True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 352: CEDU Country Aired: 2024-02-08 Duration: 01:15:18 === Behavior Monitored, Depression Drops (14:49) === [00:00:00] Franc Zach. [00:00:00] Franc Zach. [00:00:01] There's no like hard C sound, so it'd be a franc. [00:00:03] Franc. [00:00:04] Yeah, it would be a Franc trip. [00:00:06] Franc. [00:00:07] I'm Franc Zac. [00:00:08] Franc. [00:00:08] Franc Zac. [00:00:10] Franc. [00:00:11] Franc. [00:00:14] So fucking stupid. [00:00:15] Ladies and gentlemen, that was our stupid fucking cold. [00:00:19] We got him. [00:00:20] The one that we cold open. [00:00:21] There's no moving away. [00:00:23] We just do whatever we want. [00:00:25] We need to figure out. [00:00:26] I've been saying, this has been, you behind the scenes here, this has been my battle for years. [00:00:30] We need to figure out an alternative version of the intro where it's maybe like I made a softer little intro. [00:00:41] Maybe we need an even harder intro. [00:00:43] What is it? [00:00:44] It should just be me being like, fuck you, and then drop the beat. [00:01:09] The beat has been dropped, but my testicles haven't. [00:01:13] My name is Buzz. [00:01:15] That's the stuff that we got to get out of this. [00:01:17] My name, what? [00:01:19] What are you fucking, I'm sorry. [00:01:21] I have said on this show before, and I'll say it again. [00:01:23] Until I was probably about 15 years old, I thought your balls dropping was an actual physical one-time act that you experienced like a gut punch. [00:01:32] Like New Year's. [00:01:34] Yeah, like a physical thing? [00:01:36] Yeah, where they dropped the balls. [00:01:37] I see what you're saying. [00:01:37] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:01:39] Yes. [00:01:40] Your balls drop on your 12th or 13th birthday on New Year's. [00:01:44] Yeah. [00:01:44] And then you start talking about it. [00:01:45] And Carson Daly narrates it. [00:01:47] He did. [00:01:48] Well, that's. [00:01:48] And Miley Cyrus performs. [00:01:50] This is what I assume happens on New Year's. [00:01:52] I saw Miley Cyrus on New Year's last year. [00:01:54] Look at that. [00:01:55] Me and Lance Bass. [00:01:56] I stood next to him and his four of the identically heighted but multi-racial gay guys, sort of flanking his crew? [00:02:08] His crew. [00:02:09] They were incredibly. [00:02:12] My memory might fade, have faded, but I believe they were all wearing. [00:02:17] In fact, I'm sure I'm just adding this in in sort of like a altered memory kind of thing. [00:02:23] But I pictured them with no shirts and suit jackets. [00:02:28] Were they cosmonauts? [00:02:30] No. [00:02:30] No, I got the, I did not get a whiff. [00:02:33] Wouldn't that be cool? [00:02:34] That would be cool. [00:02:35] Yeah. [00:02:35] Yeah, like some kind of new. [00:02:37] What was the I can't remember fucking anything ever. [00:02:41] Talking about altered memory. [00:02:42] What's the gay YMCA band? [00:02:45] The village people. [00:02:46] Yeah, there you go. [00:02:47] So you got village people, but like cosmonaut stuff. [00:02:49] You know, a lot of people don't know. [00:02:50] They were straight. [00:02:51] They just dressed like. [00:02:52] None of my business. [00:02:53] A lot of their fan base was gay, but the village people were straight. [00:02:57] None of my business. [00:02:58] I love Lance. [00:03:01] Hello, everyone. [00:03:02] I'm Liz. [00:03:02] Liz Bass. [00:03:04] And we're, of course, joined by Leika. [00:03:10] Young Chomsky. [00:03:12] It's a cosmonaut. [00:03:14] The producer of this podcast, which is called. [00:03:17] Druid on Hello. [00:03:18] They should send more dogs to space. [00:03:19] should not. [00:03:20] To me, I've... [00:03:21] Why? [00:03:22] They live. [00:03:24] What? [00:03:25] No, they. [00:03:26] Famously. [00:03:27] They live. [00:03:27] Yeah. [00:03:28] They lived. [00:03:30] They lived up to a point, and then they don't. [00:03:33] How about an 11-year-old dog? [00:03:34] Would you be okay with sending an 11-year-old dog to space? [00:03:37] What about a mother monkey or two? [00:03:39] No. [00:03:40] This is why. [00:03:40] Why are we sending animals to space? [00:03:42] It's cheaper? [00:03:44] For what? [00:03:47] Views? [00:03:47] You could probably get a lot of views from that in some sort of TikTokian environment. [00:03:51] TikTokian. [00:03:53] Imagine how many views a dog in space would do. [00:03:56] Probably not as many as you do. [00:03:57] TikTok. [00:03:58] I think it would do a lot. [00:04:01] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show. [00:04:04] We got a little bit of a true crime week. [00:04:08] We do. [00:04:08] We do have a true crime week. [00:04:10] A true crime week. [00:04:13] Detective. [00:04:14] True crime. [00:04:15] I don't know where I'm going with this. [00:04:16] Well, fake detectives in this story. [00:04:18] Yes, some bullshit fucking detectives in this story. [00:04:21] Not our guests. [00:04:22] No. [00:04:22] Some of the people who are looking at this case. [00:04:25] We are talking about the troubled teen industry. [00:04:29] And this is sort of a follow-up to our episode we did about a year ago with David Safran. [00:04:35] And also related, I would say, to our series, The Game. [00:04:40] Absolutely. [00:04:42] As people who are probably very familiar with CDU from that, CD, which came from Cinnanon, which turned into the place that I went to. [00:04:50] And we're talking about this. [00:04:50] Also, if you haven't listened to it, we're going to link to it in the show notes. [00:04:54] Just made that decision. [00:04:55] And you should listen to it. [00:04:56] Yeah, we'll link all that stuff. [00:04:59] This was a, this is, for some reason, because we did an episode of this last year, but I was very affected looking into this again. [00:05:08] Yeah. [00:05:09] I don't know. [00:05:10] I said this during the interview that everyone's going to listen to in a second. [00:05:13] But this is one of those cases where you're like, damn, how is this not like a big fucking story? [00:05:18] Yeah. [00:05:18] Yeah. [00:05:19] You know what I mean? [00:05:20] I do. [00:05:20] I'm like, this seems like this should be at a legacy publication with like a big fucking story that like pushes all of the right buttons. [00:05:29] Kind of thing that you would see in a series like True Detective, to be honest. [00:05:32] Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:05:33] I mean, it is. [00:05:34] It involves missing children and very clear cover-ups by not only a discredited institution that is now closed, but by a sheriff's department. [00:05:46] I mean, yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's, I think that, you know, one thing that I really affected me when we were doing research for the game is just how many like lives of kids, now often adults, but still kids, because these places are still around, have are affected by this. [00:06:05] And, you know, I've been doing lately like a lot of thinking about how it's sort of affected me in certain ways. [00:06:10] But also, you know, the ultimate thing is dying from this. [00:06:15] And, you know, there appears to be at least three casualties directly linked to this specific facility. [00:06:23] And this happens still. [00:06:24] Like these places are, CDU might be closed, but these places are still all over the country. [00:06:29] And as we get into the episode, supported by people in both major political parties. [00:06:35] And it's just, yeah, it's just such a rotten industry. [00:06:39] But with that being said, I think let's get into the episode. [00:06:55] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Synanon with us here today for a rousing rap session. [00:07:03] We have David Safran. [00:07:05] You might remember him from our episode about a year ago called CDU Detective. [00:07:10] He wrote under the Nom De Guerre, a Medium Anonymous, a really great long-form piece on CDU and has written for LA Magazine about the story we'll be talking about today and a bunch of fantastic. [00:07:25] One of the best researchers into this, the topic of the, I guess, you don't like to call it that, but a lot of people know it, the troubled teen industry. [00:07:33] And Josh Block, the host and producer of the Lost Kids podcast. [00:07:38] And guys, welcome to the show. [00:07:39] Hello. [00:07:40] Thanks for having us. [00:07:41] Yep. [00:07:41] Thank you. [00:07:42] So the day this episode comes out, February 8th, is the anniversary of the disappearance of Daniel Ewen from CDU. [00:07:52] And I think we've talked about this on the show before, but I think just as a little bit of background to fill listeners in who maybe haven't heard the previous episode, can you tell us about what, first of all, what is CDU and what is it about the disappearance of Daniel Ewen that made you want to research it? [00:08:13] So what is CDO? [00:08:14] That's an excellent question. [00:08:15] I was there for 16 months. [00:08:17] I can't really answer that coherently. [00:08:20] Essentially, CDU was a private residential treatment facility, behavior modification. [00:08:30] It was originally, it was meant to be some sort of utopian rehab kind of thing. [00:08:39] And then it eventually kind of transformed. [00:08:41] It took in all kinds of kids. [00:08:44] If you had low-level depression, well, you can get your behavior modified for two years. [00:08:50] If you do have some sort of drug addiction, the same thing could happen. [00:08:54] It went on and on and on. [00:08:56] It was one of the most influential programs within the troubled teen industry. [00:09:03] And multiple kids went missing. [00:09:07] The ones that we know about and talk about most often, 1993, a kid named John Inman, 1994, Blake Persley, and then in 2004, Daniel Ewan. [00:09:20] So those are the three, the three kids that I've been researching for the last couple years. [00:09:30] And that was, you know, these were, at one time, these were solvable cases. [00:09:37] And they just never had been solved, never really looked into. [00:09:41] And so, and David and I worked on a podcast specifically about Daniel Ewan's case called, the podcast is called The Lost Kids. [00:09:48] And we, I mean, we really looked at the bigger story of the so-called troubled teen industry and of CDU specifically, but through the lens of this one, the last of the three boys that went missing from the program. [00:10:03] And he was, like, I think pretty emblematic of how a lot of teens end up at C. Doo. [00:10:08] He had low-level depression. [00:10:10] He was kind of, you know, hit his adolescence, was struggling in school, was experimenting with drugs. [00:10:14] He was, you know, there was a shift in his personality. [00:10:17] And his parents were really concerned about him. [00:10:19] They went to the schools, asked for support. [00:10:21] They reached out to psychiatrists. [00:10:23] They did a bunch of stuff because they recognized that their son was struggling. [00:10:28] And kind of in an act of desperation, Wayne Ewen, Daniel's father, just Googled online, you know, what's a program for struggling kids. [00:10:38] And the first thing that pops up is this website for this wonder, beautiful-looking boarding, I think it's like a therapeutic boarding school in the hills of San Bernardino. [00:10:48] And we can fix everything. [00:10:49] We can fix depression. [00:10:50] We can fix ADD, whatever it is. [00:10:53] Send your kid here. [00:10:54] It's going to cost you a bunch of money, but what you're going to get is your kid back. [00:10:57] And in an act of desperation, which is really how a lot of parents arrive at these programs, they thought, great, like this, this might be the fix. [00:11:04] And they took Daniel there. [00:11:07] You know, there's a bit of a story about what happened when they arrived, but essentially when they got there, Daniel said, I don't want to stay. [00:11:18] And the program said, no, no, well, let's just come talk to the dean. [00:11:21] Come talk to the dean. [00:11:21] And they kind of took Daniel aside. [00:11:23] And then they came back to the parents and said, you know what, Daniel's fine. [00:11:25] He wants to stay. [00:11:26] Best for you to just leave. [00:11:27] And that was really the last time Wayne and Lisa, his parents, ever saw Daniel again. [00:11:32] Yeah. [00:11:32] So to you, the best of your understanding, after looking into this case for so many years, what happened between that drop off and Daniel's disappearance? [00:11:42] Like, what did he find when he arrived at CDU? [00:11:46] The community he found was not what he expected. [00:11:50] I mean, I was sent to CDU for the exact same reason that Daniel was. [00:11:55] And I think once you're enrolled and you do the move-in process and you are already a startled contactee and you're just not used to this sort of, you know, private prison vibe of the place, and that threw Daniel, I believe. [00:12:12] I just want to go back a bit, though, because the narrative that we have of Daniel arriving at CDU and becoming more depressed. [00:12:19] And this all really still comes from his parents. [00:12:22] We haven't actually heard it from Daniel himself. [00:12:24] And I mean, I interviewed his best friend Nick. [00:12:26] So did you, Josh. [00:12:27] And there is a sense that there was a personality shift a bit, but it doesn't sound as extreme as how the Ewans portray it. [00:12:36] And I understand it from the Ewen's perspective, too, and the parents seeing this. [00:12:39] And the kids slipping and the grades are slipping. [00:12:42] But I do worry that maybe he wasn't really as far gone as it seems and that it was sort of an overreaction to a pretty normal shift in team behavior. [00:13:01] Nevertheless, he arrives in this place. [00:13:03] He's completely overwhelmed. [00:13:07] It's incomprehensible. [00:13:08] And he basically shuts down. [00:13:10] And he's not making friends. [00:13:14] He's finding it very difficult to navigate the system. [00:13:18] From my understanding, it was just his phone calls were monitored at CDU. [00:13:22] They were monitored by a staffer, and they happened every two weeks. [00:13:28] From my understanding, it was just one phone call that he had with his parents. [00:13:32] He was only there about 13 days before he vanished. [00:13:37] And he was scheduled to have another phone call two days before CDU informed his parents that he was missing. [00:13:44] But that phone call, for whatever reason, it didn't occur. [00:13:47] I believe they said it was like a scheduling mix-up or something like that, which always sounded very suspicious to me because that was the one part of C. Doo that they had down to a science, you know, was these scheduled phone calls. [00:13:59] So to have a mix-up, in my mind, maybe he lost the privilege at that point. [00:14:10] Because I guess the first phone call, he was trying to explain to his parents, as many of us were, that this is not the marketing that you fell for, that this is not the right kind of program. [00:14:22] Right. [00:14:23] And importantly, as you mentioned, David, these phone calls were monitored. [00:14:27] And there's very clear rules about what any of the residents could say. [00:14:34] But also, Wayne and Lisa, like all parents, were given a parent handbook. [00:14:38] And it said, here's what your kid might say. [00:14:41] They kind of inoculated the parents against complaints. [00:14:43] So they said, you might complain, and the best thing for you to do is to not, you know, don't take that at face value. === Runaways and Their Backside Advantage (15:37) === [00:14:49] All kids do this. [00:14:50] It's not going to help their growth and their development through this program if you complain. [00:14:54] And of course, Daniel did what many people would do and be like, this place is bananas. [00:14:59] Get me out of here. [00:15:00] And Wayne and we said, oh, yeah, the handbook said that he was going to say this, so we're not going to do anything. [00:15:04] And then when Daniel said, I want to leave, he kind of violated the rules of what you're allowed to say in a phone call, and CDU shut off the call. [00:15:13] So that actually was the last time they spoke to their son. [00:15:16] The call was disconnected, and then the next call never happened. [00:15:20] And then, you know, it is murky what happens next. [00:15:23] We know that C. Doo claims that he ran away. [00:15:27] And there's really only two ways to run away from CDU. [00:15:30] There's the one road that leads in and out of the program, and then there's what they call the backside, which is just the wilderness down. [00:15:39] You can see San Bernardino from the program. [00:15:42] It looks kind of deceptively close, but if you were to try and run away and run to San Bernardino, you were facing the elements. [00:15:49] It's not an easy thing to traverse. [00:15:52] And there's some speculation that he did go that direction in an effort not to be caught, perhaps seeing the city that looks kind of not too far away. [00:16:00] But the truth is, we don't know. [00:16:02] I mean, this is where we get into really murky territory because there's very little, the police have not offered any significant information. [00:16:12] The program has not offered very significant information. [00:16:16] And then the efforts by the Ewan family to try and figure out what happened has not been incredibly fruitful. [00:16:23] Right. [00:16:24] I think there's actually three ways, not just two. [00:16:28] There was a farm road, there used to be a barn. [00:16:32] But those are all different, you know, these are opposite directions. [00:16:35] And the parallels with Blake Persley's case and also Daniel Ewen's are astounding. [00:16:42] Both have three different options for how both kids could have run. [00:16:47] And that was provided by CDU. [00:16:49] All the information that we have, for the most part, about these disappearances comes from CDU itself. [00:16:55] And even within the documents, the depositions, all the stuff that, you know, in the civil suit that the Ewans had against CDU, it states repeatedly, just it's hammered over and over and over that all of these are lies, that they just lied completely, CDO staff, to the UN family, to their lawyers. [00:17:16] They lied in the depositions. [00:17:19] This is not me saying that. [00:17:20] That's what the Ewans are saying. [00:17:22] And it's just, it's so incomprehensible to, it's very difficult to untangle what is true in all of this, in all of these cases, for the most part. [00:17:32] I mean, not to kind of digress too much, but for example, like John Inman, the first kid that went missing, when the few months that Detective Alicia Rosa had revived these cases, she went back to Inman's and Pursley's and she re-interviewed a kid that reportedly ran after John Inman to Highway 18 when he was running away. [00:18:02] Not only did this now adult have no memory of John Inman, he didn't remember speaking to police about this. [00:18:12] So all of it just seemed complete bullshit. [00:18:16] And the assumption then is that staff was actually feeding the story to the deputy, that the deputy, in fact, hadn't actually interviewed that kid. [00:18:28] So that just seems to be a pattern. [00:18:33] Yeah, that is really something. [00:18:34] I mean, I know that from my experience in these schools, because I went to, as listeners of the show will probably know, I went to a school that was like a direct descendant of CDU, had many people who the entire leadership had been graduates of CDU, and many were related to people who were high up in CDU before it got shut down. [00:18:56] And I went also in the same year that 20 years ago, Jesus fucking Christ. [00:19:03] That Daniel Ewan disappeared. [00:19:06] And I ran away. [00:19:07] I ran away twice. [00:19:08] And the first time I ran away, I did the classic method of also running in winter. [00:19:13] I just took off down the road. [00:19:15] It was my first week there. [00:19:16] I said I had to go to the bathroom. [00:19:17] That was the only time you were ever allowed to be alone because the bathroom was outside this one door. [00:19:22] And I just jumped a fence and ran. [00:19:25] And they sent people after me, some staff members. [00:19:28] And there was really, oh, there was only one road, unless you were running deep into the woods away from any kind of civilization. [00:19:33] There was no towns around there. [00:19:36] And they caught me and I got taken back. [00:19:40] But, you know, for these kids, I know it was basically the same SOP, right? [00:19:45] Like they send out staff members to look for kids. [00:19:49] They do this. [00:19:50] And remember, like the staff members at these places are not generally, in my experience, the most professional individuals. [00:19:57] And I mean professional in this sort of colloquial senses. [00:20:00] And they're oftentimes damaged people in many ways. [00:20:05] Sometimes even graduates themselves. [00:20:07] Oftentimes, even graduates. [00:20:09] CDU maybe even graduates from Synanon, which is not, well, it was the whole notion of giving back, right? [00:20:15] That was embedded in the whole system people. [00:20:20] They like being in the system. [00:20:23] And then afterwards, if you're gone for a certain amount of time, I'm sure it varies place to place, they end up calling the police. [00:20:28] And in this case, they ended up calling, when did they call San Bernardino Sheriff's Department in Daniel's case? [00:20:34] For Daniel Ewan, it was February 8th. [00:20:38] Yeah, I think it was like 11 o'clock-ish in the morning, something like that on a Sunday, which is also like the dumbest time to run. [00:20:48] It's all implausible. [00:20:49] But that's what's in the police report is not, you know, CD viewed themselves as a law enforcement institution of its own, right? [00:20:57] So like they had their own departure form. [00:21:00] They had their own internal document, you know, their runaway incident report, which for Daniel Ewen, they didn't share with the Twin Peak Sheriff Station or the, you know, San Bernardin County Sheriff's Department. [00:21:12] And they didn't either with John Inman. [00:21:14] They refused to share that information. [00:21:18] But the internal document, I don't have that, but I have parts of that. [00:21:22] So does Josh through the legal docs that the Ewans had sent a while ago. [00:21:29] And it's very different than what is in the official runaway report that a counselor gave. [00:21:37] This one reporting party, they didn't really do any sort of search and rescue. [00:21:41] The narrative was, at least in the official runaway report, that Daniel was going to get some cigarettes. [00:21:48] He was going to go to the gas station or maybe Arrowbear, which is a neighboring town or whatever, because a kid that's been there 13 days and has no idea where he's at could get to a neighboring town. [00:21:58] Like I was there for 16 months. [00:21:59] I couldn't tell you how to get to the 76 or Valero or whatever. [00:22:03] I mean, that's in town, but I mean, it's just ridiculous. [00:22:08] So that was the one version. [00:22:12] Then there's another version that he was sweeping on the backside with another kid, and then somehow he magically disappeared, just sweeping a deck on the backside of the mountain. [00:22:22] So that's the other one. [00:22:23] Then there's another narrative about him running really fast. [00:22:30] And then he's taken, he's restrained by another kid who's his dormhead. [00:22:38] It's very confusing. [00:22:40] In the depositions, it seems that they're indicating that he ran a different Sunday. [00:22:46] Is that correct, Josh? [00:22:47] I do remember that. [00:22:48] It was like they just concluded that it was two different Sundays that he was running. [00:22:54] I always thought that to be a little suspicious. [00:22:57] Then there's all these reports that maybe he was trying to grab a DVD player that he was going to sell or he grabbed some skis, but there were no skis actually available on campus. [00:23:08] It's all very, very confusing, these narratives. [00:23:11] And the police report itself is very confusing. [00:23:14] So between both the police, the official police report from San Bernardino and the incident report from CDU, there's like completely contradictory accounts from, you know, testimony from people who worked there of what actually happened to Daniel. [00:23:31] But these two places knew each other very intimately, still know each other very intimately, even though CDU was shut down. [00:23:37] Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the San Bernardino Police Department and CDU? [00:23:43] Because they wouldn't have been surprised to get a phone call that a kid had been missing, right? [00:23:49] They had received a lot of phone calls about missing kids, runaway kids, or even especially violent or possible. [00:23:59] Yes, incidents at the CDU campus over the years. [00:24:03] Yeah, I believe, yeah, I believe the call logs, which I have heard, something like between 97 and 2005, there's 415 reports of runaways. [00:24:11] 415. [00:24:12] Something like that. [00:24:13] Yeah, yeah. [00:24:14] There were definitely, yeah, it was in the hundreds, but to be clear, we don't know. [00:24:17] There could have been multiple calls about a single incident, but nonetheless, like the police were well aware. [00:24:22] I mean, it raises the question of how can you have a program in your community that has that quantity of runaways and then not raise the alarm bells at some point. [00:24:31] You have to imagine as a law enforcement that you have a potential serious, and we saw what happened, but you have a potential seriously dangerous place if that many kids are running from the program into the cold of winter. [00:24:47] So we did the FOIA request. [00:24:50] We found out that there were that many incidents and it seems to be the case that they would pick up a kid and bring him back to the program, if anything. [00:24:59] I mean, that was sort of the best case scenario. [00:25:02] And then, you know, CDU also employed, well, sorry, David can talk a little bit more about what that relationship though looked like. [00:25:10] Yeah. [00:25:11] Well, I do want to say it. [00:25:12] So, yeah, in eight years' time, the Sheriff's Department logged 341 reports of runaways, 67 AWOLs, four missing juveniles, and three missing persons. [00:25:21] And these are all reports about the same thing. [00:25:22] It's just all runaways. [00:25:24] But within that eight-year stretch, and these are all, or the majority of them are all out-of-state kids, right? [00:25:32] But the Sheriff's Department logged only 10 attempts to locate and four search and rescue missions out of that entire number. [00:25:38] So they were not, they did not care. [00:25:41] They were not looking for these kids. [00:25:42] And the year that Daniel vanished, they had zero search and rescues logged. [00:25:49] But there were multiple. [00:25:50] I think it was like 33 kids. [00:25:52] There's something like, I can't remember the number, but it was a number of kids that same year that Daniel vanished. [00:25:57] And part of that reason, it seems like why that was is because San Bernardino seemed to basically take, you know, basically take like CDU's word for it, like, oh, we've got our own, you know, operation in-house, right? [00:26:10] We have our own search and rescue team that's going to handle this, which is sort of what happened with the case of Daniel, right? [00:26:17] That's right. [00:26:18] I mean, very quickly, the program, CDU told Wayne and Lisa, they said, look, Daniel's run away, but we have an excellent private investigator who specializes in tracking down kids. [00:26:30] And here's his number. [00:26:32] They kind of washed their hands of having to then have any correspondence with Wayne and Lisa because they said, here's this guy, Keith Raymond. [00:26:39] He's the best of the best. [00:26:41] He'll find Daniel for the right price. [00:26:44] And that's how Wayne and Lisa ended up hiring Keith Raymond and his wife, Cindy, to serve for their son. [00:26:54] And he's the one, I mean, we can get into it. [00:26:57] He's not very credible, but he is the one that ended up doing a more extensive search down the backside, he says, into the surrounding communities. [00:27:07] And then we don't know if that actually happened. [00:27:09] That's just what he says. [00:27:11] Exactly. [00:27:11] Right. [00:27:12] And he was also, both Keith and Cindy were, I mean, they're in the employee records for CDU as escorts. [00:27:19] So, you know, and he's kind of, he's made a number of different statements that all contradict each other. [00:27:26] But for the most part, it does seem like he was employed, you know, as some sort of staffer at CDU as well. [00:27:31] So he's double dipping, which is not uncommon, too. [00:27:34] I mean, it's a fascinating element about the entire industry. [00:27:37] So, you know, the so-called troubled teen industry, which some people have said is as big as, you know, a billion dollars. [00:27:42] Aside from the programs themselves, there's all these adjacent people that also glom onto this opportunity to take advantage of desperate parents. [00:27:53] Yeah, cottage industries. [00:27:55] Absolutely. [00:27:56] And so you can hire someone to escort your kid from the home to the program. [00:28:01] You can hire them to chase after your kid when they run away. [00:28:03] You can hire an educational consultant who will tell you which is the best therapeutic boarding school to send your kid to. [00:28:10] So it just speaks to how sort of massive this industry was and how many people were kind of dipping into the desperation of parents. [00:28:22] Yeah. [00:28:22] I mean, I just a personal anecdote about the escorts. [00:28:28] I mean, these are people, again, like all of this stuff is, I think there's sort of an assumption of professionalization or professionalism, maybe from people who are not super familiar with the industry. [00:28:39] But I'm sure, like, as I experienced firsthand, as I'm sure that Josh, you got to know by dealing with Keith, I mean, most of these people are complete freaks and psychos. [00:28:51] I mean, the first two people I ever saw have sex were these two people who escorted me to wilderness where they did it on a motel bed in the same motel room as me. [00:29:03] I mean, it's totally like a sort of like a wild west kind of very, very little, if any regulation on any of these people. [00:29:11] You know, it's, and yeah, they, they, they, I think, you know, with regards to parents, I think that parents also assume that there's, there's professionalism here. [00:29:21] I mean, you know, you mentioned talking about Daniel's parents, Wayne and Lisa, being fooled by these sort of slick press kits coming out of C-dew. [00:29:30] You know, I know that was a very similar thing for my parents, you know, thinking that they were sending me to a completely different kind of program than the one I actually went to. [00:29:40] And yeah, and so I think that, you know, it really sets the stage for a lot of parents to be taken advantage of in this way, too, by essentially charlatans. [00:29:51] And that's one of the things that's really so kind of heartbreaking listening to the podcast you guys did together, Lost Kids, is how Keith sort of strung the UNs along and then continued to. [00:30:06] The final episode in particular is so galling in kind of the bullshitting that he does. [00:30:13] But I want to sort of hone in on some of the Keith stuff for a second here. [00:30:18] So he's hired by the UNs as a private investigator to search for Daniel after his disappearance. === Keith's Bullshit Search (03:59) === [00:30:26] And does he turn up anything? [00:30:28] Does he, like in the aftermath, does he go tracking in the woods and find footprints? [00:30:33] I mean, what happens? [00:30:34] Right. [00:30:34] Right, right. [00:30:35] So what somebody claims is that he did hire, you know, he did an extensive search of the backside, hired a helicopter, did a helicopter search. [00:30:43] They searched the surrounding areas. [00:30:45] But pretty quickly, he says he gets a sighting in San Diego, which is, it's a couple hours away. [00:30:54] And very quickly. [00:30:55] Pretty far. [00:30:56] I mean, kind of shocking to hear when you look at like Google Maps. [00:31:00] Listeners, if you're doing this, especially if you're driving, pull out your Google Maps and search in San Bernardino, CDU. [00:31:07] I'm sure it still turns up. [00:31:09] And see how far it is from San Diego. [00:31:11] It seems patently absurd that it's. [00:31:14] 3,500 Seymour Road. [00:31:15] I've done that. [00:31:16] I've looked this up quite a bit. [00:31:18] Yeah, I mean, it's just an absurd, absurd distance, but sorry. [00:31:21] I just want to add that. [00:31:22] Yeah, well, I mean, for Blake Persley, they had similar things. [00:31:25] It was San Bernardino first. [00:31:27] I think Daniel Ewens was also maybe San Bernardino. [00:31:30] And then he went to San Diego. [00:31:31] Blake Persley, it was like Victor Valley or somewhere else. [00:31:34] And then Denver, because a kid who walks the limp can somehow get a thousand miles. [00:31:40] So it's, yeah, I mean, the reality here is that the deputy who took the report had a moment there to actually search. [00:31:54] And there evidently wasn't any kind of search to the point where I'm trying to ask him directly, did you ever look in the boys' dorms? [00:32:01] Did you ever look in the lot? [00:32:02] Where did you go, um? [00:32:05] And he, and he won't respond at all um, but the? [00:32:08] The truth is that he there was. [00:32:09] There was a golden moment there to really thoroughly search, before um, before the Ewens hired the Raymonds right, and which is in the absence of the police actually doing their job, is how someone like Keith Raymond can step in and say, you know i'll i'll, i'll take up the mantle here, i'll do the search, and and he comes up with these sightings in San Diego. [00:32:31] There was a few of them and the Ewens really, you know, believed in their credibility and they redirected their resources into San Diego. [00:32:38] So the youngs they still were from New Jersey, they would like fairly frequently start flying across the country and you know they, they were standing outside grocery stores with Daniel's sister handing out fly missing persons flyers, and also Daniel's friends, and friends as well yeah yeah um, who we interview in the podcast Nickleta, you know, was. [00:32:59] I mean, one of the things that the humans realized was like okay, if he's alive and not contacting us, then we, we are facing another problem, which is that he's not gonna want to talk to us if we find him. [00:33:08] So they brought, they brought Daniel's friend Nick in in the hopes that, you know, at least Nick could make that contact. [00:33:13] And Nick thought it was bullshit. [00:33:14] I mean, I I interviewed him too for the, for the last piece and uh, and he was very, very suspicious of the Raymonds uh, and he was very um, I think, in in a sense he was, he was kind of hurt by what Keith was claiming too, which was, you know, Nick was pushing back on some of this dubious stuff that Keith was saying uh, and Keith would kind of double down and say, you know, Daniel just wants basically new friends, or you know he's, he's outgrown the old ones. [00:33:41] And that was very offensive to his best friend who, you know, in some ways I I see Nick sort of as a, as a situ resident who just never went to see DO because it was such a huge part of his life. [00:33:52] Yeah now, you know, and such a trauma to watch his best friend go away for unknown reasons. [00:33:56] And then the next call is really can, can you go out with his mom fly, you know, across the country to start looking in San Diego. [00:34:05] And his, his instinct was to like uh, go to Sidoo and look at Sidu and kind of get a, get a sense of where this place was, that his best friend vanished from, which is a normal impulse right, but he was, you know, as he said, you know, he's with his his best friend's mom, who was clearly just trying to process it all. === Adam's Disappearance Mystery (15:03) === [00:34:25] And what is he gonna do? [00:34:26] He's 16 years old. [00:34:27] I think what comes through in both of your reporting very much is that Keith's response after kind of what seems like I mean, i'll say it if you know, no one else wants to say it, but it's what seems like you know, kind of a total, just like I don't know what's the turn of phrase, rubbit chase, let me know. [00:34:46] Uh yeah, I mean, he's just like one red hair after another. [00:34:49] Really yeah, red hair yeah, I mean, it's just uh, a total. [00:34:52] Um, It just seems a bit of a like a farce, of a kind of search in San Diego with these like poor leads and quote-unquote eyewitnesses that completely break down like on immediate inspection by like anyone. [00:35:11] But that then his response is, well, you know, like you're saying, David, like his response is like, well, actually, Daniel just wanted to run away. [00:35:20] Actually, Daniel just wanted a new life. [00:35:22] Actually, Daniel just wanted new parents, which eerily mirrors the exact response of CDU, right? [00:35:28] It is like almost like the literal exact same response and same attitude that CDU took to get everyone to stop paying attention to this missing kid. [00:35:38] Stop asking questions. [00:35:40] It seems like what he's doing is essentially like it's a cover-up. [00:35:44] And it's a cover-up to parents that are really receptive in some way to the cover-up because the alternative means that their child is dead, right? [00:35:54] I mean, it's either your kid is gone and doesn't want to come back, or your kid either died at C. Do or died after running away from CDU somewhere in the San Bernardino Mountains. [00:36:06] And those are, you know, as your interviews with them show, like pretty unacceptable. [00:36:12] I mean, there seems to be especially more unacceptable to Daniel's father. [00:36:18] And I totally understand that. [00:36:20] I would want to believe that my kid was alive and hold any shred of hope that he was out there, but just resented me. [00:36:27] God, that's kind of a nightmarish set of possibilities. [00:36:33] And the thing is, it's just, it reminds me so much because when I did successfully run away on a home visit, and my parents hired a private investigator who did the same thing. [00:36:43] They're like, oh, we've heard that afterwards. [00:36:46] I never saw Hyde Norhare the guy, but they said, my parents told me afterwards, he's like, yeah, the private investigator said he had heard reports of you on Hate Street and all these various places that I never went to. [00:36:59] He was just completely making all that shit up. [00:37:02] And I mean, it's so obvious, especially in that final episode. [00:37:07] I mean, I think people should listen to it themselves. [00:37:09] Keith is such a fucking liar. [00:37:12] But it does seem like he has this weird thing where he's covering it up. [00:37:16] And he even gets in contact with the UN's years and years and years later on his fake deathbed. [00:37:25] Right. [00:37:26] That is such a bizarre twist. [00:37:28] And this sort of controls. [00:37:29] Yeah, we will get to that. [00:37:31] I think, yeah, that's a whole other part of this. [00:37:34] Well, I mean, but it is interesting how, like, what you pointed out is that he's clearly not truthful. [00:37:40] I mean, clearly covering up stuff lying. [00:37:42] I don't know what his motivations are. [00:37:44] Was it just to make money? [00:37:45] Is he covering up because he knows more information? [00:37:47] But he's also clearly a terrible liar. [00:37:50] I mean, some of the corners he backed himself into are bananas. [00:37:54] And one of them was a claim. [00:37:56] So he reappears in 2018. [00:37:59] We don't know why, but suddenly saying, this was the case that always haunted me. [00:38:03] I couldn't find Daniel. [00:38:04] And I just like, you know, I'm on my deathbed as my last dying wish to find Daniel and kind of goes on to the news claiming that he had restarted the investigation. [00:38:15] And lo and behold, he had discovered that somebody at Hilltop Park in San Diego, the very same park, which is where one of the sightings happened, you know, 14 years earlier, had seen Daniel again. [00:38:28] And, you know, for the UNs, they were obviously really heartened to hear this and that he was going to take up the case and started looking into it. [00:38:36] But the claims that he starts, that Keith starts to make are out of out of this world. [00:38:41] I mean, one of them is that he, as he's searching, that he receives a voicemail message. [00:38:47] And it's initially a voicemail message from someone saying, I know you're looking for Daniel. [00:38:50] He doesn't want to be found. [00:38:52] It was an anonymous, an anonymous message. [00:38:55] Right. [00:38:55] No, that's what he said. [00:38:56] When you interviewed him, it was Daniel himself, right? [00:38:59] Well, exactly. [00:38:59] So I interviewed him. [00:39:00] He said, it was Daniel himself. [00:39:02] And I knew it was Daniel because he had a Chinese accent. [00:39:06] Daniel Ewan's parents are from China. [00:39:09] Daniel, I mean, we told this to his best friend, Nick Galeda, and Nick lost his mind because he's like, you know, New Jersey. [00:39:18] Right. [00:39:19] But there's a supplemental police report that was added on, obviously, in 2018, 2019. [00:39:24] And they interviewed Keith Raymond too, law enforcement, and he changed it a third time. [00:39:28] It's now a psychic that sent. [00:39:30] So we went from anonymous. [00:39:32] We didn't have that document for the podcast. [00:39:34] I got it later on. [00:39:35] And I was like, very, so I was trying to press him when I was interviewing or whatever it was we were trying to do for the last piece. [00:39:44] And we're saying, okay, was it an anonymous person? [00:39:46] Was it a psychic? [00:39:47] Was it Daniel? [00:39:49] Can you please just like stick to one story? [00:39:52] Wait, so he changed his story from he got this mysterious voicemail from Daniel Ewan himself and then from an anonymous caller being like, give up your inquiries. [00:40:01] They're useless. [00:40:02] And then he told the police that a psychic, as in somebody who possesses psychic abilities such as reading the future and possibly telepathy, was the person that called him and told him that Daniel was. [00:40:12] Yeah, I mean, I think I sent you guys the police report. [00:40:14] I mean, it's in the supplemental. [00:40:15] I think it's like page four of it, and it's very, very strange. [00:40:18] And we published that, you know, for LA Mag because it's just like, this is, this is, he's all over. [00:40:24] Keith Raymond is all over the original runaway report because the, you know, the, the, the deputy, he's now captain, but at the time, Robert Work. [00:40:35] Basically, what he's saying is, you know, the parents hired a private investigator, meaning we don't have to do much. [00:40:41] And then 2018, 2019 supplemental police report all over Keith Raymond because he's being interviewed. [00:40:49] There's follow-ups now. [00:40:50] You know, the, you know, the law enforcement, San Diego law enforcement in San Bernardino are actually trying to determine what are these credible at all. [00:40:59] And none of them are. [00:41:01] So again, like there is, Daniel Ewan's story has been transformed by the Raymond's. [00:41:11] And I did try to, I don't, did you, Josh? [00:41:13] Did you, did you try to interview Cindy too, right? [00:41:16] At the salon that you, yeah. [00:41:18] And she, she just shut the door, right? [00:41:19] Right. [00:41:20] Yeah, same with me too. [00:41:21] The one thing that she did state was, you know, that she's divorced from Keith. [00:41:29] And then also she claimed she didn't know, she couldn't remember anything about this case, but she knew exactly how long it's been since it's, you know, it occurred, roughly. [00:41:38] So she, she's part of this too. [00:41:40] Well, I think it's one thing for San Bernardino police, they're looking into, you know, what Keith Raymond claims, and he changes his story to say it's a psychic, but that's not the story that the media and the family got, right? [00:41:52] Because like from all of Keith Raymond's, either his sightings or whatever, it kind of kept this story alive as Daniel is still out there. [00:42:02] His face on People magazine, like leaflets and on true crime kind of missing persons, docu-day drama. [00:42:12] So like I don't even, you guys know what I'm talking about. [00:42:14] There's kind of genre, television genre. [00:42:16] Yeah, yeah. [00:42:17] Yeah, tablet. [00:42:18] Right. [00:42:19] Yeah, Core TV, absolutely. [00:42:23] And they never got that side of this story. [00:42:26] They never heard that it was, you know, oh, actually, maybe it was a psychic that called me. [00:42:31] And so you have to. [00:42:31] But they certainly got the bullshit, though. [00:42:33] They just chose not to. [00:42:35] And that's the other part of this is that, you know, this tabloid media that's obsessed with missing persons, they've, and especially even like the National Center for Missing Exploited Children, they've, they've really reinforced this narrative of the sightings of being alive. [00:42:50] They've completely ignored investigations. [00:42:53] They've ignored the podcast. [00:42:54] They've done so deliberately. [00:42:56] You know, I've spoken with Nick Mick. [00:42:58] I've spoken with the senior producer just as, you know, three weeks ago, saying, look, this anniversary is coming up. [00:43:05] Please don't just exclusively interview the Ewans. [00:43:07] Please, I'll give you any sort of information. [00:43:09] What we're doing right now here, I wanted to do with Nick Mick and with Angeline Hartman, who's the director of communications, because she was interviewed on Court TV in 2021. [00:43:21] This is a year after the podcast came out. [00:43:23] And she's leaning into Keith Raymond's claims. [00:43:26] She's saying, you know, maybe Daniel has a family now and he's in San Diego and whatever. [00:43:31] And it's been such an insult to those of us who care about this story and really want justice for Daniel because it's just not based on anything that we've seen. [00:43:42] There's no evidence of this and there's no other side to it. [00:43:46] So, three weeks ago, I'm on the call with a senior producer, and I'm saying, let's just please do this. [00:43:50] Or if you do want to interview the Ewans, just let me send you some other relevant information. [00:43:57] And the response back was, we're declining cooperation, and I just assume they're not going to do anything. [00:44:02] And then I get a message from Wayne Ewan saying, you know, by the way, I just was interviewed by Nick Mick. [00:44:08] And the questions were, you know, what, you know, if Daniel's listening, what would you like to say to him? [00:44:14] And there's nothing about the fact that there's a homicide number attached to his son's case now. [00:44:19] There's nothing about the police. [00:44:21] There's nothing about what's really happened post-lost kids or Detective Rosa losing her cases or anything that I've done in LA Mag. [00:44:30] There's just none of it. [00:44:32] So at a certain point, you know, are we now just fighting? [00:44:39] What's the point of this, really? [00:44:40] You know, if it's just, if there's two different, multiple narratives and they're all sort of competing for attention. [00:45:00] So I think that's something I want to really drill down onto is the, is the, the homicide angle of it. [00:45:06] Because, you know, as I think we talked about last year, but I really want to bring up here is that these cases, which were missing persons' cases, had the letter H attached to them in 2023 and then backdated to 2022, meaning that they're now in homicide, which is very, very different. [00:45:23] That's yet another narrative, actually. [00:45:26] I mean, because you have the Daniel is missing and doesn't want to be found. [00:45:30] You have that, you know, that Daniel is possibly dead somewhere out in the San Bernardino Mountains. [00:45:38] And then you have homicide. [00:45:41] And they are given and they're looked into by this detective that you have some contact with. [00:45:48] And then they're essentially like shunted into like Cold Gazette. [00:45:51] The cases are shut down. [00:45:53] Could you tell us a little bit about what the sort of the new aspects of that of your dealings with San Bernardino Sheriff's Department are? [00:46:02] Yeah, I mean, I think we should just go back a little bit here. [00:46:06] So late November of 2021. [00:46:10] Let me go back even further. [00:46:12] So for decades, all three CD missing kids, these cases were open but inactive. [00:46:19] And they were all in the Twin Peaks station, which is the patrol station in the San Bernardino Mountains. [00:46:25] That's part of the Sheriff's Department, right? [00:46:27] And these were just cases you just didn't want to touch. [00:46:31] So they were never investigated properly. [00:46:34] No one was looking into them. [00:46:36] And then in November 2021, a newly promoted detective to that station, her name is Alicia Rosa. [00:46:44] She comes on the scene. [00:46:45] She's looking at missing persons cases in the region, and she stumbles on the fact that three kids vanished from the same location, which is rare. [00:46:54] So she looks into CDU. [00:46:57] She sees my stuff as Medium Anonymous. [00:47:00] She saw the Lawskids too. [00:47:01] She reaches out to me. [00:47:02] She wants help navigating this world. [00:47:05] So I come on to, essentially, I'm assisting her case. [00:47:09] And what she's doing is she's looking at all three of them simultaneously. [00:47:13] And she's mainly focusing on John Inman and Blake personally, just because they're older, but also looking at Daniel Ewan too. [00:47:22] And it's a very intense few months. [00:47:25] And she realizes, wow, this, you know, her instinct here is that there's maybe foul play involved. [00:47:31] She wants to get cadaver dogs on the campus. [00:47:34] She's, you know, there's probable cause. [00:47:35] She wants to go, you know, get a search warrant, go to a judge, all these things. [00:47:41] But she also wants to get even more professional help than whatever is available to her within the Twin Peak station. [00:47:50] So she reaches out to Team Adam, which is a service that's part of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. [00:47:56] It's just for law enforcement. [00:47:58] And they have like investigative advice and search analysis and technical support and equipment and all the stuff you really want. [00:48:05] So it's a two-step process for approval. [00:48:11] So the approval did come first from Team Adam. [00:48:14] They had an investigator. [00:48:16] Detective Rosa was clearing a workstation for them in the office. [00:48:20] We were both trying to find places where they could lodge. [00:48:26] The idea I had was they could go rent out Cedu's property because it's a retreat center, and they thought it was a great idea. [00:48:33] So you're going to sleep where you search. [00:48:37] So that was late January 2022 when the approval for Team Adam arrived. [00:48:44] The next step was clearance from within the Sheriff's Department themselves. [00:48:48] So in February of 2022, Detective Rosa presented these cases to detectives that are within the, I mean, I guess they were homicide cold case detectives. [00:48:59] They're part of the specialized investigation division. [00:49:02] So detectives drove up the mountain. [00:49:04] She presented these cases. [00:49:06] Rosa's captain at the time, Don Lapierre, was there, I believe. [00:49:10] And the assumption was after she presents these cases, they give their clearance and then Team Adam could fly out and do their thing. [00:49:19] And that would have been incredible. [00:49:22] But what ended up happening was Homicide Cole case said, we want all three cases. [00:49:27] We're going to take these cases. === Cases Taken Away (08:33) === [00:49:28] And essentially, Rosa was fired from her own cases. [00:49:33] That was basically how she put it. [00:49:36] And then the new lead, so all these cases were then taken off the mountain into San Bernardino City, and then nothing happened. [00:49:47] So the new lead detective, he was a homicide cold case guy. [00:49:50] His name was Eric Ogaz, and he was the lead investigator now. [00:49:55] And in April of 2022, it still seemed like things weren't being worked. [00:50:00] They weren't being prioritized at all. [00:50:03] So I don't know why they were commandeered if they weren't doing anything, but they weren't. [00:50:07] So Rosa tried to get her cases back. [00:50:10] And Ogaz seemed to be receptive to that. [00:50:12] He supported the idea of Rosa getting these cases back. [00:50:16] And he also supported Rosa going on record and being interviewed about CVU. [00:50:21] He thought that might actually produce leads. [00:50:23] That was denied. [00:50:25] She was gagged, put under a sweeping, overbroad gag order. [00:50:29] It was denied getting these cases back. [00:50:31] Nothing could happen. [00:50:33] So then that was in April of 2022. [00:50:35] In October 2022, I kind of blew the whistle a bit in the first LA magazine piece about this. [00:50:43] And then the following month, November 2022, homicide cold case still wasn't working. [00:50:48] So even though there was some public outrage, even though people were starting to catch on that maybe these investigations should be ongoing, maybe Rosa should have them back, they still were just kind of ignoring this and refusing to work it. [00:51:04] And then things really changed starting like, yeah, I guess around November 2022, or around then another detective, Edward Hernandez, took over from Eric Ogaz. [00:51:17] And he's a different type of detective. [00:51:19] He doesn't really respond to anything. [00:51:22] He doesn't respond when people try to send him information about these cases. [00:51:27] And then this is where things really get kind of messy. [00:51:30] So in March of 2023, three things happened. [00:51:35] The first is that I think Rosa was trying to get them back a second time. [00:51:40] And there were some rumors that maybe her captain was going to be retiring. [00:51:47] So that might be an opportunity to get her original cases back, implying that maybe he had a hand in making sure that they weren't being worked. [00:51:56] The same month, another article was published in LA Mag that I wrote about Daniel Ewen. [00:52:02] And later in the month, Rosa informed me that all of these cases now had a homicide number, the same number for all three cases. [00:52:10] And what that did was completely prevent her from ever requesting them back. [00:52:14] Because what a homicide number does is it effectively acts as a barrier that prevents outside law enforcement divisions from assisting on cases. [00:52:23] So it is now property of a homicide cold case in San Bernardino Dino. [00:52:30] And that's, you know, the fact that it coincided with us spotlighting, you know, the mishandled investigations just seems really concerning because it was tacked on for 2022, but it was done in 2023. [00:52:44] And that's a real, that's a problem for us. [00:52:46] And then in April, I co-wrote an open letter to Sheriff Dikes about this. [00:52:54] My editor helped with this too, hoping that at least if we kind of went big and went public, there would be some response to it. [00:53:04] But Dykus ignored it. [00:53:06] And then in May of 2023, I received an email, my editor too, from Public Affairs, but on behalf of the entire department, stating that all communication was over about this. [00:53:21] And then the following month, the legal director for the First Amendment Coalition sent another letter to, I mean, I wrote a letter, but he sent his own letter, the legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, to Sheriff Dykus as well, just to talk about these sweeping, overbroad gag orders that aren't justified by any legitimate law enforcement concerns, like none whatsoever. [00:53:44] So we thought maybe if we had like this organization helping, that would do something, but it didn't. [00:53:53] The whole department ignored it too. [00:53:54] And then as of December 2023, County Council confirmed again that all department members will not speak about CDU at all. [00:54:04] So there is, you know, this massively influential institution, 50-year reign or whatever of this institution, and is completely off limits for any outside scrutiny, which is very, very, very disturbing. [00:54:19] Yeah, I just want to hammer that home for anyone. [00:54:22] You know, we have some members of the media listening, and so I just want to hammer this home, that since, you know, you put out the podcast, since you published two pieces, that the San Bernardino Police Department has completely stonewalled any sort of, you know, any questions, any insight into their relationship with CDU, into their relationship with, you know, what was, you know, [00:54:51] what was handled in terms of these invest in terms of these missing kids. [00:54:56] It wasn't so much that they shut down when Keith Raymond was running about, you know, saying that, oh, maybe he's in San Diego. [00:55:04] Oh, maybe he's still alive. [00:55:05] Oh, maybe, you know, he just wants to be left alone. [00:55:08] That's not when they shut down like any kind of, you know, openness about these cases. [00:55:14] It was when, you know, people started asking questions and pointing to connections that the San Bernardino Police Department and the local government in San Bernardino had with this institution, CDU. [00:55:26] So I just kind of want to bring it back around before we have to wrap up, because I think it's really important to highlight that. [00:55:35] What do we know about the kind of lattice work between the local government, the police department, and CDU, more so than we talked about at the beginning of the show? [00:55:48] I mean, one thing I can add is that CDU was a really important part of the local economy in Running Springs, and it employed beyond just the staff that worked there. [00:56:01] There were people that were catering and the medical staff and all kinds of stuff. [00:56:05] Running Springs is not a big town. [00:56:06] So there was an incentive to keep the place operational and the town happy that way. [00:56:14] And I should say that also CDU is not around anymore. [00:56:19] It shut down. [00:56:19] There was court cases that the UNs were part of several court cases that CDU faced. [00:56:25] But those staff, I mean, in terms of accountability, many of those staff went off to work at other places. [00:56:32] And this is the long history of the so-called troubled teen industry is that there's a pattern of a place getting shut down and literally in its ashes, something else will come up or multiple places will come up. [00:56:43] So a lot of the staff that worked at CDU went on to now hold very high positions inside the industry and like zero accountability there. [00:56:53] But to your point, I mean, often it is the case that you are working within a community and the community is happy to have you there because for a number of these programs, especially when they're purposely set in fairly isolated and small places so that it's difficult for the residents to make it out of there, it becomes part of the economy. [00:57:15] And it's a great, you know, Mel Wasserman, the founder of CDU, did a great job of like being a part of the community and making it known that he was like a great citizen. [00:57:26] And look at me, I'm helping out these troubled kids. [00:57:30] And so the political connections are there. [00:57:34] And then just to lift it up, even on a grander scale, these money-making endeavors are supported at the highest levels of both the Democratic and Republican parties. [00:57:44] I mean, Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, these guys are invested in these programs. [00:57:50] So like in terms of the bigger political support for these kind of programs to operate, it is there and it's very hard to dislodge them from their existence. === Emailing Dissatisfied Survivors (08:02) === [00:58:02] I mean, there just is not good regulation that exists to make these programs both beneficial and safe. [00:58:10] Yeah, I mean, going back just to Daniel's case, though, or all these cases, that, you know, this was an opportunity. [00:58:17] You know, Keith Raymond, you know, Rosa was able to track him down. [00:58:21] He was in Wyoming and she considered him to be someone that really needed to be interviewed, maybe under Polygraph. [00:58:29] This is someone who knew a great deal more than what he was saying. [00:58:34] And here's this person who, you finally get to a point where there is a law enforcement officer who does take this seriously and wants to solve this case and thinks that there are individuals that can provide information if pressed. [00:58:52] And then she can't even do this because she doesn't have the cases anymore. [00:58:57] So if they're just rotting away in San Bernardino City, you know, this has been now for two years, right? [00:59:05] This has been ongoing. [00:59:06] And if Rosa had had these cases for two years, I firmly believe that she would have solved one of them by now. [00:59:13] And I mean, honestly, I've spent the last couple of years living Lost Kids Season 2 to the point where I feel like Josh's voice is narrating. [00:59:22] I could hear it because it's just, you know, this really happened in some ways as a result of the podcast. [00:59:28] And obviously, these, you know, these homicide cops are listening to true crime podcasts too, and they kind of want to be on it, some of them. [00:59:36] And yet there's just no dialogue. [00:59:39] And we're still left in some ways with 20 years of the same narrative, really. [00:59:45] And at a certain point, something's going to have to change. [00:59:49] Or it's just going to be us doing our little podcasts. [00:59:52] And then, you know, Nick Mick and the tabloid media saying he's alive in San Diego. [00:59:57] And the parents have the biggest voice of all at this point. [01:00:00] And they're just going to go wherever it gives them hope. [01:00:02] So it's really, do you want hope or do you want the truth? [01:00:07] And that's the question. [01:00:10] Yeah. [01:00:11] I mean, I think that there's also, you know, I don't want to obviously have no idea, but like, I think that there's also the possibility that in at least one of these kids' cases, like it could have been a case of restraint gone wrong. [01:00:25] I mean, that happens at these programs often. [01:00:27] And so it could really be a literal homicide and not just shunted off to that as a sort of bureaucratic runaround to not look into it. [01:00:36] We don't know because nobody's looking into it. [01:00:38] Now that, I mean, I think it's worth pinpointing that, yeah, when these cases started getting attention, like when you guys did Lost Kids, when you wrote those articles, that is when this sort of like other kind of cover-up happened, you know, this brief, you know, this one detective looking into it, and then that is completely just being like shunted away and essentially locked in a drawer. [01:01:03] And not only that, but you said you had the county council emailing you being like, there's no, this stuff is not coming up anymore. [01:01:10] I mean, that's pretty astounding for, you know, cold cases that are 20, 30 years old at this point. [01:01:18] Yeah. [01:01:19] And it's very hard to make sense of Keith's word salads. [01:01:24] He always throws a little bit of meat in them, but other than that, it's just incomprehensible. [01:01:27] But he did, when I was trying to get him to divulge things, he did at one point say like he did what he did to reopen these cases. [01:01:36] And in his mind, he's a do-gooder. [01:01:40] And I think there was, I think we talked about it a little bit before, there was like a 14-year period or whatever, I think it's 2007 to late 2018 where there was nothing happening. [01:01:51] The Ewans were not in communication with Keith Raymond. [01:01:54] They weren't in community. [01:01:56] They were dissatisfied with missing persons organizations. [01:01:59] They were dissatisfied with everything. [01:02:01] That's why they ended up going to me. [01:02:03] It was like a last-ditch thing was to talk to a survivor that maybe could do something. [01:02:07] And then immediately, immediately, Keith Raymond reappears. [01:02:12] I think it was the same month even, with this desire to find the kid. [01:02:17] And then magically, there are sightings. [01:02:20] And then after that, it's magically there's this voicemail. [01:02:23] So the Ewans lost interest in me until, you know, a couple years later until we were doing Lost Kids. [01:02:28] So, I mean, there's, I think Josh could talk about this more, but Keith has his own beliefs about local law enforcement and their role in all of this too. [01:02:40] And some of his things he's saying are correct. [01:02:42] Totally. [01:02:42] I mean, you're right. [01:02:43] I don't think he has a lot of him. [01:02:48] He's very aware of the local law enforcement's failure to step in. [01:02:51] I mean, it helps his case. [01:02:53] It helps his brand to be like, I'm going to be the savior here and do what the police should be doing. [01:03:00] But yeah, look, I mean, even his view, he seems to have hung out at CDU a fair bunch and even attended some of the so-called therapeutic sessions, the profits. [01:03:10] And we talked for a while about them. [01:03:12] Like on that side, he actually seemed quite sane and seemed to like echo the things that we were discovering about the weird CIA-like torture tactics that they were using in the program. [01:03:23] He was very sympathetic to why kids would be fleeing from the place. [01:03:28] So he clearly has an awareness of what the program was about and of the failures of the police. [01:03:35] It's just when he gets to his own work that things become pretty shady. [01:03:38] Well, he also sort of faked his own death while you were trying to. [01:03:43] Well, this is his go-to move when things are like, I mean, when we talked, he said, you know, I promise you I'm going to send you this voicemail message. [01:03:50] Just email me. [01:03:52] And, you know, next day I email him and I said, great, like, I'd love to hear that audio. [01:03:56] And after pressing him a couple times, I get a message from his email account that said, hey, I see that you've been emailing with my brother. [01:04:04] This is Steve. [01:04:06] And my brother is about to die. [01:04:09] I'm sorry. [01:04:09] He can't answer. [01:04:10] Just like, I mean, you guys are not kidding. [01:04:13] He really does seem like one of the worst lives. [01:04:15] Happened to me with Nicholas Rossi's wife message me and be like, You're killing my husband by asking him if he's in quotation. [01:04:24] Well, no, she was really his wife, but I don't know if she was emailing him. [01:04:28] I don't know if that was what I there was definitely him behind it, but yeah, it's a very similar kind of thing. [01:04:34] Yeah, I was gonna, I mean, the question that I had had for for years was why San Diego. [01:04:39] And I finally got the answer from the Ewans. [01:04:44] It was almost in a very casual way. [01:04:48] Did the Ewans ever tell you, Josh, that the Raymonds had relatives in San Diego? [01:04:55] No. [01:04:57] So they did. [01:04:57] They told me, because I never understood why San Diego. [01:05:00] And then I think it was Wayne or Lisa pointed out that they had family in San Diego. [01:05:06] And it was like, well, don't you find that kind of strange that this area that Daniel didn't know whatsoever, and now he's like reportedly there. [01:05:15] And the source for that information is a person that can control a narrative about a certain region. [01:05:22] And they didn't think that was anything weird at all. [01:05:24] Well, it's also, it gives it gives him a place, a free place to stay when he's in town too, to save the costs. [01:05:33] Well, guys, we got to wrap up. [01:05:35] Just a couple things. [01:05:36] One is, is there anybody that are like, because, you know, we've talked about basically this decades-long cover-up of even trying to find out what actually happened. [01:05:49] Not even necessarily covering up the truth, but covering up any ability to find out the truth in the first place. [01:05:56] Is there anybody like our listeners can email or call or annoy in some way that is related to this case? === Annoy Us To Solve Cold Cases (04:59) === [01:06:04] I say annoy the San Bernardin Sheriff's Department. [01:06:06] Do what I've been doing. [01:06:08] Call up the Specialized Investigations Division. [01:06:11] Contact the San Bernardin Sheriff's Department and ask why, you know, what are these cops doing? [01:06:19] And why were these cases taken from Twin Peaks? [01:06:24] And just annoy them. [01:06:27] Public outrage is going to help. [01:06:30] And at the same time, it's just, you know, as many eyes on this topic as you can get and as people care about this and realize just how much bullshit there is, you know, that can help, you know, just kind of being investigative and also pushing NICMIC and other tabloid-y places and pushing back against this narrative that doesn't make a lot of sense or asking to see evidence. [01:06:59] That can help. [01:07:00] But really, it's just going to take us, really. [01:07:03] I think I said that a year ago. [01:07:04] It's going to take people like us. [01:07:06] It's going to take more podcasts, docu series. [01:07:08] You're going to have to fight institutions with institutions. [01:07:11] And The more you can get, perhaps something remains solvable. [01:07:18] Yeah, I'd say too. [01:07:19] You know, if you're a big-time publication out there looking for a, you know, blockbuster story, this has it all. [01:07:27] It's got missing kids. [01:07:29] It's got, you know, a cold case. [01:07:31] It's got Weirdo Keith trying to, you know, fake his own death. [01:07:35] It's got a literal sheriff's department called Twin Peaks. [01:07:39] Twin Peaks. [01:07:39] Well, that's already right there in the nose. [01:07:41] Little on the nose there. [01:07:43] Little on the nose. [01:07:44] And it's got a multi, you know, quite frankly, a multi-billion dollar industry that makes a lot of fucking money on the abuse and possible killing of kids. [01:07:57] Well, on that note. [01:08:01] Yeah, I also just wanted to say thank you to both of you. [01:08:03] I mean, I went to one of these places when I was a kid, and I tried my best not to ever think about it until about six or seven years ago. [01:08:14] Actually, really until I went to rehab as an adult, which I did need to go to at that point. [01:08:20] And a counselor there and I were talking, and I was just telling about my child. [01:08:25] This was like a regular kind of like program. [01:08:28] And I mentioned that, yeah, I went to this thing that was like, you know, I knew that it was from CDU, but I didn't know about Synanon. [01:08:35] I was like, it was from this thing called See Doo. [01:08:37] And then we sort of got talking about Synanon. [01:08:40] He had gotten basically abducted by them when he was young. [01:08:43] And yeah, like they'd give him a bunch of potassium. [01:08:47] It was weird. [01:08:48] But since then, I started looking into it and then really kind of going back and I guess in the parlance of today, like unlocking some of the trauma that I experienced there. [01:08:59] But listening to Lost Kids was the first time I'd ever really heard in media, like, oh my God, like this is a description of what I went through. [01:09:12] And then reading Running My Anger, Dave, your piece on C Doo was just like very revelatory to me because it's, I mean, a major, major, major part of my life. [01:09:26] And yeah, I mean, I gotta say, just this is, it's just such an infuriating case. [01:09:33] You know, a kid died at one of my programs at Sagewalk, which was, as you, you know, Josh, you mentioned Romney, Sagewalk owned by a subsidiary of Bain Capital. [01:09:44] And, you know, there was a homicide. [01:09:46] That was investigated as a homicide. [01:09:49] And I think probably could have been charged as a homicide. [01:09:52] But another one of those things, it's like, this is a boon for the local economy. [01:09:56] It employs all these people. [01:09:58] You know, there's a lot of money behind it. [01:10:00] And then it just got nothing, no follow-up. [01:10:03] And then the cop died, as I found out when I tried to call him. [01:10:08] And yeah. [01:10:10] And so it's just, you know, this stuff is really, I mean, these are three missing, almost certainly deceased children. [01:10:19] And, you know, dozens of adults that were supposed to be the people keeping them safe, from the people that had charged them at CDU to the sheriffs to these private investigators. [01:10:32] You know, these are all people who were tasked with one of your number one goals as any of those people is making sure a child doesn't die. [01:10:39] And they not only failed at that, they have spent decades in various ways making sure that they mislead the family and that they can cover up their own guilt. [01:10:52] So there's a lot of guilt here. [01:10:53] And there's, ironically, for CDU, nobody taking any accountability. [01:10:59] Exactly. [01:11:00] Yeah, exactly. [01:11:01] Right. [01:11:01] Totally. [01:11:03] So thank you guys for coming on. === Little Fake News Treat (04:14) === [01:11:04] We will link to basically everything we mentioned on this in the show description. [01:11:08] And yeah, I appreciate it. [01:11:10] Thank you so much. [01:11:11] This is great. [01:11:12] Thank you again. [01:11:28] Am I crazy? [01:11:29] Do they call it San Berdue sometimes? [01:11:31] Never heard that in my life. [01:11:32] San Berdue. [01:11:33] Am I? [01:11:33] San Berdue making that up. [01:11:34] That's new to me. [01:11:35] I feel like that was a 60s thing to call it San Berdue. [01:11:38] It could be, but never heard that. [01:11:40] I've never really been there. [01:11:42] Yeah, me neither. [01:11:43] Have you been to Idlewild? [01:11:46] No. [01:11:46] It's not San Bernardino, but it's all. [01:11:48] Wait, Idlewild is up. [01:11:50] That's what it is. [01:11:52] I feel like it's a Joshua Tree-style place. [01:11:55] But it's for mountain people. [01:11:56] It's for mountain people. [01:11:57] Mountain/slash lake people. [01:11:59] Isn't that kind of like Lake Arrowhead or is that on the way? [01:12:02] It's stretching my topographical and geographical knowledge. [01:12:06] But yeah, sure. [01:12:09] I remember there was a store in Echo Park called Idyllwild and it sold t-shirts that said like, feminism is cool. [01:12:16] Feminism is, you know what, check this out. [01:12:18] Feminism is based. [01:12:21] That'll be the new one. [01:12:22] Are people still saying based? [01:12:24] People like Elon Musk. [01:12:25] I feel like Elon Musk says base a lot. [01:12:28] I imagine him fucking high as a kite, running around like these poor developers' desks being like, oh, base. [01:12:36] I thought of a new based on the camera. [01:12:37] Oh my God, the new update. [01:12:40] Based. [01:12:40] You should be able to make calls on Twitter. [01:12:42] It's fuck or X. [01:12:43] It's based. [01:12:44] Yeah. [01:12:45] Oh, you should be able to trade crypto on X. [01:12:49] I wish the internet was illegal so bad. [01:12:52] There was like some fake news bullshit that the Houthis were going to cut this fiber octic cable out of the Red Sea that would destroy the internet. [01:13:00] And like, I mean, obviously it's not going to happen. [01:13:03] But like, you know, you could just, isn't there just like a bunch of fiber optic cables you could? [01:13:08] Oh, yeah. [01:13:08] People have talked about that. [01:13:09] You know, I will say people used to talk about that a lot more in the Ed Snowden days. [01:13:14] Because also, kind of right after the Ed Snowden stuff, because part of the dossiers that got like, you know, they had these maps of where all those cables and shit are. [01:13:24] But also, the big NSA black, they're not black sites, but they're sort of, they're computer black sites. [01:13:31] But the big NSA hubs for servers and shit that are, you know, I know where one is in LA and there's, you know, there's a bunch all over the world. [01:13:39] People talk about, you know, physical pipeline action. [01:13:42] Yeah. [01:13:43] I would say make more pipelines. [01:13:46] School to prison, oil, maybe, fuck it, Coke. [01:13:50] You know, that would cut down a lot of the border stuff. [01:13:54] But you were saying. [01:13:56] No, it's just, I think for fake news, like, I think it's okay to have a little fake news. [01:14:00] I think everyone should be able to have a little fake news. [01:14:02] Yeah. [01:14:03] Like, just a little, like, okay, that was my little fake news for the week. [01:14:06] The Houthis are going to come down for five rocket cables. [01:14:09] This is what they don't tell you about fake news. [01:14:10] It's fun as hell. [01:14:12] It's really the only kind of news you want to tell anyone about. [01:14:14] It's the only kind of news that you want to read. [01:14:16] Yeah. [01:14:16] The fake news. [01:14:17] Yeah. [01:14:17] Here's what sucks. [01:14:18] Reading the real news. [01:14:19] You know why? [01:14:20] Horrible. [01:14:20] Not great. [01:14:21] But the fake news, kind of interesting. [01:14:23] Fake news is makes you think. [01:14:25] I view fake news as this, as it's sort of the icing on the real news cake. [01:14:29] That's why. [01:14:30] And you don't want to have too much because then when you get too fat, you get sick, get diabetes. [01:14:35] So you just have a little fake news as a treat. [01:14:38] Yeah, true. [01:14:39] So if you're listening to this, ladies and gentlemen, keep that Daily Mail subscription. [01:14:44] Yeah. [01:14:46] Keep that New York Post subscription and keep reading that fake news. [01:14:49] I'm Liz. [01:14:50] My name is Brace. [01:14:52] We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky. [01:14:54] The podcast is called True Anon. [01:14:57] And we'll see you next time. [01:14:58] Bye-bye. [01:15:18] Come in.