And this one had the bonus of an Instagram-era cautionary tale: They really were just kids, from suburban Orange County, both barely of drinking age. It was the girl’s twenty-first birthday weekend. Emily Tran, from Irvine. The boy was half a year older, Francis De Leon, from Fullerton. High school senior portraits were printed on the MISSING posters that immediately started showing up in restaurants and tourist shops around town. They looked like nice kids, as people say. Both from second-generation immigrant families, Vietnamese and Filipino, respectively. Her family was wealthy, all doctors and lawyers and bankers. His was middle class, small businesspeople. Both success stories of the kind America doesn’t produce too many of anymore.
That night on my shift, a lot of people called in with theories and ideas. Of course nobody had seen the kids, or knew them, or even knew much about where they’d disappeared. To a lot of the old-timers in the high desert, the ones who washed up here decades ago, the national park was as mysterious and distant as Los Angeles.
“I bet they were on drugs,” one of my regulars said, calling in from a mobile home park in Yucca Valley. “Most of these tourists are on drugs.”
By September, the Search & Rescue missions were a Saturday-only affair, at the insistence of Francis De Leon’s father. He owned a couple of restaurants in the OC. But every Saturday he was back in Joshua Tree, with a dwindling supply of volunteer searchers. And like my night callers, most people around town had just forgotten about it. Which is only natural, when the missing people are abstractions.
By then I had a weird feeling about the whole thing. And it became a lot weirder when a college friend of Emily Tran’s sent the radio station an e-mail that wound up being forwarded to me. She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to use her name. But she had an angle nobody else seemed to know: Emily Tran and Francis De Leon had broken up three months before her birthday trip to Joshua Tree. Emily had broken it off, put Francis in the friend zone.
They had dated in high school, fell in love it seems. But then she got accepted to UC–Irvine and he sort of drifted. Some community college classes, a fight with his father over the family business. Nothing sinister, on its own. Still, you could sense a narrative: She was on her way up in the world. He wasn’t. Her life was expanding. His was shrinking. When Emily broke it off, Francis took it hard.
Sometimes a story gets inside you and then you have to see it through. Because nobody else is bothering with it. I started to feel like maybe Emily Tran got a raw deal.
The radio station is not the kind of enterprise that could afford to send its nighttime host on goose chases to Irvine and Fullerton and wherever else the trail might lead, so I did it the cheap way: by phone, on the Internet, collecting names and information from cached web pages and those sleaze-ball operations that sell public records to nervous spouses for thirty-five dollars. I figured out that Francis was training to become a rent-a-cop. That he’d qualified for a concealed-carry permit, as part of this training. And that he didn’t have a whole lot of friends — but he did have one friend in particular who still had a presence on social media, as they say on the cable news. Danny Mendoza. And Danny Mendoza still had a Facebook account.
There was a picture of Danny and Francis on the Loop Trail in Joshua Tree National Park, in a post dated two weeks before Francis and Emily vanished. I knew that trailhead pretty well; it was an easy mile-long walk from my cabin. No caption or location data necessary. It felt weird though it wasn’t terribly suspicious on its own. Three million people visit the park every year, most from Southern California.
But there was an interesting fact about Danny Mendoza that I learned about on his Facebook page — he had apparently enrolled in nursing school in Manila, at the beginning of September. He’d flown the coop.
By the time October rolled around, I had a pile of information. None of it compelling enough to bring to the sheriff, or to NPS law enforcement. The National Park Service has its own federal police, but in our present national dystopia it is underfunded and understaffed and mostly embarrassed to exist. The county sheriff’s department is, at best, indifferent to both the national park and the high desert. Which makes a kind of sense, as it’s based in the faraway city of San Bernardino. Another world from Joshua Tree. The kids had vanished barely a mile from the entrance station where millions of cars entered and exited every year, where scores of federal employees roamed on a regular basis, and where search teams had put in hundreds of hours specifically looking for these kids. People vanish in national parks. It’s a thing. And the National Park Service would rather not discuss such things.
The final search took place on the last Saturday in October. The weather was nearly crisp, the days short and the shadows long. Only two volunteers made the loop with Mr. De Leon, but this time they wandered behind a big desert willow that had shed most of its leaves and dried flowers. There was a narrow path behind it, no more than a jackrabbit trail. I’ve been there since and it’s a surprise anyone ever followed it, because it clearly didn’t go anywhere. But just before the wall of granite boulders, the searchers spotted the faded wrapper of a granola bar and the lid of a plastic water bottle. A few steps beyond, in a nook that barely fit them both, lay the baked remains of Emily Tran and Francis De Leon.
Francis was on top of her, his pants around his knees. His Heckler & Koch .40-caliber pistol was loosely covered in sand and dead leaves. Emily’s shorts were pulled down. The Search & Rescue volunteers — unidentified to this day — immediately backed out and radioed the sheriff’s department. They had to physically restrain Mr. De Leon, who was weeping and moaning and seemed determined to correct the crime scene.
I was, of course, out of town that day. At the dentist in Palm Springs. And then afterward I’d gone to Paul Bar because it’s on the way home, and by the time I got to the radio station everything had gone nuts. Inside Edition and People were calling. KTLA wanted me to show them the site, which I hadn’t yet seen for myself. Gary had done a good job on the story for our own station and all I could do was listen and learn.
That night on the air I thought I was saying the obvious: That Francis De Leon had raped and murdered his ex-girlfriend after luring her out to Joshua Tree as a “birthday present” and then turned the pistol on himself. That he’d scoped out the high desert two weeks before he brought her into the national park, close enough to see the traffic on Highway 62 from atop any boulder, and stolen her life. That he’d brought a loaded handgun on a short day hike and used it on the girl he claimed to love. And that his own father had a hunch all this had happened and had spent three months of weekends closely following the search volunteers, so he could be there when the bodies were found and have a chance to spin the story. Not out of any culpability in the crime, but for honor. Family honor, the family name, the family business.
Rape/murder/suicide. And Francis got away with it, by killing himself. And he used our national park, my backyard, as a slaughterhouse.
It was a total outrage and when I finally fell asleep late that night, at least it all seemed obvious.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The headlines were all the same, in the days and weeks to come. Mr. De Leon not only didn’t get arrested for trying to fix the crime scene, but he managed to write the sheriff’s press release.
The couple was found “in a last embrace,” the TV news said, with the gun only being used as a last desperate way to end Emily Tran’s suffering. And then Francis had taken his own life, tragically but also maybe heroically (with his Acura parked an easy mile’s walk away).