transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:02] The Red Weather is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or events reflects the adaptation of real, publicly available materials for creative and legal reasons. The content of this podcast is the sole responsibility of Red Weather LLC and does not reflect the views or responsibilities of iHeart Media or its affiliates. Previously, on The Red Weather. In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Trainor, disappeared from a commune. So this guy was called the father or something creepy like that. Very much polyamory kind of like dude has a bunch of wives kind of thing. I was with Anna's sister, Willow, that night.
Speaker 2:
[00:36] If you're on the Tenderhearts property, then none of the adults were there?
Speaker 1:
[00:39] They were all on the Sunrise seance hike.
Speaker 3:
[00:41] Yeah, it was only a few days before their Tenderhearts alibi fell apart.
Speaker 1:
[00:45] What are you saying, that they weren't at the seance? Not all of them.
Speaker 4:
[00:57] Good morning, good morning, good morning. I have tucked myself into a little space by the woodshed out of the rain. I think it's a perfect place and a perfect time for a ramble.
Speaker 1:
[01:19] This is Elric Light, aka Eric Lidsky, the man who founded a commune next to me when I was a kid.
Speaker 4:
[01:26] Anyone here that's living with us on this beautiful homestead here in Sevastopol will tell you I'm very particular about my spots. I'm a big believer that there are positive spots, and that there are not so positive spots.
Speaker 1:
[01:48] These were recorded sometime between 1988 and 1992, while he walked in the woods or sat in meadows, places I might have been roaming around in too. Me and Willow.
Speaker 4:
[01:58] Take this with you, pass it along to these people, if you can. And many of these people that we're discussing with hardened hearts aren't ready to hear the message. And that's fine. Sometimes it's enough to deliver the message.
Speaker 1:
[02:13] But between the lectures or sermons, there are human moments that are really specific.
Speaker 4:
[02:24] There's an owl. I've named him Jabberwocky.
Speaker 1:
[02:31] And sometimes bizarre.
Speaker 5:
[02:34] Why do I rock my sleeeep?
Speaker 4:
[02:39] Why do I rock myself to sleep?
Speaker 5:
[02:42] Do I rock myself to sleep at night?
Speaker 4:
[02:46] What's the difference?
Speaker 1:
[02:49] I kept listening, waiting for something. I'm not sure what. It's not like he was suddenly going to start talking about human sacrifice or mention Anna Trainor. In fact, he doesn't mention any names.
Speaker 3:
[03:01] Let it fall.
Speaker 4:
[03:02] Let it fall. Let it fall. Let it fall. Let it fall. And be free.
Speaker 5:
[03:11] Be free.
Speaker 1:
[03:13] But his commitment is intense, and sometimes the line between a sermon and something more personal gets blurry.
Speaker 5:
[03:27] I've done bad things. I know I've done bad things.
Speaker 4:
[03:32] Just like you, just like all of you, I sit and I pretend, I pretend. Because I want to be that vision of what I know I am capable of being. So, I pretend. I know I'm going to do it again.
Speaker 5:
[04:01] I know I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again.
Speaker 4:
[04:04] I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again.
Speaker 3:
[04:08] I'm going to do it again.
Speaker 1:
[04:11] When I went home to look into Anna's disappearance, I knew I was going to have to learn as much as I could about Elric and the collective he ran called Tender Hearts, since Anna lived there before she vanished in 1995. I figured things would get a little new agey, spiritual, little hippie-dippy, but I never expected what I did find. I am actor and filmmaker, writer Strong. This is The Red Weather.
Speaker 5:
[05:29] Okay, let's try this again.
Speaker 1:
[05:32] I was a week into going back to my hometown and researching Anna's case. I was still mostly just playing catch up to the investigation.
Speaker 5:
[05:39] I am calling from my parents' landline, so ID doesn't come up.
Speaker 1:
[05:46] Sheriff Maldonado, who had led that investigation back in 1995, told me that things would make more sense if I got access to the official case file.
Speaker 6:
[05:53] Hello.
Speaker 1:
[05:54] Hi, this is Ryder Strong. I'm calling again for Grace Laughlin. And the current sheriff, Grace Laughlin, had promised to share transcripts of some witness interviews, but I hadn't heard back from her for days, and the people in her office didn't seem to have time for me.
Speaker 6:
[06:10] Everything's in storage, so it's not easy.
Speaker 2:
[06:14] We have one building for the whole county.
Speaker 7:
[06:16] You're a meddling. You're a meddling.
Speaker 1:
[06:17] My buddy Chris was helping me.
Speaker 7:
[06:19] You're like every housewife with a Facebook page who's playing Internet Sleuth.
Speaker 1:
[06:23] All right, she's got a theory, so why don't I, you know, even if it's a complete nothing burger, why don't I bring them the pager?
Speaker 7:
[06:28] Okay, so you're going to go to the sheriff with a busty pager that your dad dog buried.
Speaker 1:
[06:32] I knew Chris was right. I had already admitted to the cops that I had lied to them when I was 15, and so if I was ever going to get their help in learning about the case, I had to play it cool. Going back over the details about that night, I really begun to think that Anna's boyfriend Mick had something to do with her disappearance. But then after talking to Maldonado, it was becoming clear that the sheriff's department was way more interested in Tender Hearts and its leader, Elric Light. But as far as I knew, the night Anna disappeared, all the adults of Tender Hearts had hiked up to Mount St. Helena for a sunrise séance.
Speaker 2:
[07:06] Right, except for Elric.
Speaker 1:
[07:07] Oh, so you knew this too?
Speaker 2:
[07:09] Yeah, almost immediately.
Speaker 1:
[07:11] Monica Tremblayne was reporting for the Press Democrat in 1995.
Speaker 2:
[07:14] It was only a few days after Anna was missing that the séance story, it fell apart. A few of the women came forward.
Speaker 1:
[07:20] So where was he? And what did that mean for the investigation? And who were Tender Hearts in the first place? When I started interviewing friends, I quickly realized I knew very little about their alternative living situations. Orion's commune had failed almost immediately. The community kind of got a little more contentious and a little more distant and kind of factioned off. You know, my mom describes it kind of just like, you know, not really lasting. There were a lot of strong personalities out there, you know, people who want to get away from it all, I think have some strong reasons sometimes. And I didn't realize that my friend Cole's parents actually met when his dad was handing out pamphlets for a cult in San Francisco.
Speaker 8:
[07:59] I don't think it lasted. It didn't last in its like, hey, let's build a spaceship form much into the 80s. It was called Stell, and they had a charismatic leader that was quite questionable. But the plan was to build a spaceship to escape the end of the world in 2004. Obviously, it came and gone. But, I'm pretty sure it kind of folded up when it realized that rocket building was hard. I'm just assuming. I'm just assuming that like, a bunch of people out in Cornfield just realized their limitation about building a rocket.
Speaker 1:
[08:37] The Tenderhearts weren't that unusual for the area. But of course, once Anna disappeared, there were a lot of questions about them.
Speaker 2:
[08:44] I think part of the problem was they were just secretive. They didn't want to talk to the cops. I mean, they didn't trust anybody, but they really didn't trust authority figures.
Speaker 1:
[08:54] They had been targeted before, by Maldonado specifically.
Speaker 3:
[08:58] Yeah, yeah, we had them up on a few violations. They had a problem with one of their neighbors, had to do with a truck or something.
Speaker 2:
[09:04] There was some argument over noise, and they took the tires off a neighbor's tractor.
Speaker 1:
[09:08] That escalated to some incidents with animals.
Speaker 3:
[09:11] They had llamas.
Speaker 5:
[09:12] Oh, that's right. I remember them.
Speaker 3:
[09:14] Yeah, well, some of those llamas would get out, and then they'd get sick at some point.
Speaker 1:
[09:19] There were accusations about poisoning.
Speaker 3:
[09:21] Well, I just remember, look, you got to understand. I get out there, and I'm just, I'm there to calm the situation, you know, cool it down a little bit. But you got a group of women, very, very angry women, and they're, they're topless. Some of them were even butt naked.
Speaker 2:
[09:37] If there was a confrontation, or if someone walked on to the property, the women of Tenderhearts liked to enact what they called a skin bombing.
Speaker 1:
[09:46] They'd go out naked. I kind of love that. It was a very specific, non-violent tactic.
Speaker 3:
[09:54] It throws you off, you know? Put you on guard, and I'm not talking about it in a good way.
Speaker 1:
[09:59] One thing about growing up in West County, if there was ever a gathering of some sort, there was always at least one person naked.
Speaker 5:
[10:06] A lot of confusing messages.
Speaker 9:
[10:08] A lot of it was like, you know, people are swimming, or you know, like you got a pool and people, you know, we were in the hot tub or the pool or whatever.
Speaker 1:
[10:15] My parents' friends were definitely hippies and of the casually nude variety when there was any call for it. It was part of the culture, a general belief in who needs clothes, be natural. It wasn't threatening or anything, but still as casual as I think the adults wanted it to be. When you're a kid, you could never not notice it. If Willow and I went to that like main area, that kind of deck that wasn't finished, that with the boards laid out in the ground, there might be someone naked.
Speaker 7:
[10:44] Because they had an outdoor shower that was right there.
Speaker 1:
[10:47] That's why. I always felt like it was a little weird, but I didn't feel like I could say it was weird, you know?
Speaker 10:
[10:53] Because if you did, you would be lame.
Speaker 1:
[10:54] But beyond the skin bombing and fights with neighbors, I wanted to know what they were all about. I found a historian who specializes in intentional communities, which, I learned, is the newer preferred term for a commune. Hi. Come on in.
Speaker 5:
[11:10] Oh, great, thanks.
Speaker 1:
[11:11] Howard Tripp is the author of two books, Countertopia, which covers the communities of the 1960s and 70s, and West of Eden, which chronicles the rise and fall of small religious sex in the area.
Speaker 3:
[11:22] I hope you don't mind my little friends.
Speaker 11:
[11:24] You all right with that?
Speaker 5:
[11:25] Oh, yeah, look at that.
Speaker 1:
[11:26] Howard's other hobby is ants. Yeah, so how long have you been farming them?
Speaker 11:
[11:31] Um, it's been, I mean, it's been over a decade.
Speaker 1:
[11:35] He has an entire wall of his house that is a series of ant farms, or as I learned they're called formicaria.
Speaker 11:
[11:41] But one of the things I've always been fascinated by, is semioculicals.
Speaker 1:
[11:45] Oh, like, that's like pheromones.
Speaker 11:
[11:47] Right, right, exactly. But you're talking about how an individual ant senses the world around them, the perception of what's real, what's happening, it can be altered completely.
Speaker 1:
[11:56] Like a drug.
Speaker 11:
[11:58] Even more than that. It's their actual sense of reality. It's not, you'll have like a colony, right? They get invaded, and they start working for another species. They don't even know why, and they're just as happy.
Speaker 10:
[12:09] They just want to do it.
Speaker 11:
[12:10] It's wild.
Speaker 1:
[12:11] Trip had researched Tender Hearts for his books, but they ultimately didn't make the cut.
Speaker 11:
[12:15] Well, if we're talking about the major communities from Sonoma County, Headwinds, Morningstar, the farm before they went to Tennessee, you're talking about, these are much bigger operations, groups that were formalized in ways that Tender Hearts, they can never really get it together.
Speaker 1:
[12:29] Well, how many people were in it?
Speaker 11:
[12:30] It was like 20.
Speaker 1:
[12:31] Oh, wow.
Speaker 11:
[12:32] Yeah, very small.
Speaker 1:
[12:33] But then for your second book, wouldn't they have counted as a spiritual group?
Speaker 11:
[12:39] Yeah, you would think that's the $64,000 question, isn't it?
Speaker 1:
[12:42] Meaning, were they even technically a religion? Did they have a belief system?
Speaker 11:
[12:47] I know what this looks like. Please don't judge.
Speaker 1:
[12:49] Trip has an entire guest house behind his main house. It's full of books and papers.
Speaker 11:
[12:54] Okay, here are some of Elric's newsletters. We have these signs they put up.
Speaker 5:
[12:59] Yeah.
Speaker 11:
[13:00] And there are tapes of his lecture series.
Speaker 5:
[13:02] Oh, wait.
Speaker 1:
[13:03] What, really? Recordings?
Speaker 11:
[13:04] Yeah, yeah. That's somewhere.
Speaker 1:
[13:06] Oh my god, I would love to hear those. Which is how I got 10 hours of Elric Light talking.
Speaker 4:
[13:12] Well, let's just jump into it. We'll start with our invocation, as we always do. I am of the earth, from the earth. I burn with a fire inside that I promise to maintain. With a thick skin and a tender heart.
Speaker 1:
[13:34] I actually found the tapes kind of soothing. There's definitely a lot of jargon. Elric liked to make up his own terms.
Speaker 4:
[13:40] This is what we might call sky mine. It's not the only directo locus, and arrive at the choiceless awareness.
Speaker 1:
[13:52] Elric is earnest, thoughtful.
Speaker 4:
[13:54] We can absorb energetic facts by existing in what Castaneda would call the kernel of non-ordinary reality.
Speaker 1:
[14:10] And he goes out of his way to reject his own authority.
Speaker 4:
[14:13] So, no, I am not your guru. I am not anyone's savior.
Speaker 1:
[14:21] One of the most exciting moments is when he gets frustrated with his recording equipment.
Speaker 4:
[14:26] My ankles burst under the weight of ill-consumed... Motherfucking damn it. Really? The mic was off the whole time? My ankles burst under the weight of ill-conceived compulsions, and I limped my way like the hurried hair past Alice into Wonderland, where only those with thrones and axes reigned. What are you living for? Where are you going? Late, late, always late.
Speaker 5:
[15:14] For what?
Speaker 4:
[15:15] For what? For what? It's not real. None of it is real. You have been tricked. You've been lied to.
Speaker 1:
[15:33] This section, like when he says he's going to do it again, feels raw, emotional, and personal. But otherwise, for ten tapes, Elric is a teacher. He stays abstract and philosophical. A unique world view does evolve.
Speaker 10:
[15:51] A metaphysics.
Speaker 1:
[15:52] He's inspired a little by Krishnamurti and a lot by Carlos Castaneda. There's this belief in the positive power of psychedelic drugs and something he calls tree time, which begins with the story of him being high on mescaline.
Speaker 4:
[16:09] Minutes can feel like hours. Seconds could be a lifetime.
Speaker 1:
[16:20] But it gets somewhere kind of interesting.
Speaker 4:
[16:23] A baby cries. She cries if she's hungry or scared. And in that moment, she might think this feeling will never end. But as we grow, we grow into a different time consciousness.
Speaker 7:
[16:46] Oh my gosh. So time moves faster as you get older.
Speaker 3:
[16:51] Let's see.
Speaker 4:
[16:53] If you consider human life, and you put it on the scale of the sempervirens...
Speaker 1:
[17:00] That's what he called Redwoods.
Speaker 7:
[17:01] Of course he did.
Speaker 1:
[17:02] That's from their scientific name or their Latin binomial, Sequoia sempervirens.
Speaker 4:
[17:07] We're talking about 3,000 years. And in that context, what's a day? What's a day? What's a year? In tree time, seasons last 3 days. All of American history would happen before you were 8 years old. A child would be born, grow to be 12, in the span of a summer vacation.
Speaker 10:
[17:37] What is dude talking about?
Speaker 1:
[17:40] Time perception, he's scaling a human life up to a redwood tree. And look, I did the math.
Speaker 10:
[17:46] Of course you did the math.
Speaker 1:
[17:47] He's actually right. If you take 100 years, the best human lifespan, and you stretch that over 3,000, it's 30 times. So one hour is 30 hours, just over a day, that's 1.25 days. And yes, a month would go by in a day, winter would last three days. So all of his comparisons are exactly right.
Speaker 12:
[18:08] You need a break.
Speaker 10:
[18:10] Probably. Yeah.
Speaker 4:
[18:12] Imagine wisdom at that scale, the insight.
Speaker 2:
[18:31] From the outside, it looked like your classic guru cult situation.
Speaker 1:
[18:36] Yeah, well, I mean, it fits all the tropes, right?
Speaker 2:
[18:38] Oh, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1:
[18:40] A charismatic leader, he's got a new spiritual take on life, and he runs off, he has a bunch of whys.
Speaker 2:
[18:48] Right, right, right, right. Except none of that, none of what you actually just said was actually true. Those are all lies.
Speaker 1:
[19:08] When I started this podcast, one of my main questions about Tender Hearts, which was kind of naïve, was, was it a commune or was it a cult? It turns out neither, and those categories are kind of fuzzy to begin with.
Speaker 11:
[19:22] Yeah, Elric had ideas later on. It's not how it started.
Speaker 1:
[19:27] It turns out Tender Hearts didn't begin as a religion or a political movement or even a philosophy.
Speaker 11:
[19:34] It grew out of a woman's shelter.
Speaker 1:
[19:36] Really? Before he founded Tender Hearts, Eric Lidsky was an employee of the Bavillion House. Bavillion was at the forefront of a wave of shelters that sprung up in the late 70s with what was then a pretty radical idea, that women might need their own place, a designated shelter away from men.
Speaker 11:
[19:52] Elric, he helped run the whole thing until 85, 86.
Speaker 1:
[19:56] They were your classic San Francisco liberals, in your face and aggressive.
Speaker 11:
[20:01] Elric got into trouble with the city officials.
Speaker 13:
[20:02] Four protesters were arrested today outside City Hall amidst ongoing tensions between the City Council and the Bavillion House.
Speaker 1:
[20:11] The distinction between a homeless shelter and a domestic violence center was a blurry line that was still being worked out. And in the early 80s, the owners of Bavillion wanted to expand the shelter by allowing men to join. But for some of the women and Elric, this was anathema. It was a split in the Bavillion organization. There was Elric on one side, and the owners and city officials on the other. Around the same time, Elric came into some money.
Speaker 2:
[20:41] The assumption is that maybe one of his parents or perhaps grandparents passed away, but nobody knows for sure.
Speaker 1:
[20:48] So he pulled up stakes, left the city, and bought 50 acres in West Sonoma County, the 50 acres right next to my parents. And so the women were...
Speaker 11:
[20:58] He got them all from the shelter. He invited them personally and their kids to come live off the land.
Speaker 1:
[21:03] Besides Anna and Willow, there were only a few other kids I remember. A boy named Josiah and a girl named Frances, and maybe one more. We called them Grommets.
Speaker 14:
[21:13] I felt antagonized by them.
Speaker 1:
[21:15] I felt like they were actively annoying to us. I think we might have just been hating on younger kids. They were wild, right? I mean, you know, it was like they were just kind of roaming free, and they were a pack. Like I definitely remember it being a pack. It was like just a group of like loud, dirty kids, like, and they had attitude. Like they were strong. Basically, it was like an outdoor version of a women's shelter.
Speaker 11:
[21:42] Yeah, it was like a camp or a farm for women escaping domestic violence.
Speaker 1:
[21:45] Everything I learned about Tender Hearts, but especially this, made it even more important that I get in touch with Anna and Willow's mom, Lainey. I'd always thought of her as some sort of new age, countercultural seeker. But if she came from a women's shelter in San Francisco, if she was escaping an abusive situation and brought her daughters to raise them in the woods, that's a very different person. Lainey, hi, it's writer Strong. How are you? I hope you're doing all right. For weeks, I'd left messages. Weirdly, this new understanding of the Tender Hearts was more radical and ahead of its time than any of Elric's professed insights, like Tree Time or Directo Locus. He was actually creating what nowadays you would call a safe space for women, but we didn't know any of that. Anybody local just saw a polygamous cult, and interestingly, Elric and the women let that happen.
Speaker 11:
[22:50] So these, if you can see, they would post these all around town.
Speaker 9:
[22:54] Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:
[22:54] Elric started spreading his teachings. So I'm looking at, there's a drawing of an elephant planche person.
Speaker 11:
[23:03] What else?
Speaker 1:
[23:03] What do you see?
Speaker 9:
[23:05] All right.
Speaker 1:
[23:05] Well, there's text.
Speaker 11:
[23:07] No, look closer. What are you missing?
Speaker 5:
[23:09] I don't know. What is it?
Speaker 11:
[23:10] It's a lotus position.
Speaker 5:
[23:11] Oh, yeah. All right.
Speaker 1:
[23:13] So it says, you are a goddess, Gaia, Shakti, Tara, Isis. What do you see all around the world? Women of sounder minds and tender hearts. Insight isn't oriental, nor is it western. Elric Light offers only the sacred and the universal, the divine feminine.
Speaker 5:
[23:31] Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:
[23:32] And then there's an address and a telephone number.
Speaker 11:
[23:34] Yeah, you had people subscribing from all across the country.
Speaker 1:
[23:37] Like how many?
Speaker 5:
[23:38] Like hundreds?
Speaker 11:
[23:39] Maybe thousands.
Speaker 1:
[23:40] But locally, the postings made them notorious. And there were times when they could have easily spoken out, but they let the rumors spread, which is actually a brilliant way to keep people out of your business. Like skin bombing, allowing people to think they were a cult ensured that outsiders, men in particular, stayed away. So the question is, did Elric believe this stuff?
Speaker 11:
[24:07] No, no.
Speaker 1:
[24:08] Really? For his part, Maldonado is adamant.
Speaker 3:
[24:11] No, no. A con is a con is a con. You lie to make your money, you lie to cover your tracks, and you just keep on lying.
Speaker 1:
[24:17] But when I listen to the tapes, Elric seems earnest to me.
Speaker 11:
[24:21] He was definitely having some kind of experience out there in the woods, right? Probably started with secular intentions to live together on a farm, and then Elric started reflecting on things. He starts thinking, rearranging places in his mind, and having new ideas that he has to share.
Speaker 1:
[24:38] But there was a pressing issue.
Speaker 11:
[24:41] It's really common among these intentional communities, unless you have a donation or, best case, a tithing system that everyone agrees on. Someone has to pay the bills.
Speaker 1:
[24:51] For the tender hearts at first, that meant getting jobs.
Speaker 9:
[24:55] Lainey worked at Safeway.
Speaker 1:
[24:57] What? I can't know. Our friend Connor, who lives in England, remembered this. I can't even imagine her.
Speaker 9:
[25:03] Yeah, I know. I know. But I swear, I remember seeing her in a reflective vest in the parking lot, like collecting carts.
Speaker 1:
[25:09] But the jobs weren't enough, and so Tender Hearts did what most everyone in Sonoma County did in the 90s.
Speaker 11:
[25:14] I mean, I would say in Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt, maybe 30, 40 percent, almost half of the communities are funded by weed.
Speaker 1:
[25:21] Hence the cannabis that was in the barn the night that Anna disappeared.
Speaker 14:
[25:24] And it was all just sitting in that barn.
Speaker 1:
[25:27] This opened up a whole new avenue. Because if Elric was lying to the cops about where he was that night, was he trying to protect the fact that he was growing marijuana?
Speaker 3:
[25:35] When do you guys want dinner?
Speaker 1:
[25:36] Um, like 30, 45 minutes.
Speaker 12:
[25:39] Thank you, Lane.
Speaker 10:
[25:41] Could Anna have been killed because of like a drug thing?
Speaker 5:
[25:45] I mean, it's just weed.
Speaker 10:
[25:46] That was a huge deal back then.
Speaker 1:
[25:48] He's right. This was the era of Camp.
Speaker 6:
[25:53] It's a scene that is reminiscent of those you see in war zones. But this is California, and the enemies are marijuana growers.
Speaker 1:
[26:00] Camp was the campaign against marijuana planting, a multi-agency task force that launched in 1983. They were a paramilitary organization. With helicopters and machine guns, they were hardcore. So does that mean that people were smoking pot around us? Does that mean that they would have been smoking pot from Tender Hearts?
Speaker 14:
[26:19] Undoubtedly.
Speaker 10:
[26:21] Undoubtedly.
Speaker 1:
[26:22] All right, so then who were... We know somebody who bought weed from them or sold for them.
Speaker 10:
[26:27] Right.
Speaker 1:
[26:27] Like, do we know any drug dealers?
Speaker 10:
[26:29] I mean...
Speaker 1:
[26:30] Do you remember anybody?
Speaker 13:
[26:31] I think Shiloh does.
Speaker 10:
[26:32] Shiloh!
Speaker 13:
[26:33] Shiloh!
Speaker 1:
[26:34] We're trying to remember who sold weed back in the day. I feel like there was an older guy.
Speaker 10:
[26:39] God, it was like... I think it was like...
Speaker 1:
[26:41] There was Jim.
Speaker 14:
[26:42] He was a drug dealer.
Speaker 1:
[26:43] I don't think so. No, but there was a guy who was always hanging out at the Hess building.
Speaker 14:
[26:47] He had, like, a battery nickname, like the Energizer Bunny or something.
Speaker 1:
[26:50] That's Copper Talk.
Speaker 5:
[26:51] Copper Talk!
Speaker 1:
[26:52] He is not a drug dealer.
Speaker 7:
[26:53] There was, like, that motorcycle.
Speaker 5:
[26:54] No, no, no.
Speaker 1:
[26:55] That guy was totally just a currency.
Speaker 14:
[26:57] Who was the guy?
Speaker 10:
[26:57] No, there was a guy, and he had, like...
Speaker 1:
[26:59] Dennis.
Speaker 14:
[26:59] No, no, not a name like that.
Speaker 7:
[27:01] Like, a DJ name.
Speaker 10:
[27:02] And he used to sell to all the skater kids.
Speaker 14:
[27:05] Remember, Rip-Hits was a thing?
Speaker 10:
[27:09] Sparks!
Speaker 14:
[27:10] Yes, Sparks!
Speaker 1:
[27:12] There's no way that was his name.
Speaker 12:
[27:13] That was not his name, but that's what they called him. That's what we called him.
Speaker 1:
[27:17] Do you think we could find him?
Speaker 5:
[27:18] I mean, how could we find him?
Speaker 12:
[27:19] I could find him.
Speaker 14:
[27:20] I think I could find him.
Speaker 1:
[27:21] So the other day, when I told you about Willow burning the weed, is this what you meant when you said that the tender hearts weren't all kumbaya and butterflies?
Speaker 3:
[27:30] And they were always alive, just the front. This was a criminal drug-dealing operation.
Speaker 1:
[27:35] That's true, but a little reductive. Because when I finally got the transcripts of Elric's interrogations, I realized Maldonado wasn't giving me the whole story. Chris, they're here. I got an email from Sheriff Loughlin with a PDF attachment. They had a watermark across every page, R Strong, and they were a total mess. The names were hard to figure out because everyone was designated by their initials.
Speaker 7:
[28:11] Oh, okay, so RM seems like he's the one in charge.
Speaker 1:
[28:15] That's Maldonado.
Speaker 3:
[28:16] I had two main guys working with me. It would have been Carillo. He headed up anything with grow operations or substances. He was kind of like our vice squad. And then, I think I put Orrin. Yeah, I put Bob Orrin as my other lead.
Speaker 5:
[28:31] She sent me, like, there's a couple interviews with a few different people.
Speaker 1:
[28:35] Look, this one is actually your neighbors then. Dude, this is me. This is a transcript of me getting interviewed.
Speaker 12:
[28:43] No.
Speaker 1:
[28:43] Yes, look, it's, quote, no, we were at Connor's house.
Speaker 12:
[28:46] Right.
Speaker 1:
[28:47] And Willow was with you.
Speaker 12:
[28:48] Yes.
Speaker 1:
[28:49] And you didn't hear anything. Not until the news, Connor's mom made us pancakes, and she told you about the fire. Yeah.
Speaker 12:
[28:55] Oh, my God.
Speaker 1:
[28:56] She put my interviews in here. Who did? Lachlan, the sheriff. She sent me my own transcripts.
Speaker 7:
[29:01] But why?
Speaker 1:
[29:02] I don't know. Just what to say. You lied. We have a record of you lying.
Speaker 12:
[29:07] Oh, this chick has it out for you.
Speaker 1:
[29:08] She also didn't include any of the interviews with Mick Bowden. It was only me and Elric.
Speaker 5:
[29:14] It looks like there's four different ones here. Oh, here.
Speaker 1:
[29:18] The ceremony. Does that involve the kids? And he goes, no. No, they press him. Why not? Something you don't want them to see, and Elric says, absolutely not. Okay, now we got three women, three of your women, your women, by the way, on the record, and they say you weren't there at all. You let off the blessing, the wind song, or whatever it's called, and they didn't see you until Wednesday. At some points, Elric got defensive. There's nothing wrong with taking a hike to see a sunrise. Is there? And Maldonado says, that depends. And Elric goes, how? There's nothing? Do you go to church? The other cop is like, I have no problem with the hike. And Elric, he's not letting it go. You go to a church and pray. You go into a building. We go outside. That's the difference. That's the only difference.
Speaker 14:
[30:08] I mean, it's a good point, honestly.
Speaker 5:
[30:09] It's a great point.
Speaker 14:
[30:10] This dialogue definitely could use a punch up, though, my friends.
Speaker 5:
[30:12] No, it's not dialogue.
Speaker 1:
[30:14] Wait, we should do this as a reading.
Speaker 12:
[30:17] Yes.
Speaker 1:
[30:18] We printed out two copies.
Speaker 7:
[30:22] Yes.
Speaker 10:
[30:23] All right.
Speaker 12:
[30:23] I'm the cops.
Speaker 10:
[30:24] Both of you?
Speaker 7:
[30:25] Of course.
Speaker 10:
[30:26] You don't have to anymore.
Speaker 14:
[30:27] I'm gonna pick up the sack.
Speaker 12:
[30:29] Brainwashing ladies is one thing.
Speaker 1:
[30:31] Okay, why are you doing a New York accent?
Speaker 15:
[30:33] I'm a character.
Speaker 12:
[30:34] Brainwashing the ladies is one thing, but the kids, you get their checks.
Speaker 15:
[30:38] Food stamps.
Speaker 1:
[30:39] Elric says, I don't steal from kids.
Speaker 12:
[30:42] We had a ranch, Bob. When was that? A few years.
Speaker 15:
[30:45] Eleven kids.
Speaker 12:
[30:46] Eleven kids, and none of them was in school.
Speaker 1:
[30:48] All of the Tenderhearts kids go to school.
Speaker 15:
[30:51] No electricity. Checks come in every month, and these kids are put out to the fields. It was their balls come to life, these poor bastards, coming in from the fields.
Speaker 10:
[31:00] What are they talking about? No idea.
Speaker 1:
[31:03] Okay, they're talking about some situation where they arrested other people with a bunch of kids. It seems like they were trying to catch Elric admitting that Tenderhearts was making money off welfare. Then they start fishing about drugs.
Speaker 7:
[31:15] Oh, here we go. Okay, this is classic good cut, bad cut, moving up to the kill, all right?
Speaker 12:
[31:19] Tell us about the guys in Jenner.
Speaker 15:
[31:21] Yeah, tell us about the guys in Jenner.
Speaker 14:
[31:23] The guy in Jenner is definitely drug stuff.
Speaker 1:
[31:25] Elric says, I don't know who you're talking about.
Speaker 7:
[31:28] Bam, this is definitely where they would slap the table. Bam!
Speaker 5:
[31:31] Just read it to me, please.
Speaker 15:
[31:33] If you weren't up to help.
Speaker 1:
[31:35] I'm not saying I wasn't.
Speaker 12:
[31:37] We know you weren't.
Speaker 10:
[31:38] Why don't you tell us about Tubas?
Speaker 3:
[31:40] What?
Speaker 12:
[31:41] Down at Tubas, there's a guy named Delio.
Speaker 15:
[31:43] You know who I'm talking about, Delilah sometimes.
Speaker 5:
[31:46] Delilah sometimes?
Speaker 15:
[31:47] If I talk to him, what's he gonna tell me?
Speaker 12:
[31:49] You don't know about Thursdays at Tubas, the garden parties?
Speaker 15:
[31:54] Did you elder the code red?
Speaker 5:
[31:56] All right, calm down.
Speaker 12:
[31:57] You want answers?
Speaker 15:
[31:58] I want the truth!
Speaker 12:
[31:59] You can't handle the truth!
Speaker 3:
[32:01] Stop it!
Speaker 1:
[32:02] Man, Elric isn't even talking anymore.
Speaker 5:
[32:04] This is... I don't know what all this garden party shit...
Speaker 14:
[32:07] Oh, dude.
Speaker 5:
[32:09] This is... That's sad.
Speaker 1:
[32:13] It took some rereading and a bit of research, but Chris and I finally figured out what was going on. Tubas and garden parties were about bars and hookup spots in the area. The cops were fishing for Elric to admit something they had suspicions about. Not the weed dealing, not the fact that maybe he was lying about this whole cult, that he was gay.
Speaker 2:
[32:36] Elric, so he did leave the seance. He went down to the East Bay, where he met up with this man named Lucas Park.
Speaker 1:
[32:42] Who was, it turns out, an ex-boyfriend. In reality, this shouldn't be shocking. We're talking about an outspoken feminist, political activist in the heart of a very liberal, very gay-friendly city. Which is, I guess, exactly why there's something heart-wrenching here. Elric could stand up for women, for counterculture, could be brave and outspoken about so much, but he was still crippled by shame and fear regarding his sexuality.
Speaker 10:
[33:10] How many of the women knew?
Speaker 1:
[33:12] None of them.
Speaker 11:
[33:13] They knew he wasn't interested in them, but they figured it was all part of his vow of celibacy.
Speaker 1:
[33:19] I actually heard this on the recordings. He talks about the power of intra-course.
Speaker 4:
[33:23] Inter is between or among intras within a contained entity.
Speaker 1:
[33:32] Polyamorous cult that wasn't poly or a cult, a pioneering feminist commune led by a gay man who didn't come out of the closet. So the tender hearts were complicit in letting the world think they were something they weren't, this multi-wife sex cult. They let that deception stand, but they were also deceived from within. And perhaps the most salient point for Maldonado in 1995, and for us now, Elric couldn't have killed Anna.
Speaker 2:
[34:01] Well, I mean, they confirmed that Elric was with Park all night and into the next morning. So first story was a lie. New alibi, it was solid.
Speaker 1:
[34:10] And as for the tender hearts.
Speaker 11:
[34:12] That's pretty much all she wrote. The women dwindled over the next year or so.
Speaker 1:
[34:16] Elric left for months at a time, and then there was nobody there anymore. The land itself eventually sold to one of our neighbors who has since passed away. So, as far as I know, it's in some kind of probate limbo. All right, here's a thought experiment.
Speaker 9:
[34:31] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[34:32] Tender hearts exist today.
Speaker 7:
[34:34] Right.
Speaker 5:
[34:35] Are you in?
Speaker 7:
[34:36] Hell yeah, dude, me and like 50 naked chicks running around the woods, getting to know each other physically.
Speaker 5:
[34:42] Okay, not, okay, not.
Speaker 7:
[34:43] Do I get to have sex with Elric?
Speaker 1:
[34:44] Not tender hearts specifically, but just a communal situation where you're sharing resources, living off the land, raising your kids together.
Speaker 10:
[34:52] Sounds like a nightmare.
Speaker 1:
[34:53] Sounds pretty great to me. And I don't think I'm alone. Even with his own experience growing up on a failed one, Orion is optimistic.
Speaker 9:
[35:02] I mean, I feel like it's a little bit of coming full circle in a way.
Speaker 1:
[35:06] You know, I got very, very interested in some modern form of co-living. And you share resources, you have a shared garden, and you have a shared kitchen and co-working space for parties and whatever else. And it's like, seems pretty idyllic. So it feels like I'm kind of like trying to do what my parents sort of did, but better, right? Like, this is probably a classic, you know, thing that we all try to do to some degree at times, fix the mistakes that our parents made.
Speaker 14:
[35:29] Oh, stop. Think about the type of people who want in on this thing.
Speaker 7:
[35:32] They're not easygoing people. They're not cool people. No, they're vegans.
Speaker 14:
[35:36] They're social justice lawyers.
Speaker 1:
[35:37] But you also got independent, critical thinkers, artists.
Speaker 7:
[35:42] Pretentious, dirty, drug addicts.
Speaker 14:
[35:46] Look at your boy Howard.
Speaker 15:
[35:47] Look at your boy Howard.
Speaker 14:
[35:48] You want to move in with him and his aunts?
Speaker 7:
[35:50] Yeah, you got to live communally with him and his insects as well.
Speaker 14:
[35:54] No, no, no.
Speaker 7:
[35:54] Communism failed.
Speaker 14:
[35:56] But like socialism failed, Ryder. Okay, there's a reason.
Speaker 5:
[35:59] Dude, I mean, you went out of going to boarding school.
Speaker 10:
[36:01] What does that have to do with anything?
Speaker 1:
[36:03] Chris spent the second half of high school starting our junior year in New Jersey at a boarding school. So didn't your mom send you there? Because, you know, you needed a different situation because you were being bullied.
Speaker 12:
[36:14] Oh, I wouldn't know.
Speaker 14:
[36:15] The bullied stuff, that's not why I went there.
Speaker 1:
[36:17] Okay, I'm just saying that the normal all-American public school childhood didn't work out for you. So, you know, you needed something, you needed an alternative. I think a lot of us do. Most of us want something different.
Speaker 7:
[36:31] You're drinking the Kool-Aid, man. Go live in tree time.
Speaker 1:
[36:35] In 1996, Elric left Sebastopol, went back to San Francisco.
Speaker 10:
[36:40] There were signs of some political involvement. Some classes taught at some wellness centers and retreats.
Speaker 1:
[36:45] But after Anna, he mostly vanished from the public.
Speaker 4:
[36:51] I like these moments, when it's just you and I. Strange, stupid little medium of tape recording.
Speaker 1:
[37:04] He died in 2001, cancer.
Speaker 10:
[37:27] Hold on, what is this?
Speaker 1:
[37:28] After our dramatic reading, I was looking back over the transcripts.
Speaker 10:
[37:32] Look at that. Ooh, who said that?
Speaker 1:
[37:33] It was a single line, quote, RM., what do you know? The Swami turns out to be a faggot. That's Maldonado, man.
Speaker 10:
[37:43] Oh, that's gross. Was that after he left the room, or was that when he was still in the room?
Speaker 5:
[37:47] I think it's after.
Speaker 10:
[37:48] I don't know, what's worse?
Speaker 1:
[37:50] Seeing that sentence, it suddenly brought into focus where the investigators were coming from. These are the people whose official job it was to find out what happened to Anna. They didn't like the Tender Hearts. They didn't like that they did drugs. They didn't like that Elric was gay. But none of those things on their own are any real justification for suspicion.
Speaker 5:
[38:11] That sucks, man.
Speaker 1:
[38:13] That really sucks.
Speaker 7:
[38:14] And you're going to go meet this guy?
Speaker 1:
[38:16] I was. My last conversation with Maldonado, before I got the transcripts, he agreed to meet me and walk me through the crime scene.
Speaker 3:
[38:24] Why don't we meet out there at the property? We can have some strawberries from Andre's stand out there by wagon. I'll show you what we found. I didn't know what to think.
Speaker 1:
[38:37] Maldonado was being helpful. He was one of the few people who seemed like he actually cared that I was looking back at this case. And then, to make things worse, Chris got a voicemail. It was from Sparks.
Speaker 13:
[38:51] Chris, what up, man?
Speaker 10:
[38:53] It's Davey H.
Speaker 4:
[38:55] Sparks McKnight back in the day.
Speaker 14:
[38:59] What a time, what a time, brother.
Speaker 7:
[39:01] Anyway, yeah, I'll talk to Ryder.
Speaker 15:
[39:04] You know, I got stories.
Speaker 11:
[39:05] I got inside information.
Speaker 8:
[39:07] For real, though, you want to talk Anna Trainor?
Speaker 14:
[39:09] You got to talk about those fuckers detecting that shit.
Speaker 6:
[39:13] Maldonado?
Speaker 5:
[39:15] Come on, man.
Speaker 14:
[39:16] Dude was a fool.
Speaker 7:
[39:17] But I got some stuff for you.
Speaker 8:
[39:19] My boy, oh man, my boy Mick.
Speaker 3:
[39:21] You know he was my boy, but damn, kid got a pass.
Speaker 10:
[39:25] He got a pass.
Speaker 12:
[39:27] Anyway, yeah, man, hit me up.
Speaker 3:
[39:30] Let's get a drink.
Speaker 8:
[39:31] I'll lay it all on you.
Speaker 1:
[39:49] The Red Weather is an iHeart podcast hosted by Ryder Strong. Sound engineering, editing, and mixing by Bo Milkes. Produced by Tess Bartholomew. Executive producers at iHeart Radio, Trevor Young and Matt Frederick. Associate producer, Bo Milkes. Original score by Kyle Morton. If you're enjoying the show, please remember to leave a review in the radio. Thanks for listening.