0:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome listener. 0:04 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad you're here. 0:06 [SPEAKER_01]: Take a seat. 0:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Next to the fire. 0:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Obscura, where we shine a light on the dark. 0:40 [SPEAKER_01]: Bakersfield in the last week of July sits at the bottom of San Joaquin Valley with a kind of dry, accumulated heat that builds through the morning, holds through the afternoon and refuses to lift through most of the night. 0:55 [SPEAKER_01]: By the middle of the day, the ice fall on Highway 99, throws shimmer up into the sky, and by evening the air inside a parked car can put a person on their knees, they're 1:10 [SPEAKER_01]: The sun sets somewhere over the tembler range, and the temperature drops, but only a little, and only for a while, even at midnight the foothills hold the day's warmth, and give it back slowly into the dark. 1:23 [SPEAKER_01]: This is oil country, pump jacks bow and rise in the fields east of town, and refinery towers blink red along the edges of the city. 1:32 [SPEAKER_01]: The sound of trucks on the 99 and 58 carries for blocks in the dry air. 1:37 [SPEAKER_01]: The neighborhoods between those highways settle into a particular kind of quiet at that hour. 1:43 [SPEAKER_01]: Stucco houses with low roof lines, concrete driveways, and front lawns that have given up some of their green to the heat. 1:52 [SPEAKER_01]: Street lights cast shadows through the slats of chain link fences. 1:56 [SPEAKER_01]: Every house looks like every other house. 1:58 [SPEAKER_01]: The way track tones were built to look in this 2:07 [SPEAKER_01]: The home in question stood at the corner where Wachwam and meets Cleveland Way, a modest single story house with a fence around the small backyard, and a driveway wall and up for a pickup truck. 2:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Vehicles and driveways like the one belonging to that family are common sight in this part of Baker's field, a gray Chevrolet pickup, the kind of truck the working class of the central valley has been driving for 40 years. 2:33 [SPEAKER_01]: The ordinaryness of this house can't be overstated. 2:36 [SPEAKER_01]: It's something I like to mention in these episodes. 2:39 [SPEAKER_01]: People see movies in the expect houses like this to look like haunted houses. 2:44 [SPEAKER_01]: But it's never the case. 2:47 [SPEAKER_01]: And what happened on Walkwam and Drive that night did not come from somewhere else. 2:52 [SPEAKER_01]: There was no broken window, no pride door, no tampered walk. 2:56 [SPEAKER_01]: The harm was already inside the house. 2:58 [SPEAKER_01]: They had been living there for a while. 3:00 [SPEAKER_01]: The man of the house was raised Salvador Coriel. 3:03 [SPEAKER_01]: He was 29 years old. 3:05 [SPEAKER_01]: He worked steady hours, paid his bills, drove the grey pickup, and had been married twice. 3:12 [SPEAKER_01]: His first marriage to a woman named Veronica had begun in 1999 in Nevada. 3:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Ray and Veronica had known each other since they were 10 years old. 3:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Her aunt had lived next door to his family in an apartment complex when they were children, and the two of them had grown up alongside each other, married young, had two kids together, and divorced in 2004. 3:35 [SPEAKER_01]: After the divorce, the children stayed primarily with Ray. 3:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Veronica continued to see them at least once a month. 3:43 [SPEAKER_01]: By the accounts of those who knew the two families, the relationship between Ray and Veronica was not adversarial. 3:50 [SPEAKER_01]: They spent holidays together with their respective extended families. 3:54 [SPEAKER_01]: They had shared an Easter only one month earlier. 3:57 [SPEAKER_01]: Veronica would later tell reporters that, as far as she knew, Ray had been a good father. 4:02 [SPEAKER_01]: That was the word she used. 4:04 [SPEAKER_01]: Good. 4:05 [SPEAKER_01]: They've been childhood friends. 4:06 [SPEAKER_01]: They'd grown up together. 4:07 [SPEAKER_01]: There was nothing in any version of him. 4:09 [SPEAKER_01]: She had known. 4:10 [SPEAKER_01]: That would have prepared her for what was about to happen. 4:13 [SPEAKER_01]: By 2011, Ray had remarried, their second wife, Sheila, lived with him in the house on Mach-Wam and Drive, along with the two children from his first marriage and additional children from the second, the household was full, school schedules, lunches packed, laundry rotated through, the ordinary engine of a family that size. 4:34 [SPEAKER_01]: The seven-year-old girl at the heart of this story is Cassandra Coriel, raised daughter from his first marriage. 4:41 [SPEAKER_01]: By July of 2011, she was about to turn eight. 4:45 [SPEAKER_01]: There was a birthday on the calendar, and there were the small anticipations a child carries for that kind of milestone. 4:51 [SPEAKER_01]: There was an older brother in the same house, 11 years old that summer, who knew her habits the way only siblings know each other. 4:58 [SPEAKER_01]: The brother would later tell investigators something that has never quite settled 5:04 [SPEAKER_01]: He said that the night before everything happened. 5:06 [SPEAKER_01]: His sister had told him, she had a funny feeling. 5:10 [SPEAKER_01]: She had told him she felt like someone was going to take her. 5:13 [SPEAKER_01]: She said it the way children sometimes just say things. 5:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Half in the language of fear and half in the language of imagination. 5:20 [SPEAKER_01]: and her older brother heard it, and did what an older brother does, he let it pass. 5:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Children say strange things have bedtime. 5:27 [SPEAKER_01]: The night was hot, the house loud, with the home of an air conditioner, and the lights eventually went off. 5:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Cassandra went to her bed in her own room, and her own bed, and a house surrounded by her family, and that should have been the end of it. 5:41 [SPEAKER_01]: By the early morning hours of Wednesday, July 27th, the house had gone through its usual shut down. 5:48 [SPEAKER_01]: The lights were off, the dog settled, the street lights along Machlom and drive cast their long sodium colored squares across the lawns, inside the family was asleep, in somewhere in the dark of that house. 6:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Between the time the lights went out and the time the sun came up, a decision was made. 6:06 [SPEAKER_01]: At 345 in the morning, the house woke up, or at least somebody in it did. 6:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Sheila Coriel, with later telling investigators that Ray had gone up early to leave for work. 6:17 [SPEAKER_01]: Shortly after he left, she went to check on the children, and when she opened the door to Cassandra's bedroom, the bed was empty. 6:25 [SPEAKER_01]: The blanket was disturbed. 6:27 [SPEAKER_01]: The small bedroom looked the way a bedroom looks when a child has been removed from it, without time to rearrange the sheets behind them. 6:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Sheila called 911. 6:37 [SPEAKER_02]: 9-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 6:53 [SPEAKER_03]: How old is she? 6:58 [SPEAKER_03]: She's what? 6:59 [SPEAKER_02]: She's what? 7:00 [SPEAKER_02]: She's what? 7:01 [SPEAKER_02]: She's what? 7:01 [SPEAKER_02]: She's what? 7:03 [SPEAKER_02]: I know. 7:04 [SPEAKER_02]: I know you're upset. 7:04 [SPEAKER_03]: I need to take a deep breath so I can understand you. 7:07 [SPEAKER_03]: She's eight. 7:08 [SPEAKER_03]: She's going to be eight years old tomorrow. 7:12 [SPEAKER_03]: She's right. 7:13 [SPEAKER_03]: She's going to be eight years old tomorrow. 7:16 [SPEAKER_03]: She's going to be eight. 7:18 [SPEAKER_03]: You live 28. 7:18 [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I am. 7:19 [SPEAKER_03]: She's eight. 7:20 [SPEAKER_03]: What year was she born? 7:22 [SPEAKER_03]: Um, two minutes of lunch, two minutes of lunch, two minutes of the lunch, two minutes of the eight, so two minutes of the fourth. 7:28 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 7:29 [SPEAKER_03]: What color shirt and pants are she wearing? 7:30 [SPEAKER_03]: The last night when she went to bed, she was wearing a pair of cotton to the plant pants. 7:39 [SPEAKER_03]: And she's not on a little white shirt with a kitty on it. 7:47 [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, okay. 7:52 [SPEAKER_02]: Is she white like her Hispanic? 7:55 [SPEAKER_02]: Is she white like her Hispanic? 7:58 [SPEAKER_03]: She's white. 7:58 [SPEAKER_03]: She looks Hispanic, but she's white. 8:01 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 8:01 [SPEAKER_03]: You guys, they're just getting brown eyes. 8:06 [SPEAKER_03]: What's your name? 8:07 [SPEAKER_03]: My name's Sheila. 8:09 [SPEAKER_03]: My name's Sheila. 8:09 [SPEAKER_03]: I'm her mother. 8:10 [SPEAKER_03]: I just called her for others. 8:12 [SPEAKER_03]: Freaking out right now. 8:13 [SPEAKER_03]: She was with us. 8:15 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 8:15 [SPEAKER_02]: Sheila, what's your last name? 8:17 [SPEAKER_03]: My name's Coriel too. 8:20 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay. 8:21 [SPEAKER_03]: Any last bar when she went to bed? 8:23 [SPEAKER_03]: Where are you going to sleep last night? 8:27 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, what time did she go to bed? 8:30 [SPEAKER_03]: Did I go to bed? 8:31 [SPEAKER_03]: I'm on my 31st night. 8:34 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, have you yelled out for her in the house? 8:37 [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I've been screaming for the last five minutes. 8:41 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 8:42 [SPEAKER_03]: I can't understand you. 8:43 [SPEAKER_03]: What was that? 8:44 [SPEAKER_03]: I've been screaming for her. 8:46 [SPEAKER_03]: I just moved two nights ago. 8:48 [SPEAKER_03]: We had an incident where my husband came home and he smelled smoke. 8:53 [SPEAKER_03]: He came in the room and they were in the straightener. 8:56 [SPEAKER_03]: My straightener from my hair was on her dresser. 8:59 [SPEAKER_03]: And they fell rocked in it. 9:01 [SPEAKER_03]: And it was smoking, and the window was open, and me and my husband freaked out because we didn't know what was going on. 9:08 [SPEAKER_03]: I thought my daughter maybe got up and got some straight hair, you know, playing with her or something, and did realize that it could do that. 9:16 [SPEAKER_03]: So we didn't really report it, so we just like, oh, you know, maybe that's what happened. 9:21 [SPEAKER_03]: She's scared to tell us. 9:23 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 9:23 [SPEAKER_03]: Where's your husband right now? 9:26 [SPEAKER_03]: He's on his way back for work. 9:28 [UNKNOWN]: Okay. 9:29 [SPEAKER_03]: And I know her mother is her mother's strut. 9:32 [SPEAKER_03]: Me and her either take her from us. 9:35 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 9:36 [SPEAKER_03]: Are any of the windows or doors open right now? 9:38 [SPEAKER_03]: I don't see anything in my city. 9:41 [SPEAKER_03]: I bought a lot of alarms. 9:43 [SPEAKER_03]: You can leave. 9:46 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 9:46 [SPEAKER_03]: And the alarm is armed right now. 9:48 [SPEAKER_03]: I know they went alarm. 9:50 [SPEAKER_03]: I wouldn't have heard them. 9:53 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, are there any other kids in the house? 9:59 [SPEAKER_03]: Four of the children in the house. 10:01 [SPEAKER_03]: They're all here. 10:03 [SPEAKER_03]: They're all there? 10:03 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. 10:05 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 10:06 [SPEAKER_03]: Have you helped for her outside? 10:08 [SPEAKER_03]: I didn't know. 10:10 [SPEAKER_03]: I didn't know. 10:13 [SPEAKER_03]: I didn't know. 10:14 [SPEAKER_03]: See why she called for her herself? 10:18 [SPEAKER_03]: She's supposed to be there to darken it, right? 10:22 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 10:24 [SPEAKER_03]: And she's not, and here's me, I got up, I just left the work, I got up to sleep. 10:30 [SPEAKER_03]: Check that out. 10:31 [SPEAKER_03]: I always get up. 10:32 [SPEAKER_03]: I check that out. 10:33 [SPEAKER_03]: Make sure all the doors will walk when don't move or I'll still, and I check all my children. 10:37 [SPEAKER_03]: I went in here and had room, and I noticed that her bed was kind of, you know, like her blanket wasn't as usually poopy as usually was. 10:46 [SPEAKER_03]: There was a dog in here. 10:48 [SPEAKER_03]: She's got like a full, you know, some big stuff dog. 10:51 [SPEAKER_03]: Did she know what the password is to me alarms? 10:54 [SPEAKER_03]: There's no password. 10:56 [SPEAKER_03]: If they're a code where she could disarm them. 10:59 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 11:00 [SPEAKER_03]: No, it's not a house alarm. 11:01 [SPEAKER_03]: It's just when the door, you know, the window or the door is where the magnet is pulled away. 11:05 [SPEAKER_03]: So it's off real loud. 11:08 [SPEAKER_03]: And now. 11:10 [SPEAKER_03]: So. 11:11 [SPEAKER_03]: Hmm. 11:13 [SPEAKER_03]: The door should be. 11:15 [SPEAKER_03]: And I checked about the room. 11:16 [SPEAKER_03]: I was everywhere for her. 11:22 [UNKNOWN]: Okay. 11:23 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, how do you turn the alarm off and on? 11:26 [SPEAKER_03]: Is it always on and then just cover so window? 11:28 [SPEAKER_03]: No, you just turn it right and switch on. 11:30 [SPEAKER_03]: You have to do it. 11:30 [SPEAKER_03]: Turn on the move. 11:31 [SPEAKER_03]: The switch, right? 11:33 [SPEAKER_03]: Yes. 11:33 [SPEAKER_03]: And it sounds a warm. 11:34 [SPEAKER_03]: If the door is open or anything, it's like a door chime. 11:37 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 11:38 [SPEAKER_03]: And it's still on. 11:39 [SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't turned off. 11:40 [SPEAKER_03]: Well, well, might have been less if she turns it off when you leave. 11:45 [SPEAKER_03]: She turns it off when you leave. 11:46 [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, so when he goes off the door, the kids, you don't work the kids up. 11:51 [SPEAKER_03]: That's when I usually get up and I turn it back on. 11:53 [SPEAKER_02]: So you turned it on as soon as he left? 11:56 [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I got up. 11:58 [SPEAKER_03]: I turned it on, like I said, but I checked the windows and made sure the windows were locked. 12:02 [SPEAKER_03]: And I came in here like I usually do and because of the incident the other night I turned the light on to check from my daughter and I pulled the blanket back to see the shoes all cuddles and her blankets because I couldn't see her head. 12:16 [SPEAKER_03]: And it was her dog. 12:18 [SPEAKER_03]: Her stuff dog is too good. 12:20 [SPEAKER_03]: Her stuff dog has gone to. 12:23 [SPEAKER_03]: No, it's her butter dog was there. 12:25 [SPEAKER_03]: Both are blankets in here. 12:28 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, is anything missing? 12:30 [SPEAKER_03]: No, not that I can see. 12:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Okay. 12:35 [SPEAKER_01]: The story she gave the dispatcher was straightforward. 12:38 [SPEAKER_01]: She had been asleep. 12:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Her husband had left for work. 12:41 [SPEAKER_01]: She had checked on the kids and Cassandra was gone. 12:44 [SPEAKER_01]: There was no sign of force entry. 12:47 [SPEAKER_01]: No broken window. 12:48 [SPEAKER_01]: No boot print on the back door. 12:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Just an empty bed in the interior room of a quiet house and central baker's field with the rest of the children still sleep in their own rooms. 12:58 [SPEAKER_01]: In the porch light, still glowing, where had been all night. 13:05 [SPEAKER_03]: I told them to be very serious in nothing. 13:09 [SPEAKER_03]: They're clones, they're really little clinkers, everything's here, they're glasses. 13:14 [SPEAKER_03]: OK, so if someone were to go to her bedroom window and open it, the alarm would have sounded. 13:20 [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, ma'am, let's see you. 13:23 [SPEAKER_03]: And I know she came home when she said she was scared that there she's seen her mom. 13:27 [SPEAKER_03]: And so maybe what's wrong? 13:29 [SPEAKER_03]: She said, my mom told me she's going to take me away. 13:34 [SPEAKER_02]: OK. 13:35 [SPEAKER_03]: How when did that happen? 13:36 [SPEAKER_03]: A cold man, it's been happening for a while. 13:41 [SPEAKER_03]: She's going in the third grade, but she was in kindergarten. 13:44 [SPEAKER_03]: Will we take her away from her mother? 13:45 [SPEAKER_03]: We had to take her away from her mom because they were sitting there to school, dirty, and when she peed her pants, they used to be a teenager. 13:58 [SPEAKER_03]: Her mom's a drug addict. 13:59 [SPEAKER_03]: They know for sure she's admitted to me and raised me and my husband. 14:04 [SPEAKER_03]: and she told us that she was on her own, but I didn't see she went into the word heroin. 14:11 [SPEAKER_03]: So me and Rayna took her away from her mom. 14:14 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, is there any other way somebody to have gotten in the house? 14:19 [SPEAKER_03]: There's two windows in the room, but both rooms are locked. 14:25 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 14:26 [SPEAKER_03]: There's a back door, but I don't see her going back there. 14:29 [SPEAKER_03]: We got some big dogs. 14:31 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay. 14:34 [SPEAKER_03]: I just don't want to go outside because do you know the other address? 14:40 [SPEAKER_03]: I just don't know if you can call me this last time we knew. 14:43 [SPEAKER_03]: So you can find this and that's the reason for you. 14:50 [SPEAKER_03]: The last address? 14:51 [SPEAKER_03]: No other log-in point too. 14:53 [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not too sure it's down the street. 14:55 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, one more. 14:56 [SPEAKER_03]: What's her name? 14:58 [SPEAKER_03]: Her name? 14:59 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 15:01 [SPEAKER_03]: How old is she? 15:02 [SPEAKER_03]: Veronica, I want to see she's 20, seven. 15:04 [SPEAKER_03]: Now, in she's got a, oh, she took the answer. 15:05 [SPEAKER_03]: It just means Mike, Mike, I'm doing all my first thing with, you know, almost like, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, 15:27 [SPEAKER_03]: If you were almost all the way to work when I got it, but it's time to check my gut up and use the rest. 15:34 [SPEAKER_03]: And then I said, I go through the house every day. 15:37 [SPEAKER_03]: And I just got out the morning and made sure what I didn't make sure she was in there because of what happened to the night. 15:43 [SPEAKER_03]: Have you been through every single room in your house? 15:46 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. 15:47 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I have. 15:47 [SPEAKER_03]: I've looked for them everywhere. 15:49 [SPEAKER_03]: I've looked for my bed. 15:51 [SPEAKER_03]: I thought maybe she'd called them. 15:52 [SPEAKER_03]: I'd bed with me. 15:53 [SPEAKER_03]: She's not in there. 15:54 [SPEAKER_03]: I even woke up my life in your old son because I thought maybe she got scared and gotten dead with him. 15:59 [SPEAKER_03]: And sure, older brother, they have the same mom. 16:04 [UNKNOWN]: OK. 16:06 [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, there's mom and I said, you know, because you know, there's mom and I don't get along. 16:13 [SPEAKER_03]: That was a little gross to you. 16:15 [SPEAKER_03]: She's a little girl. 16:16 [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know, numerous times, but they were going to take her from, and she told me she was scared. 16:23 [SPEAKER_03]: And then, for all, mom and I never take you, she's just saying things, because she's upset. 16:28 [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I thought maybe, 16:30 [SPEAKER_03]: She just upset that we had took her from her and told her that she could have seen her because of the drugs. 16:36 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 16:36 [SPEAKER_03]: We lost the last time the mother did see her. 16:39 [SPEAKER_03]: I lost her in the mom scene, you guys out. 16:42 [SPEAKER_03]: My son, my son's 8-week-old, very senior. 16:46 [SPEAKER_03]: She didn't even get to see her, actually. 16:47 [SPEAKER_03]: She came over three days after the baby was born, which was July 1. 16:52 [SPEAKER_03]: It was about that week and so, well, July 6, I want to say. 16:58 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 16:59 [SPEAKER_03]: She came over and she wanted to take the kids with her. 17:07 [SPEAKER_03]: But she wanted to take her daughter. 17:09 [SPEAKER_03]: All right, so is about seven weeks ago? 17:13 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it was about seven weeks ago. 17:14 [SPEAKER_03]: But she told her she came over. 17:16 [SPEAKER_03]: I distinctly remember because of the fact that she wanted our kids. 17:22 [SPEAKER_03]: But she just wanted our daughter at first. 17:29 [SPEAKER_03]: And he said, no, either you're gonna see both of the kids and spend time with your son too, or you're not gonna see them. 17:35 [SPEAKER_03]: And she won't all take them both, I guess. 17:38 [SPEAKER_03]: It's usually like, we're all like to take my other one with her. 17:43 [SPEAKER_03]: And then my husband said, no, never mind, I don't want them going. 17:47 [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I had asked to be for Dr. She left. 17:50 [SPEAKER_03]: Why didn't you let the kids go to see if you just get one going, this she seemed like she was acting on. 17:56 [SPEAKER_03]: This she was on drugs again. 17:58 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, what's your husband's name? 18:01 [SPEAKER_03]: Ray, Ray Y, and the same last name? 18:06 [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, Ram. 18:07 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, what kind of vehicle is he going to be driving? 18:10 [SPEAKER_03]: He's going to be driving on 2010. 18:12 [SPEAKER_03]: I think people leave it in. 18:14 [SPEAKER_03]: It's a start. 18:15 [SPEAKER_03]: Great. 18:15 [SPEAKER_03]: Silver. 18:16 [SPEAKER_03]: Toby. 18:18 [SPEAKER_03]: Before, right. 18:18 [SPEAKER_03]: Four. 18:20 [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. 18:21 [SPEAKER_02]: Four doors. 18:23 [SPEAKER_03]: She'll be home in a minute right now. 18:24 [SPEAKER_03]: My mother-in-law just took off she's driving on me. 18:28 [SPEAKER_03]: She's a flight endeavor. 18:31 [SPEAKER_03]: She went to go see if she could find my daughter at her grandma's house, which is down the street. 18:37 [SPEAKER_03]: Which is the last known address for Veronica too. 18:41 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, what's that address? 18:43 [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not sure what the address is. 18:45 [SPEAKER_03]: It's on brand new chair. 18:46 [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I was born in there. 18:48 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I've always been here. 18:50 [SPEAKER_03]: I've been there for a handful of times. 18:55 [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, if your mother knew her way over to that address, my mother lost what over there to see if she can see is there. 19:05 [SPEAKER_03]: Because the only place I could see is that they would take her because they're homeless. 19:09 [SPEAKER_03]: The last time I knew they had bought an RV, the one that you can drive. 19:15 [SPEAKER_03]: They bought one of those and they pulled a boot and I'm ready to be put in it in. 19:19 [SPEAKER_03]: Sheila, the deputies just arrived there to meet go outside and talk to them. 19:23 [SPEAKER_03]: Excuse me. 19:24 [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you very much. 19:25 [SPEAKER_03]: You're welcome. 19:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Within an hour, the city was moving, patrol cars rolled through the neighborhood. 19:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Officers knocked on doors. 19:33 [SPEAKER_01]: The description went out. 19:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Seven-year-old girl, brown hair, last seen in the bed she was no longer in. 19:40 [SPEAKER_01]: A search of the surrounding blocks began. 19:42 [SPEAKER_01]: Helicopters were spun up. 19:44 [SPEAKER_01]: By the time the sun came over the Sierra Nevada and started baking the asphalt of Highway 99 again, 19:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Alpha Central Bakersfield was looking for a child who had vanished out of her own bedroom in the middle of the night, and nobody had any idea where she had gone. 20:00 [SPEAKER_01]: The man's name has not been preserved in most of public reporting, but the action that he took as, he was a gardener. 20:08 [SPEAKER_01]: He was working in East Bakersfield that morning. 20:10 [SPEAKER_01]: He was watering the lawn. 20:12 [SPEAKER_01]: He was holding a hose, and he was to all appearances, having an ordinary Wednesday morning at his job. 20:18 [SPEAKER_01]: A child walked up to him, she was small and dirty. 20:21 [SPEAKER_01]: With a black eye that was nearly swollen shot, and she was wearing the clothes she had gone to bed in, she was by any measure that mattered, a child who should not have been where she was. 20:33 [SPEAKER_01]: East Bakersfield is not Central Bakersfield. 20:36 [SPEAKER_01]: They are not next door. 20:38 [SPEAKER_01]: They are nine miles apart. 20:39 [SPEAKER_01]: In a seven-year-old girl that's not in the night, walk that distance on her own. 20:45 [SPEAKER_01]: The little girl has tempered water. 20:47 [SPEAKER_01]: He gave her the water. 20:48 [SPEAKER_01]: He took her gently to a neighbor's house, the neighbor called the police. 20:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Within minutes, the address on Eucalyptus Drive was its own kind of crisis scene, with a child found, a child being held, and a child whose name, nobody on the property knew yet, but who matched exactly the description that had been broadcast across Kern County since just after sunrise. 21:11 [SPEAKER_01]: She'd been asleep, she said, 21:16 [SPEAKER_01]: To remember being grabbed by the neck, she remembered being put under a couch. 21:20 [SPEAKER_01]: And the couch was in the back of a truck. 21:22 [SPEAKER_01]: And the truck, she said, was a gray Chevrolet pickup, similar if not identical to the family truck. 21:29 [SPEAKER_01]: She remembered drifting in and out of consciousness. 21:32 [SPEAKER_01]: She remembered waking up under the couch in a field. 21:35 [SPEAKER_01]: She remembered screaming and pushing the couch off her to get out from underneath it. 21:39 [SPEAKER_01]: She remembered standing up in the dirt and walking, looking for water, looking for help. 21:44 [SPEAKER_01]: Looking for anyone, the injuries on her body told the rest of the story, bruises and abrasions, a black eye nearly swollen shut, evidence of sexual assault, the kind of damage that does not happen during a fall or fight or an accident. 22:00 [SPEAKER_01]: The kind of damage that happens on purpose, by hand, by force. 22:05 [SPEAKER_01]: She was seven years only. 22:06 [SPEAKER_01]: She had won, or been driven nine miles, and then deposited, possibly while still unconscious, and a dirt field on Eucalyptus Drive, with a couch leftover her like a shroud. 22:17 [SPEAKER_01]: The current county sheriff, Donnie Youngblood, later tower porters at a press conference that she had been left for dead. 22:24 [SPEAKER_01]: He set it plainly in front of the cameras and a careful flat voice that spoke of quiet anger. 22:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The girl had been sexually abused and left for dead in a dirt want. 22:35 [SPEAKER_01]: There is no softening that sentence. 22:37 [SPEAKER_01]: By mid-morning on Wednesday, July 27th, Cassandra was in protective custody. 22:42 [SPEAKER_01]: She was alive and conscious and she was being seen by doctors and by detectives. 22:47 [SPEAKER_01]: gently, the way a child of that age is seen with social workers in the room and care taken about every word. 22:54 [SPEAKER_01]: The story she gave in pieces, over our hours, was the story of being taken from a bed she trusted by a person whose face she could not name in the dark, when investigators asked her whether she was afraid of getting someone in trouble by talking to them. 23:09 [SPEAKER_01]: She said something that has stayed in the case final ever since. 23:13 [SPEAKER_01]: She said her step mom would never do that to her. 23:15 [SPEAKER_01]: She said that if had been somebody else, yes, she would get them in trouble. 23:20 [SPEAKER_01]: She did not name her father. 23:22 [SPEAKER_01]: She did not, in that interview, accuse anyone. 23:25 [SPEAKER_01]: She simply ruled out one woman in her family. 23:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Sheriff Youngblood held a press conference that day. 23:30 [SPEAKER_01]: He gave a few details and held back the rest. 23:33 [SPEAKER_01]: The investigation was active. 23:34 [SPEAKER_01]: The girl was safe. 23:35 [SPEAKER_01]: The investigators were following leads. 23:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Over the next 24 hours, the leads they were following would all begin to point in one direction. 23:44 [SPEAKER_01]: Listener, I want you to keep a couple pieces in your hand for the section that comes next. 23:49 [SPEAKER_01]: The first piece. 23:50 [SPEAKER_01]: There were no signs of first entry at the family's home. 23:53 [SPEAKER_01]: No broken window, no pride door, no tampered lock, whoever had taken Cassandra out of her bedroom had walked into the house through a door that was not locked against them, and had walked her out of it the same way. 24:06 [SPEAKER_01]: The second piece, the truck Cassandra described, the gray Chevrolet pick up with a couch in the back of it. 24:13 [SPEAKER_01]: match the family's own truck, it matched her father's truck, the third piece, the one that is going to do the heaviest lifting in a moment. 24:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Is this? 24:23 [SPEAKER_01]: Ray Coriel, that morning, after his daughter had gone missing, had been called by his wife. 24:29 [SPEAKER_01]: His wife had told him their child was gone. 24:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Ray had not, at the scene, behaved like a parian crisis, according to investigators who were 24:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Acting as if everything was fine. 24:43 [SPEAKER_01]: In a non-ass deputy's for updates on his daughter. 24:46 [SPEAKER_01]: He did not press them. 24:48 [SPEAKER_01]: He did not pace. 24:49 [SPEAKER_01]: He stood in his own house. 24:51 [SPEAKER_01]: The house's daughter had vanished from, and gave the impression of a man whose Wednesday was proceeding on schedule. 24:58 [SPEAKER_01]: By the end of Wednesday, the question of what had happened was no longer the question. 25:03 [SPEAKER_01]: The question was, 25:04 [SPEAKER_01]: who, and by the end of Wednesday, the people who were trying to answer that question were already looking at the man whose truck matched the description of the truck that child had been put inside. 25:15 [SPEAKER_01]: He was asked voluntarily to sit for a polygraph examination. 25:19 [SPEAKER_01]: He agreed. 25:21 [SPEAKER_01]: He came in that same week. 25:22 [SPEAKER_01]: He was asked questions about his daughter. 25:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Questions about the night and questions specifically about whether he had had sexual contact with her. 25:31 [SPEAKER_01]: The polygraph examiner and the report that was later released indicated that on the questions related to that act, Ray Coriel showed a high probability of deception. 25:42 [SPEAKER_01]: He was not arrested that day. 25:44 [SPEAKER_01]: The polygraph alone is not a basis for arrest. 25:47 [SPEAKER_01]: The polygraph is a tool, and investigators use it to find seams in a story. 25:53 [SPEAKER_01]: The places where the body tells a thing the mouth refuses. 25:56 [SPEAKER_01]: They had a seam now. 25:58 [SPEAKER_01]: They needed something underneath it. 26:00 [SPEAKER_01]: A second polygraph was scheduled for the following day, said I knew it on Thursday. 26:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Ray was told to come in. 26:06 [SPEAKER_01]: He did not come in. 26:08 [SPEAKER_01]: A crime scene is a document, so is a phone. 26:11 [SPEAKER_01]: A record made up of small electronic hand shakes that any modern device performs every few minutes with the closest piece of infrastructure that can hear it. 26:20 [SPEAKER_01]: In 2011, most of us were already carrying a tracking device in our pockets and not thinking of it that way. 26:27 [SPEAKER_01]: The phone in the pocket whispered to a tower, the tower wrote a record. 26:32 [SPEAKER_01]: The record, in cases like this one, became the difference between a story and a verdict. 26:37 [SPEAKER_01]: By Thursday morning, July 28th, detectives at the Kern County Sheriff's Office had asked for and received the cell phone records associated with raid couriel's number for the early hours of the previous day. 26:50 [SPEAKER_01]: They drew a line on a map. 26:52 [SPEAKER_01]: The line they drew was not the line of a man going to work. 26:56 [SPEAKER_01]: Ray had told his wife and told investigators that he loved the house at 345 in the morning to drive to his job. 27:03 [SPEAKER_01]: His job, listener, was not in the East Fakers field. 27:07 [SPEAKER_01]: His job was in the opposite direction. 27:09 [SPEAKER_01]: The cell phone records places device and East Fakers field. 27:13 [SPEAKER_01]: They placed it specifically, and the area near the field on Eucalyptus Drive. 27:18 [SPEAKER_01]: They placed it in the area where his daughter, hours later, would walk up to a gardener and ask for water. 27:24 [SPEAKER_01]: They placed it in the area where a couch had been dropped in a dirt one with a child underneath it. 27:29 [SPEAKER_01]: The line on the map did not match the line of a commute. 27:33 [SPEAKER_01]: It matched the line of a kidnapping. 27:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Listener, this is the moment in the case where the room turns. 27:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Up to this point, Ray Coriel was a father whose daughter had been taken, and the investigators around him were treating him with the quiet gravity that a man in that position is owed. 27:50 [SPEAKER_01]: They were watching, but they were watching softly. 27:53 [SPEAKER_01]: They were taking notes, and they were waiting. 27:56 [SPEAKER_01]: The cell phone records ended these niceties. 27:59 [SPEAKER_01]: Thursday at noon, Ray was due at the Sheriff's Office for that second polygraph. 28:04 [SPEAKER_01]: He did not arrive. 28:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Instead, he texted his wife. 28:07 [SPEAKER_01]: The texts were not the texts of a man going to a meeting. 28:10 [SPEAKER_01]: They were the texts of a man going somewhere else. 28:13 [SPEAKER_01]: He told her he wanted to harm himself. 28:15 [SPEAKER_01]: He told her he deserved to die. 28:17 [SPEAKER_01]: And one of those messages he made a disclosure he had not made do were before. 28:21 [SPEAKER_01]: He told her he had been the victim of a sexual assault by his older cousin when he was a child. 28:27 [SPEAKER_01]: He sent these messages from inside the house, he had blocked himself in his bedroom, and the bedroom contained among other things, several shotguns, his wife called for help, deputies arrived to surrounded the property, and what followed was a seven-hour stand-off, swan officers, negotiators, vehicle staged at the perimeter, 28:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Family members brought to the curb to talk to him through the line. 28:51 [SPEAKER_01]: The neighborhood and central baker's field, the one that had been waking up the day before to a missing child, was now waking up to a swat vehicle parked at the corner of Wachlomond, Cleveland Way, and a man with a shotgun inside the house. 29:06 [SPEAKER_01]: When the stand-off played out, Wachlomond was arrested on the lawn with their weapons trained on the front door. 29:11 [SPEAKER_01]: Detectives elsewhere in the county were closing the gap. 29:15 [SPEAKER_01]: The cell records had landed, the girl's account, the truck description. 29:19 [SPEAKER_01]: By the time the sun was sinking over the temple arranged that Thursday, the district attorney's office had what they needed for an arrest warrant. 29:27 [SPEAKER_01]: The warrant was signed. 29:28 [SPEAKER_01]: It charged Ray Coriel with kidnapping. 29:31 [SPEAKER_01]: with kidnapping to commit rape and sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 10, with attempted murder. 29:38 [SPEAKER_01]: While the warrant was being signed, Ray inside his bedroom was writing. 29:43 [SPEAKER_01]: He was writing letters. 29:44 [SPEAKER_01]: He addressed one of them to God. 29:46 [SPEAKER_01]: The first words of that letter, according to the court documents that would later make their way through the public record, were for give me farther for I have sinned. 29:54 [SPEAKER_01]: He wrote letters to each of his children, the letters told them he missed them. 29:59 [SPEAKER_01]: He wrote them as if he was already gone. 30:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Around seven in the evening, after seven hours of negotiation, Ray came out of the house. 30:06 [SPEAKER_01]: He was taken into custody, transported to the sheriff's headquarters. 30:10 [SPEAKER_01]: booked and held on a bail set at $1 million. 30:14 [SPEAKER_01]: In the interview that followed, he gave a statement that hung over this case. 30:18 [SPEAKER_01]: He did not, in any clear way, deny what happened. 30:21 [SPEAKER_01]: He told investigators that he had blackouts. 30:24 [SPEAKER_01]: He said he had a flashback that night. 30:26 [SPEAKER_01]: A flashback to his own childhood abuse while standing at his daughter's bedroom door. 30:32 [SPEAKER_01]: He said the next thing he remembered was being out in a field. 30:35 [SPEAKER_01]: He said he could not recall how Cassandra had ended up in his truck. 30:39 [SPEAKER_01]: He said, and these are his words from the court documents. 30:43 [SPEAKER_01]: I think I heard a cough. 30:44 [SPEAKER_01]: He said he remembered hearing a voice. 30:46 [SPEAKER_01]: He said he remembered nudging a couch and tossing a couch pillow. 30:50 [SPEAKER_01]: He said his wife had called him, while he was in that field. 30:54 [SPEAKER_01]: And the call had pulled him back into the moment. 30:56 [SPEAKER_01]: And he had looked around, and he had not. 30:59 [SPEAKER_01]: Until that instant understood where he was. 31:02 [SPEAKER_01]: On its face, that is a strange story. 31:05 [SPEAKER_01]: But it's not the account of a man who knows what he did. 31:08 [SPEAKER_01]: But the account of a man who knows what was done and who is hiding from the truth from underneath a layer of language that lets him not own it. 31:16 [SPEAKER_01]: The investigators in that room were not in the business of letting that language do its work. 31:22 [SPEAKER_01]: He was charged. 31:23 [SPEAKER_01]: Originally with 11 felonies, the list included kidnapping to commit rape, kidnapping a child under 14 for LUDE-ARL-SIVIS-AX, sexual intercourse with a child under 10, an attempted murder. 31:36 [SPEAKER_01]: If he had been convicted on all 11 counts at trial, he would have faced multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole. 31:44 [SPEAKER_01]: There would have been no number on the back end of his prison time. 31:47 [SPEAKER_01]: He would have died inside the case sad and years passed for almost four years. 31:54 [SPEAKER_01]: During those four years Cassandra grew up, she lived with her mother and continued to recover in the slow and uneven way that survivors of that kind of harm 32:04 [SPEAKER_01]: cover. 32:05 [SPEAKER_01]: In June of 2015, Ray Coriel, now 33 years old, took a plea. 32:11 [SPEAKER_01]: He pleaded no contest to three of the original charges. 32:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Two sex crime charges and the attempted murder charge. 32:18 [SPEAKER_01]: The plea took the multiple life sentences off the table, and also took a trial off the table. 32:23 [SPEAKER_01]: It took the possibility of Cassandra needing to take the witness stand, and tell her story to a jury in a room with the man who had raped her. 32:32 [SPEAKER_01]: The sentence happened the next month in July of 2015, almost exactly four years after the night of the kidnapping. 32:40 [SPEAKER_01]: The judge handed down a sentence of 34 years to life in a California state prison. 32:45 [SPEAKER_01]: 34 years to life is not the same sentence as life without parole. 32:50 [SPEAKER_01]: It carries a back end. 32:51 [SPEAKER_01]: It says on paper that there is a day in the future where Ray Coriel will become eligible 32:59 [SPEAKER_01]: That day is decades from the day he walked into prison. 33:02 [SPEAKER_01]: It will come up when it does parole boards will weigh what was done in the house on Mach-Wam and Drive. 33:09 [SPEAKER_01]: In the early morning of July 27th, 2011, against whatever Ray Corio has become in the intervening years, people and Cassandra's family will presumably attend those hearings in front of strangers and suits every few years 33:27 [SPEAKER_01]: comes out. 33:28 [SPEAKER_01]: Listener, that is where the legal record sits. 33:31 [SPEAKER_01]: But the legal record is not the whole story. 33:33 [SPEAKER_01]: The whole record includes the bedroom door he stood at. 33:36 [SPEAKER_01]: In the moment he chose to open it, it includes the seven-year-old girl who told her brother the night before that she had a funny feeling. 33:45 [SPEAKER_01]: It includes the gardener of what the hose down and gave a thirsty child a drink of water. 33:50 [SPEAKER_01]: It includes the wife who got the text from her husband saying he deserved to die and was correct. 33:59 [UNKNOWN]: You
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