[ominous music playing]
[narrator] As teenagers, they bonded over a desire
to be someone else for a night.
[laughter]
But reality hits hard when one of them is found dead.
As rumors and gossip take over the narrative...
[sirens wail]
...the surviving friends start to question everything
and everyone...
[man groans]
...they thought they knew.
[main theme playing]
[Lydia] I gotta say that I'm slightly uncomfortable
about going to the park. -[Mark] Yeah.
[Lydia] I've never been to the park before.
There's a lot of people who don't even know this part
of my life. -Yeah.
A ton of people.
This event really kicked me in the ass because it sent
this shockwave of like, "No, it was never safe.
You're lucky you're alive."
-[Lydia] Is that it? -[Mark] That's it.
That's the tunnel.
Feels weird being this close.
I've never been this close since.
It looks exactly like every other train tunnel
in the world. -Yeah.
-But for us,
it's completely unique. -Right?
[Mark] Yeah.
This is the last thing he saw, right?
[man echoing] Help!
["Imagination" by Glitter Symphony playing]
♪ Kick the ball party ♪
♪ On a [indistinct] night ♪
♪ Everyone's a no one ♪
♪ Not much day and light ♪
♪ You're waiting, waiting for someone who never comes ♪
♪ You have to be that too ♪
[Mark] Ron and I met in Indian Guides, which was
an alternative to the Boy Scouts.
[playful music playing]
[children cheering and playing]
I was in first grade, and he was coming
out of kindergarten.
We really found a connection because we were both,
you know, we were both a little weirdo...kids.
Very Gen-X, these sort of feral kids that were free to run
around in a neighborhood that was pretty safe.
We would go down into the sewers, the storm drains,
with our skateboards and a flashlight,
and cruise on down.
It was like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."
Going... [makes swooshing sounds]
Right, you know, through this tube.
And we came home when the streetlights came on.
[children cheering]
[Lydia] In the 80's, when you were 13 and you wanted to make out with
a boy or drink a really tragic wine cooler,
you would go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
That's when we became friends.
Ron, Mark, Duncan, Lindsey, all of them.
People treated it like going to a club on a Saturday night.
It was awesome.
You were just going to see a movie, so, like,
how dangerous could that be?
-[rock music playing] -[people cheering]
[Lindsey] When I was 14 years old, we all started dressing up
like the characters.
We would get to the show probably, like, two hours
beforehand and hang around in the parking lot,
smoking cigarettes, blasting music.
When you're that age, like early teens, mid-teens,
your friends are the most important thing in the world.
I can't stress enough how happy that time was for all of us.
It just seemed like such innocent fun.
[rock music ends]
I was in college up in Santa Barbara,
and Ron moved in with Duncan,
living in the Valley.
And then Nathan moved in, and he was a friend of Duncan's.
Duncan definitely replaced
the Mark-factor for Ron.
Ron finally sort of found himself and his confidence.
And he got accepted to UCLA,
and he started going to the Renaissance Faire.
And there's a whole culture of people at the Renaissance Faire
that he got to know.
[horse neighs]
When I met Ron and Duncan for the first time.
I was living with my friend Debra, and we were all doing
the Renaissance Faire together.
She had a dress in Elizabethan costumes, so it would just be
like this fantasy.
Of course, being 20-something, it would be a drink fest.
[folkloric music playing]
[Lydia] It's not my bag.
I was, like, going to see punk rock shows.
[rock music playing]
And then there was people with swords saying things like,
"Thou!" I was like, "I love you --
[kiss smacks] -- bye."
One night, there was a concert that I was going to
with a bunch of cool people that I had met in Santa Barbara.
And I called Ron and asked if he wanted to come up.
And he said he had plans. It was the summer solstice.
And he said he was gonna be doing something
to celebrate that.
Ron was spiritual that way.
[Lydia] I was supposed to be there that night,
but I canceled on Ron.
And I always wonder what would have happened if I was...
[eerie music playing]
[Patty] About 11:30 on Thursday night, my dad called me...
[phone rings]
...and told me that somebody had called him and said,
"Mr. Baker, we have your son.
Unless you give us $100,000, he will die."
[phone rings]
We were hoping it was just a prank,
but he called and checked...
[phone rings]
...with Ron's roommates, Duncan and Nathan,
at the apartment.
They told him that Ron had been dropped off at a bus stop on
Van Nuys Boulevard and took the bus over the hill to UCLA,
so we got a little concerned.
[ominous music playing]
I got a call at work...
[phone rings]
[Mark] ...which was very unusual,
and it was Ron's sister Patty trying to find Ron
because he didn't come home.
I was getting phone calls when I was at work.
"What do you mean Ron's missing?"
"Well, Ron was supposed to go to UCLA.
He took a bus to UCLA and he never made it."
I'm like, "What? That's weird."
Nobody could understand why some random person
would kidnap Ron.
But we knew that it couldn't be anybody we know because anybody
who knows Ron knows they're not rich people.
I went to our family home just to wait and see what happened.
And then there was another phone call that came through.
[phone rings]
[Patty] "Mr. Baker, we have your son.
Unless you give us $100,000 by 5 o'clock, he will die."
[ominous music playing]
[Patty] And then they hung up.
And at that point, my dad called the police.
[911 operator] 911, what is your emergency?
[Patty] They put a tap on the phone.
But the third call never came.
What was really odd about the ransom calls is they never
gave information about where to bring the money,
what the meetup was, the usual kind of story
when you're kidnapping a person.
[ominous music playing]
Sunday, I was working late, and when I got back, I had
a message to call my parents.
So I called them, and that's when they told me...
Ron's body had been found.
[ominous music intensifies]
[Adriane] Ron was found in the Chatsworth train tunnel
a couple days before.
But we had heard they couldn't identify him at first
'cause it looked like he'd been hit by a train.
[train whistles]
But he wasn't killed by a train.
He'd been stabbed, and his throat
had been slashed.
[unnerving chords pounding]
We didn't even know what to think.
It was shocking.
We were just like, "What do you mean, Ron's dead?
"This can't be real. I mean, not Ron.
"Who would want to do this to Ron?
You know, Ron was a nice guy."
My first thought was, is if this could happen to Ron,
it could happen to any one of us.
[ominous music intensified]
'Cause I was supposed to go with him that night...
would it have happened to me too?
It's terrifying.
And that became the circus that we all lived in.
[sirens wailing]
There's always a distrust that somebody is not
who they say they are.
And that at any point, it could all be taken away.
Forever.
[suspenseful music playing]
[man screams]
After I found out he was gone, um...
and I looked up at the stars,
like Ron and I used to do,
and I looked at a star. I think it was Sirius.
It was like one star that I knew, and I told him
to meet me there.
I told him to find me there.
[sad music playing]
And I imagined us...
...you know, seeing each other again.
[emotional, shaky breathing]
Ron was open to the possibility of things
that couldn't be proven.
He loved the idea of connecting with the Universe to do
some kind of spiritual ritual to celebrate the solstice.
A couple days before the summer solstice, I know
he was trying to get, like, people to take him
up the Chatsworth Tunnel.
It's also known as the Manson Tunnel.
Because the Manson family used to be up around that area.
But we all said "No."
Because a year prior,
a group of us -- Duncan, Nathan, and Ron,
and our friend Debra -- we went up there,
midnight, one night,
and we encountered, like, some other weird people
in the tunnels,
and the whole place had like a bad vibe, like we are not
meant to be here. But Ron had always liked it.
Ron always wanted to go back.
[ominous music intensifies]
[man] Mr. Baker's body was discovered in the railroad
tunnel above Chatsworth Park.
Mr. Baker was stabbed numerous times
and had his throat slit.
The circumstances of his death and the things that we went
through, it's still traumatic.
I got a phone call -- it was a call I would never forget.
[phone rings]
They had found Ron, and he was murdered.
And I screamed.
[scream echoing]
And I was like, "Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?" You know?
I was getting calls from my friends.
There was, like, a ransom call. Nobody knew where Ron was.
And then, like, all of a sudden, by Monday, he was dead.
It was just -- it was so rapid fire.
We were like, "What, what is going on here"?
When the detectives started looking at Ron's murder,
they went over to the apartment,
and when they looked through Ron's room,
they found a makeshift altar that had a big candle
in the shape of a pentagram,
and then, his roommates, Nathan and Duncan,
told the detectives that Ron went to UCLA
to go to a Mystic Circle meeting that night.
We had heard that Ron's body was decimated with,
like, symbols, pentagrams, and they thought it
was, like, a ritual killing.
So that's where the police were going.
Then, this whole Mystic Circle came up, and it became that Ron
got into black magic.
Channel 4 news has learned he was involved in occult
organizations both on and off the UCLA campus.
[Lydia] At the beginning, it was just our story.
And then the news got a hold of it,
and then it became everybody's story.
[reporter #1] This next story, a bright, God-fearing kid,
who went off to school at UCLA in Los Angeles --
then he was found murdered.
And as our Robyn Dorian reports, a macabre secret
double life was revealed.
That was during the time of Satanic Panic --
you have that Tipper Gore effect of music and life,
There's songs about thrill killing, sadomasochism.
[Lydia] Where people were scared of Ozzy Osbourne and everybody's
you know, a Satanist and Satanists are coming after
your children, and there was this whole Satanic Panic that
happened in the 80's and early 90's in,
I don't know if it happened all over the world,
but certainly happened in Los Angeles.
[reporter #2] Some young people are attracted to the occult by
seemingly harmless pleasures,
such as fantasy role-playing games like "Dungeons & Dragons."
[Lydia] The news had seen some pictures of Ron in a Wicca group,
and it just decided that Ron was a Satanist.
[Debra] Ron was part of something called the Mystic Circle.
But the fact that Ron was into Wicca
has no relevance to his murder.
Ron wasn't Satanic. He was very much ritual-based.
But people tried to sensationalize that.
[suspenseful music playing]
We had met with the detectives, and their line
of questioning was all about the occult.
Asking us what we knew about Wicca and the occult.
They were very interested in the fact -- they wanted to know
if any of us carried knives,
which we did because of Renaissance Faire.
And then I remember them saying, "So do you use
"these knives to kill animals with?"
"Do you, like, sacrifice animals?"
You know, we had, like, four cats walking
around the apartment.
We're like, "Where are you going with this?"
Me and Lydia, we thought maybe there was some random crazy
person who killed him.
Ron was very trusting.
So it really could've been anyone.
The mystery, the big question that we were trying to figure
out was, you know, what happened to him after
he got dropped off at the bus stop?
Like, between there and him being murdered, what happened?
We thought, "Well, maybe he didn't go to UCLA.
Instead, he took a bus up to the train tunnel."
There were some weird groups up there when they had killed him.
[man screams]
Me and Adriane and Duncan and Nathan talked about,
you know, what are the possibilities?
Did he have other friends that he went up there with?
Maybe I'm naive, and people are going up to the train tunnel
doing occult stuff.
Maybe somebody's after all of our friends.
You know...
Who knows what's going on.
Nobody knew what happened.
And everybody started looking at each other
a little differently.
It wasn't the same afterwards.
It was hard to trust anybody else.
And it wasn't too long before I began to wonder if it was
someone from within our friend group.
[ominous music intensifies]
[narrator] The discovery of 21-year-old Ron Baker's mutilated body is
a horror his family and friends struggle to comprehend.
[sirens wail]
For them, this must have been the actions of an unknown evil,
while police are going public
with a much more sinister cause.
Police fear 21-year-old Ronald Baker, a UCLA student,
was stabbed to death by a Satanic cult.
[Ron's dad] There's Ron and Patty.
[Ron] Howdy, dad.
[Patty] Ron was a great little brother.
Ron was always really funny.
He had a really great sense of humor.
We would play games around the house.
We were involved in the church.
My parents were charter members, which is why I think
my parents and I thought it was ridiculous that Ron's murder
would be tied to the occult.
We even talked to the detectives about it,
and we were kind of upset that it was on TV.
[Det. Frank] Many people think that because of the way Mr. Baker
was murdered, it could've been a revenge-type killing
where he betrayed a certain cult.
Other people went as far as to suggest that it may possibly
be a sacrifice.
But the detectives told my parents and I that they were
not really leaning that way.
They really didn't feel that it was occult-related.
But any media is good media at this time, because if the story
is out there, people that saw him at the park that night
might come forward and say what really happened.
So we were all just hoping for that.
[organ playing]
[Lydia] I remember that...
I didn't have anything to wear.
I didn't have any black clothes,
like, that were nice.
I remember Duncan was a pallbearer.
I remember being upset that I wasn't.
I had never been to a funeral.
And Ron's dad was there, and he started crying,
and I cried too.
Like, that was the first time I really cried.
I gave a eulogy, and Duncan did too.
Duncan gave a eulogy as well.
When...Duncan went up and gave a eulogy,
I thought to myself,
"I'm his best friend."
Like, you only get one.
You don't get two best friends.
You're not his best friend.
I was a little off put by that, but...
And then, after that, I think we all, you know, after the funeral
was done, we all went over to Lydia's and commiserated.
It was one of the most emotional days of my life.
[sad music playing]
[Lydia] It was a terrifying time.
I mean, even after that, we were all like,
"Who would kidnap Ron?"
I remember thinking, "Well, where's Nathan?"
-Yeah, yeah. -And Nathan had bailed. He was gone.
[Lydia] I remember after the funeral,
Duncan said, "I can't keep going back to that apartment.
"Now that Ron's dead, it's too upsetting.
"I can't keep going back.
We have to let the apartment go."
-Yeah. -We were terrified around that time,
but Duncan was in a panic. -That's right.
That's right. He was afraid.
-Yeah. -And that's when Duncan
moved in with us.
My parents felt really bad for him.
And they said, "We should take care of him.
He should stay here." -Yeah.
Duncan was staying with my family, and his...
moods changed.
More solemn, more angry, more paranoid.
He started saying peculiar things.
Things like, "I think I was followed today.
"Did you see a car outside?
"Did you see this car, blue car, red car, whatever,
this make, model? Did you see this?"
This is when we all started to get worried that he was losing
touch with reality.
[suspenseful music playing]
He was increasingly paranoid about stuff.
Maybe they were after him, and they got Ron by mistake.
[Lydia] Then one day, he didn't come home.
He kinda came home on the regular.
He'd say, like, "See you around 10, see you around 11."
And he didn't come home.
-And then the phone rang. -[phone rings]
[Lydia] It was about 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.
I was asleep.
When the phone rang too long, the answering machine
would pick it up.
But I picked up the phone, and it was Duncan.
He said,
"Lydia, they got me."
And I was like, "What? Who's got you"?
And he said, "The guys who killed Ron,
they got me."
[Lydia] I hung up the phone,
and I was like, "They got Ron, and then they got Duncan."
Nobody knew who was next.
[eerie music playing]
Duncan, he's bigger than life. He's very charismatic.
He's kind of good-looking. He's fun to be around.
He had a great imagination.
Duncan came up with a lot of crazy stories, and he always
had something interesting to talk about.
You knew that he was a lot. You knew he told stories.
You always meet someone who's like,
"He caught the biggest fish."
[eerie music playing]
Duncan and Ron definitely were like yin to yang.
Duncan had more of the personality.
He was more outgoing, and Ron was more quiet,
so it always seemed like Ron was kinda along for the ride.
It's the little brother syndrome, so he's trying
to keep up with his, like, cooler friend.
He said that he had been in the Marines
and that he had been discharged, but not really.
They said he was going on secret missions.
He would disappear for a few days and say, "Oh, well, I had
to go to Africa and, you know, kill a man."
I said, "Oh, so they flew you, this one guy, overseas."
Like, within a course of 48 hours, you got flown overseas,
did whatever you did, and then you got flown back?
Whatever, Duncan.
You knew it wasn't true, but it was just part
of who he was, you know?
After Ron's death, he moved in with Lydia or Lydia's family.
And we barely talked to Duncan at that time.
And the next thing we know, somehow, you know,
he gets kidnapped.
[phone rings]
After I hung up the phone, I was completely out
of my mind, scared.
And my stepmother said, "We have to call
the police right now."
[sirens wail]
Then Detective Garcia showed up, and I told him
the whole story. And he asked for the tape.
[phone line bleeps]
[Lydia] And then he said, "We'll be in touch.
We'll be in contact."
[Patty] I was actually nervous for myself.
Like, who are these people? Why did they take Duncan?
Could they come after me next? Like, what's going on?
My parents were so worried.
And my dad got a gun, and we had a baseball bat.
I don't know what that would do.
But we literally were all home, terrified for the longest time.
When I heard about the kidnapping, it just seemed
so over the top. It was, like,
I didn't believe it.
It's ludicrous. Duncan was just a liar.
I'm gonna put this nicely.
Lydia was not in the circle of friends that I knew.
If you knew what Duncan was like,
how could you not have seen
that he faked it?
Duncan just couldn't handle what happened to Ron,
and so he just left.
Duncan was feeling a lot of pressure from the police,
and he told my parents that too.
So we were waiting to see what happened,
and he didn't resurface. And then, um...
the police weren't giving us a lot at the time.
But my dad remembered that Duncan had asked us to store
boxes in the garage.
And my dad found a to-do list in one of the boxes.
And the first thing was, "Get a new ID."
"Get a new car."
It's basically like, a list you would make if you're trying
to get a new identity.
So my dad immediately called the detectives.
It felt like the longest time, but Detective Garcia came back
and he said, "So...
"this call that Duncan made to you, saying he was in
a warehouse in North Hollywood..."
[Duncan] They got me in, like, a warehouse,
like, in North Hollywood.
The call actually came from Nevada.
I was like, "Nevada? They had him in -- "
Literally, I was like,
"He was kidnapped and taken to Nevada?"
And that's when Detective Garcia had to explain it to us.
"He made the call from Nevada from a bus station.
"He took a bus from Los Angeles to Nevada, and now we don't
know where he is. He's running."
And I couldn't believe it.
Because you see things
on TV where people do...
really cruel things, where they bait
and deceive and hurt people, and it's entertainment.
You just, it's never you.
[ominous music playing]
[sirens wail]
[Debra] Detectives came and talked to us again, and it was really
clear to them that there was no occult aspect to this murder.
Even though that narrative kept coming up in the newspapers,
but they were asking us if we'd heard from Duncan,
and they made it clear he was kind of on the run...
and that they were considering him a suspect.
We knew he ran 'cause he couldn't handle it.
We just didn't know that he ran because he was involved.
They also asked us a lot more questions
about their roommate, Nathan, and his relationship with Ron.
Because it wasn't just Duncan that they were looking for.
It was Nathan and Duncan.
[ominous music intensifies]
And it's like the hair raises up on your arms.
There was no good reason for them to have killed Ron,
but we sat down and told them stuff
that we hadn't told them before.
I remembered about two to three months before
Ron's death, Duncan and Nathan started getting really close.
It kinda pushed out Ron.
And then Duncan told us he was going to get a fake ID.
And somehow Duncan and Nathan were gonna come into
all this money.
That's when things started adding up that, like,
somehow those guys were involved in it.
[Debra] Detectives told us to be careful, and if we hear from
them, let us know, and it all felt very surreal.
The idea that Duncan and Nathan were still out there
and had done this to Ron...
was frightening.
Ron's former roommates are the prime suspects
in his murder.
No one knows where to find them
or what they'll do when they're face to face.
[distorted scream echoing]
[soft ominous music playing]
[Debra] Nothing had been resolved with Ron's murder.
Duncan and Nathan were their suspects.
There hadn't been any justice served, and it felt
like it was still all hanging over all of our heads.
Duncan was...
on the lam.
And Nathan, I never saw him again, never heard
from him, nothing...
until that day
at the Renaissance Faire.
That day, Adriane and I are at Renaissance Faire.
We're walking through the crowd,
and it's a nice, beautiful day and in the distance, I can kinda
see somebody that I think I recognize.
And he's heading right towards us.
As this person got closer to me, I realized it was somebody
that I didn't really wanna see.
I realized that it was Nathan.
I started to get anxious.
But he was really happy to see us, and came up and gave Adriane
and I a big hug.
And I didn't want him to know I knew.
So, you know, I just let him hug me and said,
"Hey, how's things going?"
I didn't wanna be around him.
But detectives told us, you know, if we hear from them
or if you run into them or anything, you know,
to let us know.
And they went out to Renaissance Faire to try
to find him.
It was just this wild goose chase.
And every so often, at the Renaissance Faire,
like, all of a sudden, the detectives show up,
and they never really told us that they had found either
Duncan or Nathan.
[Lydia] I was living in New York City, and I got a call that Duncan
had been caught. And I thought that was it.
I thought it was over.
[Patty] Duncan was arrested in Salt Lake City
for a fraudulent passport charge.
So he starts talking about a case in L.A.
that he says he was involved in,
and that he has information about.
And that was Ron's death.
So the LAPD detectives were really interested
in Duncan's story.
This is all just from Duncan, who is a habitual
manipulator, liar.
So...no story that he tells will ever...
be my story.
But apparently,
Duncan and Nathan had been watching criminal shows about
how you get money out of people
and how you pull off good heists.
And they had decided to use this plan on Ron.
"We're not gonna hurt Ron,
but we're gonna get money out of his parents."
And they took him to the train tunnel.
They went up to Chatsworth Park.
And they were drinking beer.
They were pretty drunk, especially Ron.
And then, I guess Nathan stumbled, and Ron was making
fun of him, or, you know, saying things.
[man laughs]
[Patty] And Nathan just snapped
and just started stabbing him.
[echoing scream]
Duncan said it was dark, so he couldn't see,
but that Nathan kept turning on a lighter,
and that he could see little flashes of what was going on.
After that, they went down from the tunnel and called
the ransom call in.
[phone rings]
[Patty] I know that Duncan made the ransom call to my parents,
so to me, he's equally as guilty as Nathan.
But Duncan was cooperating with the detectives, and Nathan was
incarcerated for a different crime.
So Duncan agreed to wear a wire and go visit Nathan so that
he could try to get a confession.
He goes and gets Nathan to admit to killing Ron
in the tunnels that night.
With Nathan's confession and the DNA evidence, both were
arrested and charged with murder.
[Mark] It wasn't just like a kidnapping.
It was murder. And they planned it.
They knew they were gonna murder him.
[Adriane] And then they lied to all of us.
That's where the betrayal comes in.
Duncan put on a show to all of us.
You knew what happened to Ron.
You were there, and you got everybody's sympathy.
[Debra] He got up there and gave a eulogy.
It's made me the most angry that he could carry the casket,
carry the casket and sit there, you know, with us, day by day,
watching us cry.
Look us in the eye and -- and lie.
[Lydia] He prayed on Ron, and then he prayed on us.
He ruined so many lives.
I will never...
be the same.
It affected every relationship and friendship I had
after that.
If you can't trust people who were in your friend group,
who do you trust?
[melancholic piano playing]
Duncan and Nathan, they each had separate trials.
[Adriane] I had to go be a witness in both trials.
Nathan was just blank.
He just sat there, like he knew he had been caught.
And then I walked by Duncan and remember Duncan giving me
this weak little smile and me just staring him down.
I remember I just wanted to spit at him.
I wanted to hit him.
[Patty] They were both convicted of first degree murder and got
life without parole. -[Adriane] Duncan got life.
And then, 2021, wonderful Governor Newsom
released Duncan on early -- gave him parole,
which...is horrible. And now, he's out of jail.
You look up these YouTube channels, and he's talking,
like, "Oh yes, back when I was incarcerated..."
I spent 27 years inside.
And it's like, you were incarcerated
for killing your best friend.
Like that should be your disclaimer.
You should have to wear something around your neck.
I don't know where the justice is, you know?
[Patty] Ron would have been a really great uncle,
and my kids never got to meet him.
And it's just really difficult to not have him around.
[Mark] Yeah.
[crickets chirping]
[Mark] Yeah.
This was... was the end of the line.
[Mark sniffs]
I loved him. He was such a good person.
Smart and funny. He challenged me.
He taught me. He had this...
this drive to do good for the world.
There's not a lot of people like him.
-Love you. -Love you too.
You're kinda all I have left of him.
-Ditto. -Yeah.
[people speaking indistinctly]
As long as we can remember all that amazing stuff he was,
how smart and kind. Look at Ron.
-[Mark] Yeah. -[Lydia] Aw, Ron.
Stop it.
That legacy will way outlive Duncan and Nathan.
[Mark] Here he's got like a beret on 'cause he's in
the Renaissance Faire.
Oh man, he loved the Renaissance Faire.
'Cause they won't get a legacy.
And we're his.
[echoing laughter]