Latest / NO FILTER / The Chilling Disappearance That Shock An Entire Community _ True Crime Documentary(M4A_128K)

Transcript

The Chilling Disappearance That Shock An Entire Community _ True Crime Documentary(M4A_128K) · NO FILTER

• 0:13
  Speaker 1: There is something deeply unsettling about watching someone walk away
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: and never come back. Most people have done it before,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: a heated argument, a need for air, a few minutes
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: alone to clear your head. You leave your phone behind.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: You assume you will be back soon, and the people
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: around you assume the same. On the afternoon of June
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: twenty eighth, twenty twenty one, under the crushing heat of
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: the southern California Desert, a thirty year old woman named
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Lauren l Cho walked away from a property near Joshua
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Tree and disappeared. It happened in a ten minute window
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: there one moment, gone the next, but as the hours passed,
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: something began to feel deeply wrong. Lauren had reportedly left
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: behind almost everything, her phone, her belongings, food and water,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: even her pet parakeet, something friends later said she rarely
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: liked being separated from the people who loved her. Spent
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: three and a half months searching a brutal, sun scorched
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: landscape for any trace of where she had gone. The media,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: for most of that time said almost nothing, and the
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: desert she vanished into was not forgiving terrain. Morongo Valley
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: and Yucca Valleys sit at the edge of immense stretches
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: of open wilderness, dry washes, jagged hills, loose rock, and
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: endless sand hardened beneath temperatures. Even experienced hikers can become
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: disoriented There, Distances warp in the heat, trails disappear into
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: open land. One wrong direction can place someone miles away
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: from help without realizing it. Search crews would later comb
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: through those hills using helicopters, aircraft, canine units, and ground teams.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: But as detectives reconstructed Lauren's final hours, one detail kept
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: troubling them. For nearly ten minutes, nobody could fully account
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: for where she went, and in the desert, ten minutes
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: can be enough for someone to disappear forever. Before her
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: name appeared in headlines across the country, Lauren Cho was
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: simply El to the people who loved her, a nickname
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: spoken casually by friends, the kind of person who felt
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: vividly alive in other people's memories. Lauren grew up in
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: New Jersey in a close knit Korean American family, and
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: graduated from hundred and Central Regional High School in two
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: thousand nine. Later, she attended Westminster Choir College, where she
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: studied music education. Lauren Cho was born on December twentieth,
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety in South Korea. She grew up in Hunterdon County,
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: New Jersey, in the rolling rural landscape of the state's
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: western interior, a place far removed from the desert that
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: would eventually claim her. Her family called her Ell. To
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: them that nickname wasn't just a shortening of her name.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: It was its own thing, its own identity, and l
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: had an identity that could fill every room she walked into.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: From an early age, Lauren was drawn to music with
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: the kind of intensity that makes people stop and listen.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: She had a classical soprano voice, clear trained, precise, and
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: as a teenager she had already toured with choirs across Europe,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: performing in concert halls and cathedrals. She graduated from Hundredon
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Central Regional High School in two thousand and nine and
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: went on to study music education at Westminster Choir College
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: in New Jersey. She was also a black belt in taekwondo.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: She was, by any measure, someone who committed fully to
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: whatever she loved. After college, Lauren began teaching high school
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: music in Irvington Township, New Jersey. She was also a
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: section leader in a church choir. From the outside, it
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: looked like a stable, purposeful life, a woman doing exactly
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: what she had trained to do. But Lauren was a
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: person of appetite a vision. She wanted more than stability.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: She wanted freedom and creation and the feeling of building
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: something entirely her own. Her sister wrote that Elle was
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: a talented musician, an incredible baker, a hilarious and loyal friend,
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: a strangely intuitive gift giver, and probably the coolest sister
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: one could hope for. She was also a tattoo artist,
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: with several tattoos of her own. She kept a parakeet.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: She was the kind of person who noticed the things
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: other people walked past. By the winter of twenty twenty,
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Lauren had made a decision. She was dissatisfied with teaching.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: It wasn't that she didn't love music, she did, but
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: she wanted something bigger, something that was entirely hers. She
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: wanted to cook. She wanted to run her own food
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: truck and live by her own terms, somewhere out west,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: where the air was different and the possibilities felt open.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: So she quit her job and she went looking for
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: a new life. She had spent her entire life mastering structure, music, discipline, performance, precision.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: But somewhere along the way, Lauren cho began searching for
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: something less predictable, something freer, and that search was about
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: to carry her thousands of miles from home. Around Memorial
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Day of twenty twenty, Lauren met a man named Cody Orrel.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: He was planning a cross country road trip westward, traveling
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: on a tour bus. Lauren and Orrel had previously dated,
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: and when they reconnected, the timing aligned with what Lauren
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: had already been dreaming of. She joined the trip in
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: December twenty twenty. The two of them made the full
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: journey west together, crossing the country on Orrel's tour bus,
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: eventually landing at their destination, Bombay Beach, California. Bombay Beach
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: sits on the eastern edge of the Salton Sea, a strange, isolated,
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: sun bleached community that had in recent years become something
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: of an enclave for artists and musicians. It was the
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: kind of place that attracted people who wanted to reinvent themselves.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: For Lauren, it felt right. She bought an old school
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: bus with the intention of converting it into a food truck.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Started cooking for the small circle of friends that had
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: gathered around their little community. Every evening the group had
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: dinner together, and Ell was in the kitchen. One dish
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: people remembered in particular was her vegan basal ice cream,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: an unlikely creation that somehow worked, that somehow made perfect
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: sense for who she was. By the spring of twenty
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: twenty one, an opportunity arose. A filmmaker named tau Ruspoli
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: had a collection of Airbnb rental properties called The Whole,
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: situated in a remote stretch of desert between Yucca Valley
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: and Morongo Valley, just outside Joshua Tree National Park. The
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: landscape there is arresting, massive boulders, Joshua trees twisting up
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: from sandy soil, enormous sky. It is also unforgiving in
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: summer temperatures climb past one hundred degrees, and the terrain
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: is rough, disorienting, and largely without shade. Lauren was offered
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: a position as the private chef at The Whole. She accepted.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: By June twenty twenty one, c and Orrel had relocated there,
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: staying on the property on Benmar Trail. She was still
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: working on her school bus conversion. She still had plans.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: A friend named r. J Okay later told The High
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: Desert Star that the day Lauren disappeared, she had texted
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: him asking for his help fixing up the bus. She
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: had mentioned her parakeet that she didn't like to leave
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: the bird alone for even a day. She was thinking
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: about the next week. She had plans in the desert.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: Lauren seemed closer than ever to the life she wanted,
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: a food truck, a creative community, a future she was
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: building with her own hands. Then, the afternoon of Monday,
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: June twenty eighth, twenty twenty one, began intention. A housekeeper
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: at the property later told investigators that both Lauren and
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Orrel had been drinking earlier in the day and that
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: an argument had broken out between them. The specifics of
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: what they fought about were not publicly confirmed by law enforcement,
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: but the housekeeper reported that the dispute arose after Urel
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: declined to let Lauren take a vehicle and drive away.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: According to Orrel, sometime around three in the afternoon, he
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: went inside the tour bus. When he came back out,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Lauren was gone. There was a ten minute window, he
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: told The High Desert Star, and she evaporated. Urel told
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: police that before she walked away, Lauren had been visibly
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: upset and had expressed statements about being distressed. A friend
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: of Lauren's name, Jeff Frost, speaking to local said that
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: she had expressed some wishes to harm herself before she left.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: Lauren walked away without her phone, without food, without water,
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: into the desert hills between Yucca Valley and Morongo Valley
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: in the full heat of a California June afternoon. Orrel
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: searched for her himself first, then called friends to help.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: When they couldn't locate her, he contacted the San Bernardino
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: County Sheriff's office. His call was logged at five thirteen pm.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: According to the sheriff's report, jo had walked into the
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: hills and had not been located. The initial search party
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: that evening found no trace of Lauren, not even her footprints.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Responding law enforcement, according to investigators, found only the tracks
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: of the people searching for her. That absence of tracks
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: led Arel to one theory that Lauren might have gotten
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: into a vehicle with someone. The Marongo Basin Sheriff's Station
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: classified Lauren as a voluntarily missing person. That classification would
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: shape how the early weeks of the search unfolded. Search
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: teams combed the desert for footprints, clothing, any sign that
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: Lauren had passed through. They found nothing, not a trail,
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: not a direction. On July second, twenty twenty one, just
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: four days after Lauren disappeared, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Department officially suspended its search and rescue operation. Her case
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: was reclassified as a missing person. Lauren's family refused to
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: accept the story. About a week after her dis appearance,
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: relatives launched a Facebook page called missing Person Lauren l Cho.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Her sister posted about Laurence tattoos in case anyone had
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: seen her. Someone knows something, She wrote on the page.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Maybe someone has seen something and these pictures will jog
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: their memory. Friends circulated missing person flyers around Bombay Beach,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: orel and others pushed the story on social media, but
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: for weeks, the national media paid almost no attention to
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: the disappearance of a thirty year old Korean American woman
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: in the California desert. Lauren's family was largely left to
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: search on their own. Investigators did continue some work in
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: the background. On July twenty fourth, the Sheriff's Department conducted
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: aerial searches of the remote mountain terrain near the Benmar
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Trail property. On July thirty first, detectives executed a search
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: warrant at the Airbnb site, deploying seven dogs to search
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: the property and surrounding unincorporated areas. According to a sh
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Sheriff's Department statement, a second search warrant was sought in
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: part because the property owner was not present and multiple
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: people were living on site. As August turned into September,
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: the investigation appeared to stall. Then in the final week
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: of September twenty twenty one, everything changed. Another missing person's
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: case exploded across national television, and suddenly attention began drifting
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: back toward the California desert. On September eleventh, twenty twenty one,
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: the disappearance of Gabby Petito, a twenty two year old
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: white travel blogger from New York, became one of the
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: most covered missing persons cases in modern American media history.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: Every major news outlet devoted enormous resources to the story.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: Social media was saturated with theories, updates, and live streams.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: The search for Petito became a cultural event. Meanwhile, Lauren
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: Chow had now been missing for over two months, and
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: the national press had published almost nothing. The contrast was
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: impossible to a Journalists, activists, and families of other missing
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: persons began raising the issue publicly, pointing to Lauren specifically
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: as someone whose case had received a fraction of the
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: attention given to Petito. Lauren's Facebook page, once a small
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: community of worried friends, suddenly had thousands of followers. Her
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: family's plea for help was being amplified on a national
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: scale for the first time. In response to the swelling
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: public interest, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department announced that
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: its Specialized Investigations Division would be joining the Marongo Basin
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: Station in the search for Lauren cho The most experienced
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: investigators in the county were now formally on the case.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: Nearly three months after she had walked into the desert.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: For the first time since Lauren vanished, the full weight
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: of national attention seemed to be pressing down on the case.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Investigators returned to the desert with renewed urgency. Before October
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: was over, they would uncover something that changed the investigation forever.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: The Specialized Investigation's division worked quickly, and on October ninth,
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, one hundred and three, days after Lauren
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: Cho disappeared, investigators searching the rugged, open desert terrain of
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: Yucca Valley found unidentified human remains. The San Bernardino County
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Sheriff's Department issued a statement confirming the discovery and noting
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: that the remains had been found in the area associated
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: with the search for Lauren. Forensic work began immediately to
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: determine the identity of the deceased. Lauren's family waited, the
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: world waited. On October twenty eighth, twenty twenty one, nineteen
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: days after the remains were found, the San Bernardino County
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: Coroner's Division issued its confirmation the human remains found in
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: the desert outside Yucca Valley were those of Lauren el Cho.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: She was thirty years old. The cause and manner of
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: her death were listed in the final autopsy report as
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: undetermined and unknown. Toxicology results revealed the presence of caffeine
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: and alprisalum, a prescription anti anxiety medication, in her system.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: No other substances were identified. No evidence of trauma was
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: documented in the reporting. Investigators found no indication of foul play.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: What the evidence did indicate was that Lauren had died
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: in the open desert in the brutal heat of a
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: California summer, in terrain that search teams had described as
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: rugged and unforgiving. The manner of her death remained formally
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: a question without an answer, But the most important question
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: remained unanswered. How does someone walk into open desert in
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: broad daylight and never come back out. In the weeks
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: after her remains were identified, the people who had known
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: Lauren spoke about her with the specificity that comes from
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: real love, not the generalized grief of tragedy. Her family
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: described her on Facebook as someone who was fiercely loved
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: by many. Her sister noted that where Elle really shown
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: was as an aunt. She was funny, genuinely, quickly funny.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: She gave gifts that were inexplicably perfect, the kind that
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: made you feel seen. She was loyal. She was the
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: person who stayed. Cody Orrell, speaking to The High Desert Star,
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: described Lauren's dream with plainness and affection. Lauren wanted a
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: different life. She quit her job and moved on the
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: bus with me. The idea was she was going to
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: come here and open the food truck and follow her dreams.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: Lauren Elcho was born on December twentieth, nineteen ninety. She
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: stood five feet three inches tall. She had black hair
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: and brown eyes. She had a parakeet she worried about.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: She had a bus she was turning into a food
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: truck because she believed she could build something beautiful out
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: of whatever material life handed her. She had made dinner
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: for her neighbors every night and made the table the
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: center of something. She walked into the desert on June
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: twenty eighth, twenty twenty one, and was not found for
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: over three months. Her cause of death remains officially undetermined.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Her manner of death remains unknown. What is known is
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: that a woman died in a desert that very few
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: people were looking at while the country turned its full
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: attention somewhere else, and when attention finally arrived because of
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: the death of another woman in another state under entirely
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: different circumstances, it came too late to do what Lauren's
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: family had needed it to do from the beginning. Her
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: case is a story about one woman's life cut short.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: It is also a story about who we look for
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: and who we don't, about which names the cameras recognize
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: and which ones they pass over, About what it cost
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: the people left behind when the answer to those questions
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: is the wrong one. Lauren Cho was thirty years old.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: Her family loved her. She had plans. In the end,
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: the people who loved Lauren did not want her remembered
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: only for the way her story ended. They wanted people
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: to remember the music, the cooking, the laughter, the strange,
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: perfect gifts, the life that existed long before the headlines
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: ever did. Thank you for watching Murder Ledger. We explore
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: real cases, unanswered questions, and the details that refuse to fade.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: If these stories matter to you, consider subscribing and sharing
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: your thoughts in the comments.