Unexplained

00:00 This is an iHeart Podcast. 00:02 Guaranteed human. 00:04 Hello and welcome to Unexplained, where each week we explore another true tale of high strangeness, with me, your host, Richard McLean Smith. 00:13 If you're new here and you're a fan of expertly told, atmospheric stories about the strange and unexplained, then you've come to the right place. Please subscribe to the show if you haven't already done so. 00:25 This is Unexplained Season 9, Episode 36, Message Received. 00:41 It was approaching 11 o'clock on the night of Monday, December 15, 1980, in Pacoima, a neighbourhood tucked into the northeast corner of the valley, where the long grid of Los Angeles finally runs out against the dark wall of the San Gabriel Mountains. 00:58 A light fog had settled over the streets, as Paul Wood made his way back to his apartment at the junction of Foothill Boulevard and Arroyo Street. 01:07 Streetlights bloomed in soft bursts of haze as the occasional car slid past. 01:13 Pacoima had always been an eclectic neighbourhood, ever since developers carved the valley's farmland into tract housing after the Second World War. 01:22 Thanks to discriminatory lending and restrictive practices, it was one of the few places where black Americans and immigrant families could buy or rent a home. 01:32 Over time, it grew into a vibrant, successful community, but one that had been increasingly suffering from a chronic lack of investment. 01:40 Like many long-time residents, Paul had watched with sadness as a certain roughness crept into the place, which is why, when he noticed a group of young men loitering on the opposite corner, something told him to keep an eye on them. 01:56 There were two of them, each glancing up and down the street, as though waiting for something to happen. 02:02 Paul watched as one slipped back into the shadows, while the other stepped up to the crossing, pressed the button and waited. 02:10 But when the lights changed and the signal told him to walk, the man stayed exactly where he was. 02:17 Then Paul heard an engine and looked up to see a small pickup coming down Foothill Boulevard. 02:23 Then it stopped at the lights. 02:26 Paul watched in stunned silence as the man at the crossing suddenly pulled out a pistol and smashed the driver's window. 02:34 A woman's desperate screams pierced the night as the assailant began grappling with the driver through the broken glass. 02:42 Just then, two men now ran out from behind a brick wall. 02:46 As the first man finally accessed the vehicle, another vaulted into the back, while the third scrambled in through the passenger side. 02:54 With a shriek of tyres, the truck lurched away up the road, its lights shrinking into the fog, until there was nothing left of it at all. 03:03 Paul hurried inside and immediately called the police. 03:08 Later that night, 31-year-old vocational nurse Melanie Uribe failed to arrive at her 11 o'clock shift at Bacoima Memorial Hospital, where she temped occasionally. 03:20 She drove a black Chevy Love pickup. 03:24 Melanie was a divorced, loving single mother to an 8-year-old son and was close to finally completing her studies to fulfil her dream of becoming a registered nurse. 03:35 It was sometime around 5am the following morning when a fire was reported on Fillmore Street at the corner of Bromont Avenue. 03:42 Firefighters arrived to find a pickup truck burning in the dark, but when the flames were put out and the smoke had cleared, they found no one inside. 03:54 By the time daylight had settled over the valley, the blackened shell had been identified as Melanie Rebe's truck. 04:01 But Melanie was nowhere to be found. 04:05 You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith. 04:15 On Wednesday morning, only a stone's throw from where the burned-out truck had been found the day before, 32-year-old Etta Louise Smith was hurrying to get herself ready for work and get her kids to school. 04:28 Like a great many people in Pacoima, Etta worked for the Lockheed Corporation as a shipping clerk at its sprawling plant in Burbank. 04:36 It was that morning she later said that she first heard about Melanie Rebe's disappearance, in a bulletin on the local KNX news radio station. 04:46 The story immediately caught her attention. For a start, Melanie was also a single mother who was almost the same age. But also, like Paul Wood, Etta couldn't help feeling that violent crime, of which it appeared Melanie had most certainly been a victim of, had been steadily getting worse in the neighbourhood. 05:05 Only the week before, the body of a local seven-year-old girl, Lisa Rosales, had been found strangled and sexually abused on an embankment near Hanson Dam, the broad flood basin where the Tuyunga Wash spills down out of the mountains, barely ten minutes' drive from Etta's house. 05:25 With a seven- and eight-year-old of her own, it was all beginning to feel uncomfortably close. 05:31 Later at work, as the day went by, more fragments of the story dripped out of the hourly news reports. 05:38 Etta was preparing some paperwork when another update came on around 3pm. 05:45 It had been nearly two days since Melanie was last seen, and with little to go on, the police had begun going door to door throughout the neighbourhood in the hope of simply stumbling upon her. 05:57 It was then, so the story goes, that something very strange happened to Etta. 06:04 A thought arrived in her head, fully formed, as though someone else had spoken it directly to her. 06:11 She isn't in a house, it said. 06:14 Then came the images, unspooling rapidly through her mind like a reel of film. 06:20 A canyon road curving round a bend, and a dirt track peeling away from it toward the foot of a hill, and something white glimpsed through a screen of shrubbery. 06:33 She didn't know the name of the road, but she recognized the place at once. 06:38 And she had no doubt that whatever that white thing was, it had something to do with Melanie. 06:45 Etta was so struck by what had happened that she had to sit down. 06:49 However, this wasn't the first time that something like that had apparently happened to her. 06:54 She would later describe how, as a girl, she often had vivid daydreams of things that were about to happen. 07:02 Usually it was nothing more remarkable than a weekend trip to her grandparents' place in the country – But in her mind, she watched the images unspool, her family leaving the house, then pulling into her grandparents' driveway, her cousin coming out to meet them with the baby on her hip. 07:20 Then, sure enough, the day would unfold exactly as she'd seen it. 07:25 But this was something else entirely. 07:36 Etta is said to have spent the rest of the afternoon turning it all over, unable to mention it to anyone for fear that they'd think she'd lost her mind. But when she couldn't bear it any longer, she requested to leave work early and headed straight to the LAPD's Foothill Division station. 07:53 Pushing through the door, Etta couldn't help but feel a little apprehensive as she approached the front desk and asked to speak to someone about Melanie Uribe. 08:03 A few minutes later, Detective Lee Ryan came out and invited her through to a back room to talk. 08:11 Instinctively, somewhere between her respectable manner and smart clothes, Ryan could tell at once that Etta wasn't there to waste his time. This was only further confirmed when she revealed that she'd come straight from her job at the much-respected Lockheed to speak with him. 08:28 Even still, what she said next took a moment to digest. 08:33 She didn't want him to think that she was crazy or some kind of crank, she said. 08:38 But, and there was no right way to say this, she believed she'd had a vision of where Melanie was. 08:45 Then she described it to him. 08:48 Detective Ryan took a moment. 08:51 He didn't for a second think that was true, but as all good detectives know, when someone walks in wanting to talk, you let them talk. 09:00 Maybe she really did have information, but just wasn't being entirely honest about how she came into it. 09:07 Or perhaps she'd absorbed something she overheard. 09:10 Either way, he had nothing to lose by hearing her out. 09:14 And so, instead of balking, he turned to the large map of the city they kept on the wall behind him and asked Etta to show him where she believed Melanie to be. 09:27 He watched Etta like a hawk as she studied the map for a moment, tracing the streets with her finger and up beyond into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains until her finger came to rest. 09:40 There, she said. 09:42 She was pointing at Lopez Canyon. 09:46 Okay, well, that's a lot of ground, Ryan said. 09:50 She's there, said Etta, firmer now. 09:53 I know it. 09:55 Etta even offered to take him there that evening, but Ryan suggested they wait until the following morning instead. 10:02 That way he could organise a helicopter to take her up there and she could point the specific place out from the air. He told her to come back at 7am. 10:12 Then Detective Ryan did something he wouldn't normally do. He picked up a camera and asked Etta to pose for a photo of her pointing at that same spot on the map. 10:23 He figured it might be worth having, just in case she turned out to actually be involved in the crime. 10:34 On the way home, Etta is said to have been suddenly gripped by the feeling that she hadn't done enough. 10:40 She couldn't stop wondering what if Melanie was still alive and didn't have until tomorrow morning. 10:47 When she finally got in her niece Deborah who watched the children for her after school could tell immediately that something was wrong. 10:56 Then Etta told her all about her apparent vision and her trip to the police station. 11:01 She told her young children too Tina and Andy and all of them agreed. She couldn't wait until the following morning to find out if it was real. She had to go then. 11:13 Etta would later say she didn't quite know what possessed her to take the children, only that at the time, she figured having more people meant finding Melanie sooner, and finding Melanie was all that mattered. 11:27 They set off north, just as the last of the light was draining from the sky. 11:33 In summer, the hour before sunset is what Hollywood cinematographers call the magic hour, when the whole valley turns to gold and the hills glow with a mystical haze, where just for a moment, the real of LA and its unreal Hollywood counterpart become one. 11:52 But this was December, and that evening, there was only grey cloud and a light drizzle. 12:00 Etta's van climbed out of the streets and into Lopez Canyon, where the road narrows and twists between steep slopes of Chaparral and Scrub Oak. 12:10 As they drove deeper into the canyon, Etta was apparently gripped by a sudden sense of trauma. It seemed to move through her entire body. 12:19 She told everyone to be on the lookout for anything white, peeking out from under the brush. 12:25 But by the time they'd reached the top of the canyon, they'd seen nothing, Etta turned the van around and headed back down. 12:34 She got about halfway when she noticed the tyre marks cut into an embankment on the left-hand side of the road. 12:42 She pulled over and told the children to stay in the van as she and Deborah got out to take a closer look. 12:50 The marks looked fresh, and when Etta looked out across the road, she saw the same tracks pressed into the dirt on the other side. 12:58 Her vehicle had clearly been there recently, stopped and turned around. 13:04 Etta reached down and ran her fingers through the dirt of the tracks. 13:09 She later claimed that as her skin touched the dirt, a jolt of fear shot through her like an electric current. Some kind of echo, perhaps, she thought, of whatever had happened there, which only something violent and traumatic could have generated. 13:24 And in that moment, she knew this had been Melanie's truck. 13:30 And Melanie was there. 13:33 Etta looked back toward her children in the van. 13:37 Of course, she knew they shouldn't be there at all, but if having them there meant finding Melanie, then so be it, because night was falling and they were running out of time. 13:48 So she called for them to get out and join her. 13:52 For a while they picked their way around the scrub, never straying far from one another. 13:57 Then eight-year-old Tina drifted off to the side of the dirt track and deeper into the undergrowth. "'Mom,' she called. "'Come quick.' Etta found Tina standing completely still, pointing at something lying half-hidden through a thick mesh of shrubs. 14:17 It was the white object, just as Etta had apparently seen it. 14:22 Etta's mind erupted. 14:25 A maelstrom of thunder and lightning, fear and rage, crashed through her all at once. 14:31 It was a white nurse's shoe. 14:34 and inside it, the foot of an otherwise unclothed woman lying still in the dirt. 14:46 For a long moment nobody moved. The canyon had fallen almost silent around them. 14:52 Just then, from somewhere further down the road, came the crunch of tyres on gravelly tarmac and a pair of headlights swung round the bend. 15:02 A police patrol car Etta ran into the road, waving her arms. And when the car pulled up, the officer stepped out. Everything she'd been holding in since three o'clock that afternoon came pouring out. 15:16 She could barely string the words together. 15:19 She would later say she had no memory of what she actually told the officer, only that it was enough. 15:26 He followed her through the scrub to the place where Tina had been standing, then walked back to his car and radioed it in. 15:34 The body of a woman had been found in Lopez Canyon, and he had good reason to believe it was Michelle Uribe. 15:43 Etta gave a statement to the officer and then finally he let her take the children home. 15:50 Later that night, up in the canyon, the police sealed off the road and kept watch over Melanie's body so that nothing would be disturbed before daylight came and the scene could be properly examined. 16:03 Back in Pacoima, Etta had barely had time to put the kids to bed when there was a knock at the door. 16:10 Etta opened it to find two detectives waiting for her on the doorstep. 16:15 They wanted her to come down to the station, they said, to give a statement. 16:19 But she'd already given a statement, she replied, not to mention having spoken to Detective Lee Ryan earlier. 16:27 But Ryan was no longer working on the case, they said, and they wanted to hear the statement from her themselves. 16:34 Etta told her children that Deborah would look after them and that she'd be back later that night. 16:40 Then she gathered her things and accompanied the detectives to the nearby Van Nuys police station. 16:46 There they sat her down and asked her to take them through it all again from the beginning. 16:52 So she did, from when she first heard that radio bulletin at three o'clock, then the subsequent vision, all the way through to spotting the shoe in the canyon. 17:03 And when she'd finished, they asked her to go through it all again. 17:07 And again. 17:09 Each time circling back to the same points. How had she known where to look? Did she really expect them to believe that a vision had led her there, after they themselves had been searching the same area, with dogs, helicopters and mounted officers, and found nothing? 17:27 And why on earth would a mother, so worried about being taken for a crank, drive her two small children up to the canyon on the cusp of night to look for a dead body? 17:39 And each time Etta tried to explain, her words only sounded more and more ludicrous. 17:46 Etta had been there almost five hours when it finally dawned on her that none of this was about getting a statement. 17:59 The detectives continued with the questions, but by now, all politeness and courtesy had completely withered away. 18:08 Had she ever known Melanie Uribe, they asked. 18:12 No, came Etta's anguished reply. 18:16 But the detectives weren't convinced, and the fact was, at that point, they had nothing, except the story of a woman who, for reasons that would have been beyond all scientific credibility, somehow knew exactly where the body was. 18:31 In desperation, Etta had a brainwave. 18:35 What if she took a lie detector test, she said? If they didn't believe her, maybe the machine would. 18:41 But the detectives weren't sure. For a start, it was late and Etta was in no fit state to be tested, whether she was lying or not. 18:50 But Etta insisted and eventually they agreed. 18:55 A short time later, a tired but defiant Etta was being strapped up to a polygraph test and eagerly awaiting her first question. 19:04 Then the machine was switched on. 19:07 They began in the customary manner. 19:10 Was she taking the test of her own free will? 19:13 Yes, she said. 19:15 Was her name Etta Louise Smith? Yes, she said. 19:19 Was she 32 years old? 19:22 Yes, she said. 19:24 The examiner stared impassively at the reel of paper feeding out from the back and its continuous inky lines of troughs and peaks. 19:33 Had she ever known Melanie Rebe? He asked. 19:36 No, said Etta. 19:39 Was there another reason that she had known where the body was located? 19:43 No, she said again. 19:47 When it came to an end, Etta was left alone to wait for the results. 19:51 It was around three in the morning that the detectives finally came back. 19:56 The test was conclusive, they said. 19:59 She was lying. 20:01 Etta was utterly aghast. 20:04 The detectives tried again. 20:06 Was there anything else she wanted to tell them? Because as things stood, she was heading for a charge of accessory to murder. 20:14 But I didn't do anything, she insisted. 20:18 Eta would say later that she wanted to cry and scream, but something inside stopped her. 20:25 Fine, she thought, take me to jail, and then one day you'll discover just how badly you'd got it all wrong. 20:32 Etta was removed from the interview room and formally placed under arrest. 20:38 After being booked, she was strip searched and completely sprayed down with a hose before being placed in a cell to await further instructions. 20:47 With her one phone call, she rang her niece Deborah at the house and told her not to worry, but to get her a lawyer. 20:55 Then she gave her instructions for the kids and asked her to tell Tina and Andy that she loved them. 21:01 When Detective Lee Ryan found out that Etta had been arrested, he was furious. 21:08 Ryan had given her his word that she would not be taken into custody. 21:12 As far as he was concerned, she was a friendly witness, someone who'd come forward on her own time, wanting nothing in return, and what had been done to her broke every standard the department was supposed to hold itself to. 21:26 At some point, Etta was joined in her cell by another inmate that seemed to take a particular interest in her case. 21:34 It was an undercover police officer, trying to get a confession. 21:39 But Etta stuck to her story throughout. 21:49 With Etta in a cell, the search for Melanie's killers had all but ground to a halt. 21:55 But whispers were beginning to spread on the streets of Pacoima. 22:00 Sometime in the afternoon, the day after Melanie was murdered, 20-year-old Pacoima local Lewis Morgan turned up at his friend Velma Ford's house on Sprawl Street. 22:12 Lewis was clearly dealing with something and making Velma nervous. 22:16 It was all Spencer, he said. Spencer Nelson. 22:20 Velma knew the name but wasn't sure if she'd met him before. Then eventually, Lewis told her everything that had happened. 22:28 How he and his friend Norman had been hanging out at his home on Paxton Street when Spencer suddenly showed up, fixing to do something. 22:37 All of them had robbed people before and were low on cash, so that night they decided to go out together to see what they could find. 22:47 He never meant to hurt her, he insisted. They just wanted her truck. 22:52 But then Spencer took it to a whole other level. 22:56 When he raped her, Lewis thought that would be the end of it. 23:00 But then someone said Spencer's name out loud. 23:03 Lewis couldn't remember if it was him or Norman, but that didn't matter. Because of that, Spencer killed her. 23:13 Velma couldn't believe what she was hearing, then Lewis told her to come out into the street and led her to a spot across the road and pointed to a rock partially covered with leaves. 23:25 That's what he used to do it, he said. 23:28 For a while, the two of them just stood looking down at it. 23:33 Then Lewis crouched down, scooped up some dead leaves that had drifted against the curb and laid them over the top of it. 23:42 But just like the wind that later swept those leaves away, Lewis's fate was already out of his hands. 23:49 Spencer Nelson, it seemed, had no such qualms about hiding his shame, and perhaps with good reason. 23:56 Despite bragging about what he'd done at a party later that night, nobody, it seemed, had any desire to tell the police about it, for fear that Spencer would find out and get them too. 24:09 But the story kept travelling, and finally, somebody picked up the phone. 24:15 That call led detectives to one of the young men, and he led them to the others. 24:21 And so, six days after Michelle Uribe was murdered, Lewis Morgan and Norman Willis were arrested on Sunday, and Spencer Nelson was picked up the following day. 24:33 At Van Nuys Police Station, on that same Sunday, Etta was told with no more ceremony than she'd been arrested with, that she was free to go. 24:44 As Etta made her way to the front desk to collect her things, something rose up from deep inside her, in a voice she hardly recognised as her own, telling her she didn't have to be strong anymore. 24:55 She didn't make it ten feet before she completely broke down. 25:00 She'd been held as a suspect in Melanie Rebe's murder for nearly four days, and though she was overjoyed to finally be out and ready to move on with her life, something had irrevocably changed inside her, and things would never be the same. 25:21 In the end, Etta decided the only way to put it all behind her was to face it and clear her name entirely. 25:28 She didn't want a cloud of suspicion hanging over her for the rest of her life, and with her Department of Defense clearance at Lockheed, she couldn't afford one. 25:38 She needed her day in court. 25:41 It took more than six years to get there, but in March 1987, she sued the LAPD at the Van Nuys Superior Court. 25:50 Among the witnesses who took the stand on Etta's behalf was former detective Lee Ryan. 25:57 Although living in Idaho by then, he came back to Los Angeles especially to testify. 26:03 Ryan told the court what other detectives had told him back in 1980, that their commanding officer, Captain John Salvino, had ordered Etta, who was white, jailed because she had black friends and her partner was black. 26:19 Since the men they were looking for, as witnessed by Paul Wood, were also black, it stood to reason to his mind that she likely knew something. 26:29 As Ryan told the court, Etta had put her job and standing in the community on the line by coming forward, and that what followed had been an embarrassment to the department. 26:41 The police maintained that in the circumstances it had been reasonable to hold her, which, flagrant racism aside, is not entirely wrong. 26:51 Either way, after seven days of testimony, the jury found that Etta Louise Smith had been wrongfully arrested and that the police lacked sufficient evidence to arrest her. 27:03 She was awarded just over $25,000, or about $75,000 by today's standards, for the pain and suffering caused and her lost wages for those days. 27:15 The jury foreman said afterwards that most of the jurors had believed Etta's story, that she really had seen Melanie in a vision. 27:25 The trial also settled one more question that had apparently dismayed Etta for six years. 27:31 It turned out that she didn't fail the lie detector test after all. 27:36 The results had actually been inconclusive, but because the detectives didn't believe her either way, they decided to tell her she'd failed, just to see how she'd react. 27:48 As for Detective Lee Ryan, who'd never once countenanced the possibility of psychic power before he met Etta, he became a little more open-minded afterwards. 27:58 From time to time, he digs out that photo of her, standing in the police station as she points with such certainty to that spot in Lopez Canyon, and wanders... 28:10 For her part, Etta herself claimed never to understand it, nor did she ever have an apparent vision like that again. 28:18 She also claimed to often wrestle with how that strange vision of an innocent woman that she'd never met found its way to her across the valley. 28:28 In the end, she put it down as just one of those things that happen to people over the course of a life that won't ever be explained. 28:38 More than 30 years later beneath an account of the case posted online a woman who said she was Melanie Uribe's sister left a few lines. 28:48 Melanie who'd been much loved had now been dead for longer than she'd been alive she wrote and she still missed her. 28:57 As for that little boy that Melanie had been raising so well he was now a grown man of 40 for whom not a day went past that he didn't grieve for his mother. 29:08 Etta has never forgotten her either. 29:19 Please remember to like and subscribe if you've enjoyed the show. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by me, Richard McLean Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook at Unexplained Podcast and on X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod. 29:50 Until next time, stay strange and dissonant. 30:58 This is an iHeart Podcast. 31:01 Guaranteed human.