S3E8: Arson
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You can do more without spending more. Learn how to save at Cox.com slash internet. Cox Internet is connected to the premises via coaxial cable. Cox Mobile runs on the network with unbeatable 5G reliability as measured by UCLA LLC in the U.S. to age 2023. Results may vary, not an endorsement of the restrictions applied. Hey guys, it's Payne here. Just FYI, today's episode is a little bit shorter than normal, but for good reason. Things are starting to heat up. Do-dun-dun-da-dun-dun-da-dun-dun-da.

From Tinderfoot TV in Atlanta, this is Up and Vanished. I'm your host, Payne Lindsey. She told me one day, it was like the fourth day, she said, Sam, do you believe women's intuition? I said, I don't know why. She said, I think you got me pregnant that first day, that first night. And I think back, you know,

I think if they killed her, they killed my kid too. No, he's a complete liar. There's no women's intuition bullshit that Ashley had to talk about. Ashley at the time knew she was pregnant and she knew who she was pregnant by. He's a complete liar. Nobody understands that Ashley knew that she was already pregnant before she even met Sam.

After speaking with Sam for the second time, I shared his remarks with Kimberly. Before Ashley went missing, she had told her grandmother that she was indeed pregnant. Kimberly later spoke to her grandmother and learned all this after the fact. But apparently, Sam was not the father. I was given another man's name. He was a family friend. And for right now, I will not be sharing his name publicly.

We spoke on the phone for about a half hour, and he admitted to me that about a month before Ashley went missing, she told him that she was pregnant and that she believed the baby was his. Obviously, this is pretty big information. From my own research, what I can tell is that this man had absolutely no contact with Ashley anywhere near the time she went missing. At this point in time, I don't believe this man is a suspect. Then again, nothing is off the table yet, and I'll continue to look down this avenue.

In this case, three names come up repeatedly: Sam McDonald, Paul Valenzuela, who is V-Dog, and Tashina Running Crane, aka T. Not once did we say that she killed Ashley. Only thing that we asked Tashina was, "Where is Ashley?" But she kept telling us that we keep saying that she killed her. And for many years, I'd never said she killed my sister. She was the one that put that into our words.

because it was too hard to even say she's dead or she was killed. Tashina, she never wanted to talk, but she was always close. And we would go search, she'd always pop up or she'll like, she'll drive by. And when Ashley went missing, she would park on the road. And there was this little trees that you can see and it was her little green car. And it was always parked really close to our house. And I would be up all night smoking cigarettes and early in the morning, you'll see her drive by.

And she didn't even live there anymore. So why does she keep driving by? Keep in town and see where we're going. All I wanted was for her to help me find Ashley. She was the one that told on herself. Like, we're family. Why are you acting so weird? In the first month after Ashley went missing, Kimberly met with T in person. We were talking about Ashley. And she was just telling me about all these men that she's sleeping with and all these men that she's been with. And she claimed that she's been...

with this officer. And then right then when she was saying that, all these cop cars like flew by. There were all these big cop cars. They all fly by in a line and she freaks out. She freaks out and she wants to find her phone. And she told me to help her look for her phone in her car. And so we're helping looking for the phone and we found her phone under the seat. And the first person she called was that officer, the officer Badu. He worked for BLES.

the Blackfeet law enforcement. For whatever reason, T discloses to Kimberly that she was in a relationship with a Blackfeet police officer. His name is Kenny Burdue. According to Kim, when T saw a bunch of cop cars fly by, she panicked, and she went for her phone to call him. It was on speakerphone, and it said, "We reached Officer Burdue," and then right then and there, he called back. He said, "Don't worry. Don't worry. It's not about Ashley."

Kimberly not only found this relationship odd and suspicious, but very frustrating. -At that time, we weren't able to get ahold of any officer because nobody would answer our phone calls. But for them to call back a suspect right away, there's a reason why we have all these protests with these law enforcement. -In Ashley's final days, she stayed with Sam. She was eventually taken to Divide to be picked up by Paul Valenzuela. And from that point, the trail goes cold.

Sam was supposedly asleep, so he didn't see Ashley get in the car with anyone. But if Sam isn't lying here, then she did leave with someone that day. But was it Paul? And where did they go? Several rumors began surfacing in town. We were told that Paul picked Ashley up and they went out to Bridge Creek. That's where they stayed at in this trailer. That her and Paul was fixing up. Is that trailer still there? Yeah. We were told by a witness that went to go buy drugs there.

I said that. T and Ashley and them were over there fighting. They're fighting. I haven't been able to make contact with the person who told Kimberly this story, but if it is true, any sighting of Ashley after Sam fell asleep in his car is huge information. According to the witness, Ashley was seen fighting with T at a trailer her and Paul shared. And we searched that trailer. Behind that trailer, it has the biggest grizzly bears.

And we talked to the bear man and the game warden. He said the biggest bears are in Babb and in Birch Creek. And those are the two places that we searched for Ashley in. These bears are big-ass smart cars. And we went searching behind the trailer in Birch Creek. We were searching with a group. We were getting chased by one behind us and one in front of us.

They were just like huffing and puffing and you can just hear them breaking branches behind us. And then there was one over here making a noise and he was coming this way and so we took off that way. These bears were out there and are they the type to move their things that they find? Are they the type to move what they find and what they eat? Do they move them? And so we went into the bears' places to check if they moved her because they find things, you know, the bears.

They find things. They can move things. Because there's so many grizzly bears back there. We had an angel on our shoulder, I guess, because we didn't get ate that time. We searched that trailer. We walked in. The walls were painted. They were just painted. Parts of the things were ripped up. In the back room, though there was no floor, it was all ripped up. It was very, it was very weird. We were searching in the back of that trailer. We found something of Ashley's.

Nobody knows that we found something about Ashley. It was found in this trailer, by that trailer. But nobody knows that. We found her shorts, bloody shorts. The bloody shorts that Kimberly found, that she believed belonged to Ashley, are still currently being tested by law enforcement. Whether this trailer is significant or not, something else very odd occurred here. So we were searching with this officer from Ponderay County. He went to search with us in this one area, and he got a phone call.

He's like, "I just got a call. This T is burning up the trailer there." And he took off. They called the cops and said that she was burning the trailer down. She tried to burn the trailer down. T put the house on fire. And that was supposedly where Ashley might have made it. She made it out there. This incident is completely and 100% verifiable. Multiple witnesses have corroborated that T attempted to burn down that trailer.

The plot here continues to thicken, and this back and forth is driving me nuts. "This is a very crazy story. I believe that we can get into it, we can crack it, you know? They will all fall on each other." I'm going to Mexico City, and it's going to be an awesome vacation, all thanks to Viator.

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After my first phone call with T, we continued to chat for several weeks. She seemed very willing to talk to me, but she was hesitant about doing an official interview. In order to really get the facts straight here, this has to happen. So I made my plea for a sit-down interview. What part of Montana are you staying in these days? I don't want to say. I live a peaceful life. I was going to ask you if you had any time to meet this week. I'm not going to do that again. I mean...

Excellent. We agreed to meet the next day, in the parking lot of a casino. I made the drive, parked the car, and I waited.

oh my goodness and waited hurry up it had been about 30 minutes and i was starting to think that maybe this wasn't going to happen then she texted me change of plans a new location hey what's up i'm not giving you an address go to seven google it um okay and so when i get to seventh do i go left or right you go right where the hell am i going here i don't like this at all

Okay, I'm pulling up here in a second. Can you take a right? Okay. Keep going. Okay. Call up and park there and then come in. I was quickly relieved to find that I was meeting T in a local park, out in public. She had one of her friends with her, but the first thing she told me was not to record this. So I didn't.

Off-the-record conversations at this point are useless, so I was a little frustrated. I'm really trying to help here, and I can't help anyone if you're not talking on record with me. So my investigation continued. During my second meeting with Sam McDonald, he told me that I needed to speak to a lady named Wendy, and that she had some valuable information regarding Ashley.

In the call here, Wendy is referring to T. He came down to where we live. It's like way off of Mountain Road. She said that her boyfriend was harassing her. She just said that she was having trouble with her boyfriend and basically that she wanted to scare him away. She was high and she was just saying that, you know, she was having trouble with her boyfriend, that he keeps harassing her and kicking in the door.

Did T pick up that gun in person or did you leave it out for her? Like a long gun?

Yeah, and I never did see the gun again. I'd never seen it again. You know, I was naive at the time. I didn't really think anything of it until when I started going through the scenarios of how weird she was acting. She was high and she was dealing drugs. I don't know if she used that gun and I don't know what happened, but I do believe that she has something to do with it.

My husband lives at Star School. That's where he used to live and we were at his mom's a lot. His stepdad's place, it's about a mile from Star School. I noticed that her mother's car had been parked there. She said it broke down, but it was a really nice fancy like Cadillac car. It was new. It was a Cadillac. It was nice. And she said, oh yeah, I'm going to get it moved on. It broke down.

My friend, he hauls cars and crushes them. She was determined to have him get that car out of there and crush it. That's what he did is he just kind of went around and picked up cars and crushed them and got paid for it. He got the car and crushed it. I don't know where he took it to. He got the car, he picked it up and had it crushed. And she paid him through drugs.

Why do you think she'd want to crush a car that was in good shape? Because she probably did something wrong in it. I don't know. I don't know. Like, why would you crush it?

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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

You know, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Hey, Payne. It's Tashina.

So why don't you go ahead and put this video on your podcast because I'm going to put what you told me and everything like that when we first met because guess what? I recorded our whole conversations from day one. And you could actually put that on there too and mention how you believed me and how you coaxed me into it and all this and that and all that good stuff.

Well, that's not good. I immediately called her back. He said that you were just going with it.

Not really sure what she's talking about here, but I can understand her frustration.

It's not my job to be anyone's friend here, but I treat everyone with the same respect. If I discover valuable information about her disappearance, it's going in this podcast.

For the record, I don't think T did it. I don't think Paul did it. Or Sam did it. But being as objective as possible here, their names are synonymous with Ashley's case. Everyone will get their chance to share their side of the story. The only way to clear things up for good is to sit down with T on record and go over everything. So I did that. -Is this recording? -No. -Okay. -You want to take this?

Next time on Up and Vanished.

Up and Vanish is a production of Tenderfoot TV. Created, hosted, and edited by Payne Lindsey. Executive producers are Payne Lindsey and Donald Albright. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set. Our theme song is Ophelia by Ezra Rose. Sound design, mixing, and mastering by Cooper Skinner. Additional production by Cooper Skinner, Eric Quintana, and myself, Mike Rooney. Our cover art is by Trevor Eiler. Special thanks to our sponsors,

Special thanks to Grace Royer and Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Ryan Nord, Jesse Nord, and Matthew Papa at The Nord Group, Station 16, Beck Media and Marketing, as well as Chris Cochran and the team at Cadence 13. Visit us on social media at Up and Vantage, or you can visit us at upandvantage.com where you can join in on our discussion board. If you're enjoying Up and Vantage, tell a friend, family member, or coworker about it. And don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening.

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