"She Was Fine" - The Mitrice Richardson Case (part two)
This is Part 2 of a two-part episode. If you haven't listened to Part 1, we strongly recommend going back — this story builds on itself, and the full weight of what you're about to hear depends on understanding everything that came before.
In Part 1, we introduced you to Mitrice Richardson — a 24-year-old honors graduate from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in psychology, a dream of going to grad school, and a life full of promise. We walked through the warning signs her family noticed in the days before her disappearance, the alarming evening at Geoffrey's restaurant in Malibu where every person who interacted with her recognized something was wrong, and the devastating series of failures at the Lost Hills Sheriff's Station — where deputies arrested her on minor charges, promised her mother they would hold her, and then released her at 12:28 in the morning with no phone, no money, no car, and no way home. Into the dark canyon roads of Malibu. Into an area she had never been. The department's official position: "She was fine."
Part 2 picks up at 6:30 the next morning, when a retired KTLA news anchor spots a young woman in his backyard in Monte Nido — six miles from the station. She tells his wife she's "just resting." She's gone before deputies arrive. It's the last confirmed sighting of Mitrice Richardson alive.
What unfolds over the next eleven months is a search effort plagued by decisions that defy explanation. K9 dogs pick up Mitrice's scent and are pulled off the trail. A two-day search is cancelled after one day. A volunteer drone is redirected away from the area where her remains will eventually be found. Over 300 volunteers comb 18 square miles and come up empty. Privately organized searches discover disturbing, racially offensive graffiti in a canyon drainage culvert — which authorities paint over.
And then, in August 2010, California State Park Rangers — who are not looking for Mitrice at all — find skeletal remains in a remote creek bed in Dark Canyon. Naked. Clothing scattered hundreds of feet down a ravine. Adjacent to a secluded ranch known for producing pornography. Residents had reported hearing screams from the canyon in the nights after Mitrice disappeared.
The coroner rules the cause of death undetermined. The sheriff's department says no foul play. Deputies move the remains against the coroner's explicit orders, then can't lead investigators back to the correct location. Critical evidence — including Mitrice's clothing — goes missing from the chain of custody. The family is taken to what they later believe was the wrong discovery site, where they find a bone left in the dirt.
No one has ever been charged. No one has ever been held accountable. Mitrice's mother, Latice Sutton, who spent sixteen years fighting for answers, died in September 2025 without ever learning what happened to her daughter.
This one stays with you.
If you have any information about the disappearance and death of Mitrice Richardson, please contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department at (323) 890-5500 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-8477. A $25,000 reward is available for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
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