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- [00:02]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon
- [00:31]
Sponsor Voice 1
Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [00:41]
Sponsor Voice 2
This is Crime House.
- [00:46]
Vanessa Richardson
There's a reason why people seek out remote places for a bit of peace. No big buildings, no traffic, no phone buzzing in your pocket. Just Mother Nature, the trail ahead, and a silence so complete, it almost has a sound of its own out there. Something primal stirs inside you, like you've shed every modern burden and finally returned to the creature you were meant to be. Free, untethered. Alive in a way civilization never allows. But nature doesn't care about any of that. What looks like peace is really just the absence of the familiar. And the moment you step off the pavement and into that world, you. You've entered something else entirely. Out in the wild, you're largely on your own, far from a police station, a hospital, anyone who can come running when you need help. At first, that distance feels like the whole point. But there's a reason humanity flocks together. Because out in the wild, danger lurks around every corner. A wrong turn, a sudden drop in temperature, an unexpected encounter. The margin for error out there is razor thin. That same peaceful trail is shared by animals that hunt and sometimes by people who do, too. And when something goes wrong, no one's close enough to hear you scream. Today, we're talking about three people who went searching for that escape and encountered dangers they never saw coming. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This is the third stop on our summer series, Deadly Destinations. Four Sundays, four kinds of getaways, and the real crimes that turned them deadly. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community.
- [02:51]
Sponsor Voice 1
Go.
- [02:51]
Vanessa Richardson
Please rate, review and follow the show if you're a Crime House plus subscriber. All four episodes of Deadly Destinations are available right now, completely ad free. If you haven't joined yet, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free. And early last week, we left the shore behind for the open ocean. This week we're heading inland and off the map into the forests, jungles and mountain trails where the nearest help can be days away. We're covering three cases. First, a young American woman who set out on a solo trek through the Himalayas and walked into a mystery her family is still trying to solve. Then, a man who turned a quiet Australian forest into a hunting ground, and the one survivor who brought him down. And finally, two men who went deep into the Amazon to protect it and were killed for what they revealed. All that and more coming up.
- [04:05]
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We've all been there.
- [04:06]
Vanessa Richardson
You look up.
- [04:07]
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- [04:32]
Vanessa Richardson
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- [05:00]
Vanessa Richardson
Get ahead of it now and get
- [05:01]
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- [06:21]
Vanessa Richardson
in the spring of 2010, a 23 year old American named Aubrey Sacco was on a trip of a lifetime. But she was nearing the end. Aubrey was a recent University of Colorado graduate from Greeley, Colorado and by every account a force of nature. An athlete, a scholar, an artist, a musician, a devoted yoga student, she was someone people remembered. Meeting her own mother described her with the phrase glitter the world one country at a time. For the last five months, that's exactly what she'd been doing. Traveling across Asia, through Sri Lanka and India, staying with local families instead of in hotels. She was learning, volunteering, soaking up everything she could. She wasn't a tourist passing through. She wanted to live in the places she went. And the whole time she stayed in close, near constant contact with her parents back home. She had one last adventure planned before she came back. She wanted to trek through Nepal's Long Tong Valley, high in the Himalayas, and then stay for a bit to volunteer. It was the perfect ending to her dream trip. In late April 2010, against her parents advice, Aubrey set out on the Long Tong Trek alone. On paper, it was a moderate risk. The Long Tong Trek is a popular route north of Kathmandu and it's generally considered safe. But it consisted of a winding, days long climb through the forest and small mountain villages following a river fed by glaciers. It ended up toward a monastery high in the valley. Trekkers do it all the time and Aubrey was experienced, careful, and she'd been navigating Asia on her own for months. So she didn't hire a guide. She didn't sign on with a group. She just went. Her last email home came around the 20th or 21st of April. She stayed her first night at one of the trailside villages and the next day continued continued up the route, stopping at the little lodges along the way. The last confirmed sighting of her was on or about April 22 at a lodge called Lama Hotel, not far past a checkpoint manned by the Nepal Army. She was carrying a bright lime green backpack, the kind of thing you could spot from a distance. But after that day, no one spotted her again. Aubrey blew well past the date she was supposed to return to the States. And when the emails stopped completely, her family knew something was wrong. She was never out of touch, not for this long. At first, they told themselves the ordinary, hopeful things. That she'd lost signal high in the mountains, that the trail had taken longer than planned, that any day now, a message would land. But the days kept passing in silence, half a world away. And the hopeful explanations got harder and harder to believe. In early May, her mother, Connie, contacted the US Embassy in Kathmandu. Officials there suggested that political unrest in the country might have delayed Aubrey somewhere in the mountains. But days kept passing with no word. So her father, Paul, flew to Nepal in the middle of May. Determined to find his daughter there, he joined a search that was already underway. He hiked the trail himself. Even after recovering from a recent surgery, he bounced between the hope that she was alive somewhere and the dread of what he might find at the bottom of a ravine. The last lodge where Aubrey had stayed offered some clues. They had some of her things. Her laptop, her camera, her journal. But not Aubrey. What grew out of that was one of the largest private search efforts in Nepal's history. Helicopters swept the valley. Experienced Sherpa teams probed the ravines. Dogs worked the trails and the riverbanks. They offered a reward. And they found nothing. Not a single trace of Aubrey. Not even that bright green backpack. Paul and Connie would go back to Nepal again and again over the following years. There, they pressed the authorities, hired their own searchers, and did whatever it took to keep the investigation going. Connie grew openly frustrated with how the official investigation was handled, particularly the lack of resources like cadaver dogs and forensic teams that she felt a serious search demanded. At one point, she felt the authorities just didn't want to find out what had happened to their daughter. But the deeper the search went, the stranger it got. The local police took statements from dozens of people, and the accounts kept shifting. Villagers who had first told researchers they'd seen Aubrey pass through left, later changed their stories, saying they hadn't seen her at all. People at the lodge where she'd eaten initially remembered her being there. And then, weeks later, no one would admit they'd seen her. Volunteers kept running into the same unsettling feeling. People were being silenced. But why? Well, 10 years earlier, a British trekker had been found dead in that same river valley. The local men who reported finding the body were arrested and spent a decade in prison. The people who lived in the Area believed those men were innocent and that whoever was actually responsible was never caught. The lesson they took from it was simple. If you get involved, you're the one who pays. So when an American woman vanished on their trail, a lot of people decided the safest thing to do was to say nothing at all. That left Aubrey's family with two very different possibilities. The official lien was that it had been an accident, that Aubrey had somehow fallen into the fast, glacier fed river. But the people searching for her pushed back hard on that. The river was a good distance off the trail, and if she had gone into the water, that conspicuous backpack should have washed up somewhere. It didn't. Not that they were aware of. The other possibility, the one her family kept circling back to, was foul play. And the suspicion pointed at the army checkpost Aubrey had passed on the trail. Within months of Aubrey's disappearance appearance, three French women reported that they were sexually assaulted by soldiers at that very checkpost. And over the next two years, more women were reportedly attacked in the same region. None of it has ever been tied to Aubrey, but for the people who loved her, it was impossible to ignore. And Aubrey, it turned out, was not the only foreign woman to have vanished on the trails around Kathmandu. In the years before she disappeared, at least two European women went missing in the same region. In one case, searchers found bloody, torn clothing and pages from the woman's passports. But they were left in a forest reserve closer to the Capitol. At the time, some investigators openly feared that someone was preying on women hiking those trails. No one was ever caught. Whether any of it connects to Aubrey, no one can say. But it meant her family was never able to dismiss the darkest explanation. The leads the family did get were extremely thin. At one point, a photo of an unidentified man surfaced on Aubrey's recovered laptop. The Sacos circulated it widely, hoping the man would come forward and tell them what he knew. Paul was careful to say the man was not a suspect, only someone they couldn't identify in a case with almost nothing to hold onto. Then, three years later, in 2013, Paul. The Sacos got a phone call they'd been waiting for and dreading in equal measure. Police in Nepal had made arrests following an undercover operation, and the family was told one of the men had confessed to murdering Aubrey. For a few hours, Paul and Connie braced themselves to finally learn what had happened to their daughter. And then it all fell apart. The man who had confessed changed his story, at one point naming people who didn't even exist. None of the physical evidence matched about Four weeks later, the men were released without a single charge being filed. After everything the searches, the waiting, and one terrible stretch of believing they were about to get an answer, the Sakos were left right back where they started. Aubrey Sako has never been found. Her father channeled his grief into a 14 song album he called Finding Aubrey. Some of the tracks were recordings Aubrey herself had made before she left for Asia. Then, in 2015, a landslide triggered by a massive earthquake buried Longtong Village, the very place she was last seen alive. The last place anyone saw her was gone, just like that, as were any lingering clues waiting to be unearthed. The to this day, Paul and Connie still don't know what happened to their daughter. As of this recording, her case remains open and unsolved. Aubrey's case shows that the wild side can swallow a person whole and give nothing back. But sometimes the most dangerous thing out there waiting in all that quiet, isn't the wilderness at all.
- [15:52]
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- [17:01]
Vanessa Richardson
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- [17:09]
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- [17:36]
Vanessa Richardson
So a quick warning before this next story. It involves serial murder and sexual violence, so please take care while you listen. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, backpacking across Australia was a rite of passage. It was cheap, adventurous, and people assumed it was safe enough. Young travelers from all over the world would land in Sydney, stick out a thumb and catch rides with total strangers without thinking twice about it. That was just how you saw the country. You trusted that whoever pulled over for you was exactly who they seemed to be. A lot of the time that trust was rewarded. That was the whole quiet bargain of the open road. At least until 1989. That's when young hitchhikers began to vanish, particularly along the Hume highway, headed down to Melbourne. The first to disappear was an Australian Couple from Melbourne, 19 year olds Deborah Everest and James Gibson. They'd set off and never reached their destination. Then came three German backpackers. 21 year old Simone Schmiedel, 20 year old Gabor Neugebauer, and his girlfriend, 20 year old Anya Habscheid. Followed by two British women, 21 year old Carolyn Clark and 22 year old Joanne Walters. They were planning to hitchhike around the country together before they vanished without a trace. Seven people, all between the ages of 19 and 22. They came from different places and they disappeared at different times between 1989 and 1992. At first there was nothing obvious connecting them. They were just scattered missing persons reports. And in a country full of young travelers, someone dropping out of contact wasn't always cause for alarm. Their families an ocean away in most cases were simply left to wonder. But that changed in September of 92. That's when two people outrunning in Belongo State Forest came across human remains. They were the bodies of the two British backpackers, Carolyn Clark and Joanne Walters. And once police began searching that forest in earnest, they kept finding more bodies. The three German travelers, Simone Schmiedel, Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habscheid. Then the young couple from Melbourne, Deborah Everest and James Gibson. Seven victims in all, buried across the same lonely patch of forest. And the horrific story behind it finally came into focus. This wasn't a series of unrelated tragedies. Someone had been using Belongo as a private burial ground, which told police there was a serial killer operating off the Hume highway and no one knew who he was. The case made headlines around the world. In Australia, it changed something fundamental. Young women especially stopped sticking out their thumbs. The open road didn't feel free anymore. It felt like a train trap. What followed was one of the biggest manhunts in the country's history. A dedicated task force poured over the crime scenes and chased down leads. But the killer was careful. He'd left very little behind in that forest to identify him. Months went by. Police were sure of one thing only, that a murderer was still out there. And he might still be driving that same highway, looking for the next young traveler with a thumb out and a pack on their back. But the big break in the case didn't come from that forest. It came from a man who had survived. Paul Onions, a British backpacker. Back In January of 1990, he'd been hitchhiking along the Hume highway when a friendly mustached man who called himself Bill pulled over and offered him a ride. They drove south and then near a town called Mittagong, right on the edge of Belongo, Bill suddenly stopped the car. He pulled out a gun and some rope and said it was a robbery. Onions didn't wait to find out what came next. He threw open the door and ran. Bill chased him and fired at him. But Onions managed to flag down a passing car. The two of them sped off and got away. He reported the whole thing to local police at the time and described the man and his vehicle and. And then he went on with his life. Years later, back home in England, Paul Onions saw news coverage of the bodies being found in a forest in New South Wales. The same forest where that man had once pulled a gun on him. He picked up the phone and called the police back in Australia, he would never take a cent of the reward money, even though he was the one who helped solve the case. What's frustrating is his tip sat there for months and the original report from 1990 had gone missing from the files, aside from some small details one officer had jotted down in her notebook. But once detectives finally followed it up, everything started to move. Onion's account was backed up by the motorist who'd rescued him, and separately by another woman who'd had her eye on her boyfriend's co worker, someone she thought police ought to look at. Paul Onions flew back to Australia and positively identified the man who had tried to kill him. It was a 49 year old road gang laborer named Ivan Milott. He fit the profile in ways that were hard to ignore. He'd worked that very highway for the Roads Authority. He owned property near the forest, he was obsessed with guns and he'd sold off a four wheel drive vehicle right after the first bodies were discovered. Police began quietly watching his home and In May of 1994 they moved in with a heavily armed tactical team. They surrounded his house and arrested him. When they searched Milotte's home. They found what they needed. A cache of weapons, including parts of a rifle that matched the type used in the murders. And there were belongings that had no business being there. Camping gear, clothing, and cameras that had all belonged to the victims. Trophies from people he left in the forest. His trial in 1996 ran for months and drew international press. More than a hundred witnesses took the stand, and Paul Onions was the first of them. Members of Milotte's own family testified, trying to provide him with an alibi. And his defense tried to shift the blame onto one of his brothers. But he performed badly under cross examination, and the physical evidence against him was overwhelming. Milotte was convicted of all seven murders and sentenced to seven consecutive life terms with no possibility of parole. Ivan Milott died in prison in 2019 of cancer in a maximum security facility, having never confessed to what he'd done. And two questions about him have never gone away. The first is whether there were other victims, because police long suspected that the seven he was convicted of were not the whole story. That there were unsolved disappearances going back years that fit his pattern. Even now, there are efforts underway to take another look at some of those cold cases. The second question is whether he acted alone. That one was raised strikingly by his own former lawyer, John Marsden. He claimed on his deathbed that Milott had help. Neither of those questions were ever answered, but neither has been fully put to rest. Milotte's crimes burned themselves so deep into Australian culture that they went on to inspire one of the most infamous horror movies to come out of the country. It's a 2005 film called Wolf Creek. And there's one last dark twist to it all. Years after Milotte went to prison, his great nephew, along with a friend who recorded it, murdered a young man named David Ochterlony. It happened in the very same place as his great uncle's crimes and the Belonglo State Forest. He was later sentenced to 43 years in prison. Ivan Milott preyed on people who came looking for adventure. But our last two travelers didn't go into the wild looking for adventure at all. In fact, they went to protect it.
- [26:15]
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- [27:22]
Vanessa Richardson
In June of 2022, two men set out by boat into one of the most remote and dangerous places on earth. The Javari Valley. Deep in the western Amazon. It's near the borders of Peru and Colombia. The Jivari Valley is the second largest indigenous territory in Brazil. It's twice the size of Switzerland, and it has an estimated 17 ICE populated groups living inside it. People who've had little or no contact with the outside world. It also has a lot of people who want to strip it for parts. Illegal fishermen, poachers, loggers and drug traffickers, all operating in a near lawless stretch of border country where the government can barely reach in the nearest town. The murder rate had climbed to among the highest in the world by 2022. That's where Dom Phillips was at the time. He was a 57 year old former British journalist and longtime contributor to the Guardian. He'd lived and worked in Brazil for years, but he'd since stepped back from daily journalism to write a book about how to save the Amazon. His reporting on illegal fishing was what brought him to the Jivari in the first place. The second man was his guide and friend, 41 year old Bruno Pereira. He was one of Brazil's foremost experts on the region's indigenous peoples and a former senior official at the government's Indigenous Affairs Agency. He'd been pushed out of that post after a tireless fight for the protection of indigenous land. Now he spent his time helping run indigenous led patrols against the illegal fishermen working the rivers. It was dangerous work. He'd been threatened for doing it, but it didn't stop him. That June 2022, the two of them set out from a river town at the edge of the reserve and traveled the waterways by small boat. It was long days on the water in punishing heat but they were interviewing the people who lived there, riverside communities and indigenous communities alike, about the work of defending the territory. It was the heart of what Phillips wanted his book to capture. Not just what was being done to the Amazon, but who was standing in the way of it and at what cost. But the day before they disappeared, they'd had a tense encounter with a local fisherman. His boat had been turned back from entering indigenous land, so he and his men raised their guns and threatened the two of them. Later that same day, the fisherman crossed paths with them again, this time at a home of a relative where they were lodging. This time, the fisherman reportedly took it as a threat when Pereira asked Phillips to photograph him. Pereira had been documenting the illegal fishing in the area for some time. Having their photos on the record was not something they took to nicely. But June 5, 2022, was a new day. That morning, Phillips and Pereira set off by boat back toward town. It was supposed to be a routine leg, a couple of hours down the river, a trip they'd made before they were expected, but they never arrived. When the two men failed to turn up, it was Pereira's colleagues, the indigenous patrol teams he'd worked with, who raised the alarm. They went out onto the rivers to search, throwing themselves into it with extraordinary determination. As the authorities moved slowly, the sluggish official response drew sharp criticism in Brazil and abroad. Within days, the disappearance of a British journalist and an indigenous expert was front page news all around the world. People were marching in the streets, demanding the two of them be found. For about 10 days, the search continued. The indigenous teams pushed up the rivers and into the forest, following every thread. The first signs weren't A backpack, a laptop and a pair of sandals turned up near the home of a local fisherman. The same man from the river police arrested him. There were traces of blood on his boat, sent away for analysis. And a few days later, he actually confessed. He led search teams to the spot in the forest where he'd buried the two men. A second man would also turn himself in and admit his role. The remains were recovered and identified about 10 days after Phillips and Pereira had vanished. Both men had been shot. At first, police said the killers had acted on their own, that there was no one else behind it. But the indigenous organization Pereira had worked with pushed back immediately. They had warned in writing and more than once that an organized criminal group was operating in the valley. They insisted this crime had not been some spontaneous act between fishermen. It had been planned. And while the official investigation moved forward, international journalists picked up Phillips's Work and kept digging into the network behind the killings. They wanted to make sure the story Phillips died reporting on did not die with him. Over the next two years, the scope of investigation widened, and it looked like the people who'd raised the alarm were right after all. Prosecutors charged more men than the police named an alleged mastermind, a fish trading boss who they say funded and armed the killers. He ran a transnational illegal fishing operation that had been monitoring Pereira's patrols. He'd been jailed early on in the investigation, but on a separate matter and behind bars, authorities said he was recorded admitting that he'd supplied the ammunition for the hit. A former government official was also indicted, accused of failing to act on warnings that might have prevented the killings. And the deeper investigators and journalists dug, the bigger the picture got. The illegal phishing network they found was tangled up with cross border drug trafficking. It turned out that stretch of river was a smuggling corridor as well as a poaching ground. In all, nine people were eventually charged, and investigators reached a conclusion about why it happened. Bruno Pereira was killed because of his work exposing the illegal fishing in the valley. And Dom Phillips was killed just for being the witness beside him. As of this recording, the case is still moving through the courts. No one has been convicted yet. The alleged mastermind is a defendant, and the proceedings have been moved to a federal court in a state capitol with a hearing scheduled. Bruno Pereira had spent his life protecting the people of that forest. Phillips had gone there to tell the world why it mattered, and both of them were killed for it. In that part of the world, the killings of land defenders and the journalists who cover them often go unpunished. The forest is vast, the state is far away, and the bodies are easy to hide. The fact that this case was pursued at all with charges and a trial is itself unusual. It happened because the people who loved these two men and the colleagues who refused to let go would not allow it to be otherwise. Dom Phillips never got to finish his book, though he had written the opening and the first few chapters and left notes and plans for the rest. So when he was gone, a group of his friends and fellow journalists decided to finish it. Each of them took on a piece of it. They retraced the route he'd traveled and sat down for the interviews he planned to do. And in 2025, three years to the day after he was killed, they published it. It's called how to Save the Amazon, because that was the whole, whole point of it. Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed by people who believed that Silencing the messenger would silence the message that out there, far enough into the wild, a story could disappear along with the men carrying it. The book is proof that it didn't work. What's striking is that across these three stories, the danger looked completely different each time. One person seemingly swallowed by the wilderness itself. No villain, no malice, just an indifferent landscape that gave nothing back. Another was hunted by a predator who knew exactly how to use that isolation as cover. And two more were killed by the very people destroying the wild they came to protect. But there's one thread that runs through all three. That same trail that clears your head is shared by animals that hunt, and sometimes by people who do too. The distance that feels like freedom is the exact thing that turns deadly when something goes wrong. The wilderness isn't cruel. It isn't out to get anyone. It's just indifferent. And indifference, when you're far enough from help can be every bit as deadly.
- [36:26]
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- [36:34]
Vanessa Richardson
Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Be sure to come back next Sunday for the final stop on Deadly Destinations, Episode four, the Trip of a Lifetime. The far flung once in a lifetime journeys people dream about for years and save up up to take and three that went unpredictably wrong and you'll still get all our normal episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Wherever you get your podcasts, your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benidon, Natalie Pertzovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Nicolette Tavolaro, and Keri Murphy. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [38:27]
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- [39:51]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi listeners, it's Vanessa Richardson on a special four episode conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crime series. I'm taking you to four kinds of getaways where paradise turned deadly. Listen to our special Deadly Destination series every Sunday on Conspiracy theories, Cults and crimes. Or join Crime House plus to listen to all four episodes now ad free. To join Crime House plus, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or@crimehouseplus.com
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Vanessa Richardson
Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon
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