, if their picture was captured on camera with a weapon, that there’s going to be a heightened law-enforcement effort to engage them, and that’s exactly what happened.”
More than two years later, Rauda’s criminal trial has yet to begin, but he and his family continue to proclaim his innocence. Oswald told me that he doesn’t understand how Rauda got the carbine and can’t imagine him using it. “He doesn’t even hunt,” he said. “He eats from the dumpsters at the McDonald’s near the 101.” Rauda’s brother-in-law told me that he believes Anthony has been framed. Rauda, too, argues that the focus on him is misplaced. “The Beaudette family and friends can blame the sheriff’s department for his death,” he wrote. “That’s where the justice is at.”
For almost two decades, Rauda has felt picked on, singled out, wronged, specifically by law enforcement and the criminal-justice system. In the murder case, he has repeatedly asked to represent himself and been denied. He’s gone through several public defenders and is now being represented by a private attorney who works with indigent clients.
In pretrial hearings, he behaves erratically. “I don’t want to sit in jail another two years,” he shouted at the judge during a hearing in July. He was in a restraint chair, with his hands fixed to the armrests, surrounded by deputies. He was railing against the fact that he hadn’t been provided a ballistics expert, or been allowed to send an investigator to his campsite. Did the judge want him to be stupid? To close his eyes and his ears? “I have a brain, I have soul,” he said. “I’m gonna fucking have your job one day, lady. Fucking liars.” The judge looked at him with raised eyebrows as the deputies wheeled him out.
After asking me to help him get an attorney (which I didn’t) and asking me to put money on his books (which I did, so that he could buy writing materials and stamps for our correspondence), Rauda decided that he didn’t trust me, either. In his final letter to me, he expressed resentment. “The media’s portrayal of me has been slanderous,” he wrote. “I have not been to Malibu in years.”
Then he turned, as usual, to the cops, and their failures. He wrote, “There’s been other shootings and crimes in that area that cannot be linked to me, nobody investigates that. I have medicine records showing injuries done to me by sheriffs, this can be checked, no one has. . . . I met a lot of good people in my travels but lying cops are not among them.”
It will likely be many more months before the case goes to trial. At a recent hearing, the judge, citing Rauda’s uncoöperative behavior, entered a doubt as to his competency to stand trial. Criminal proceedings are currently suspended, while he is assessed and stabilized. The prosecutor is confident that the trial will take place, but when it does she faces a challenging set of circumstances. The first five near-misses used shotgun ammunition, and no shotgun has been found. Just a month after Rauda’s arrest, the Woolsey Fire devastated Malibu, scorching much of Malibu Creek State Park and destroying his campsite, along with any evidence that may have remained.
The struggle inside the sheriff’s department could prove consequential, too. After Rauda’s arrest, Wright and Royal were transferred out of Lost Hill Station and later disciplined for conducting what the prosecutor called “unauthorized investigations”—including the dowel test on the Tesla. Both filed lawsuits against the department; the county settled with Wright, but Royal’s case is on hold until Rauda’s trial is finished. The prosecutor has referred to these disputes as “potentially exculpatory,” making it extremely unlikely that she’ll call on Wright and Royal to testify at Rauda’s trial, despite their intricate knowledge of the case.
If Rauda is the Canyon Shooter, one thing is clear: he has extracted heavy revenge on the sheriff’s department and on the Lost Hills cops in particular. Public confidence in law enforcement in the area has been seriously eroded. Along with the reputational harm, there may be a financial toll. Erica Wu, Tristan Beaudette’s widow, has filed a ninety-million-dollar lawsuit against the sheriff’s department, State Parks, and others, citing their “failure to warn.”
Wu’s father died of cancer when she was eight, and her mother raised her and her sisters alone. After Beaudette’s death, grief counsellors she met with tried to make this out to be a silver lining. Who better than she to raise two little girls who had lost their dad?
But Wu didn’t want to be an expert on grief, on growing up without a father. Her own childhood loss didn’t ease the burden; it made it heavier. She told me about Beaudette’s last Father’s Day, less than a week before he died. It was clear and sunny, and he brought the family to the beach. “Tristan set up a little sunshade, and the girls were playing in the waves,” Wu said. “They were letting the waves chase them, and I remember running after them and Tristan running after them, and I remember sort of looking at the three of them and just thinking how lucky I was to have them.”
She went on, “Probably the biggest fear that I had was loving them so much that you get scared of what it would be like not having that.” His death, she says, had a redounding effect. None of them will ever be the same. “Obviously, he died, but that sort of family that I had died, too,” she told me. “Part of me, part of them.”
After Beaudette’s death, she couldn’t spend another night in their house in Orange County. The moving vans came, as scheduled, for their move to the Bay Area. Her sisters did everything, and put most of the stuff from the old house into a storage unit. Wu barely remembers this period. She didn’t move into the house that Beaudette had found for them. She rented another place, a town house near the medical center where she works. Every day feels like a lifetime, she told me. She still can’t believe that her husband kissed her goodbye the morning of his camping trip and never came back.
When I talked to Wu last month, she was getting ready for another move. It was just to another unit in the same complex, but she sounded lighter and more optimistic than she had in our previous conversations. The girls were excited. They could each have their own room, if they wanted, though Wu didn’t think they would. They still sleep in the same bed.
She had been making photo albums for them—pictures of their father, which until recently she found it excruciating to look at. She’d also cleaned out the storage unit, filled with her husband’s things. She set aside a box of his favorite T-shirts, and the girls found them in her closet. Now they wear them to bed, like nightgowns. A friend offered to take the rest of the shirts and make them into quilts for the girls.
On Tristan’s birthday, Wu told me, she takes off work and lets the girls miss school. They spend the day together, doing something that he would have loved. On his most recent birthday, they went hiking in the redwoods. Wu took a wrong turn and they ended up lost, on a six-mile hike. When they finally made their way back, they took some of his ashes to the Pacific Ocean and scattered them from the beach. ♦
