A Murder Mystery Rises From California Ashes

LOS ANGELES (March 17) -- It began on Christmas Eve, when a couple of hikers decided to traipse through a section of the massive Angeles National Forest that had burned bare a few weeks earlier in the 160,000-acre Station Fire. Moving down a steep ravine, deep into the forest, the hikers found the unexpected.

A human skull.

The hikers called authorities who, given the day, sealed off the area and then the morning after Christmas descended with a full forensics team to scrape, dig and sift through dirt and ash. They found more bones. And a second skull.

Justin Sullivan, Getty Images

Hikers found two skulls and other bones last year in the Angeles National Forest, burned bare by the Station Fire a few weeks earlier.

Since then, officials have learned little more than what they knew at the time. The investigators believe the skulls were there before the Station Fire, though they don't know for how long.

One of the skulls, of a man, has a bullet hole in it. The other skull, of a woman, shows signs of trauma. More bones were found nearby, as were three distinctive jeweled rings, which police had hoped would help them figure out who the victims were.

No such luck. They can't even tell whether the two people were killed at the same time, or whether they are investigating two separate crimes. Anthropologists and other investigators from the Los Angeles County medical examiner's office are hoping more detailed analysis of the bones, DNA and the site will yield more clues.

"It can be a couple of months" for DNA analysis to be finished, said Ed Winter, assistant chief coroner for the Los Angeles County medical examiner's office. "Then, of course, it can be years before you get any hits."

David McNew, Getty Images

The Station Fire blackened thousands of acres of forest in the Los Angeles' mountains, long a favorite haunt for criminal activity.

Despite the tragic circumstances, the discoveries add to the mystique of Los Angeles' mountains, and the high desert beyond, which have long been favorite dumping grounds for killers, hideaways for pot-farmers and meth-makers, and desolate scenes for rape.

The remote reaches of L.A.'s mountains have even shown up in popular culture, from "Perry Mason" TV shows to literature. James M. Cain's narrator in "Double Indemnity," for instance, sets up an unsuccessful murder in a remote part of Griffith Park, the city's iconic wildlands straddling the mountains separating Hollywood from the San Fernando Valley.

"It's not uncommon, unfortunately," Winter said. "We recently had bones found in Griffith Park. The fire came through, and then the heavy rains, and a week later a hiker found some bones."

It's impossible to measure a void, so officials can't say how many bodies go unfound in the dense underbrush.

And it's not just bodies that find a final resting place in the wilds. After a fire sweeps through, all manner of trash and discards, such as abandoned cars and old furniture, emerge from the underbrush, charred castoffs from the densely populated flatlands.

"Urban areas, such as L.A., mean there is little privacy," said Glynn Martin, executive director of the Los Angeles Police Historical Society. "The forests, on the other hand, provide remote expanses where many things criminal, such as marijuana grows, rapes or murders, can be carried out privately and without the risk of immediate discovery."

Some crimes have drawn national media coverage. The body of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion was found in the nearby Cleveland National Forest in Orange County in 2002, where she had been buried by her kidnapper and killer, Alejandro Avila, who was sentenced to death in the case in 2005.

Nick Ut, AP

Investigators search near the edge of the Cleveland National Forest in Riverside County, Calif., where the body of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion was found in 2002.

Martin, though, disputes the notion that the mountains carry a mystique as a dumping ground. It's more a function of proximity.

"There are about 10 million people in the greater L.A. area," he said, "For the very, very few that have disposal needs of a criminal variety, there are two obvious choices: the Pacific Ocean or the mountains. In the one case, debris becomes apparent, and in the other it generally doesn't. I wouldn't rush to call L.A.'s beaches a dumping ground for the murderous few, so I wouldn't apply it to the local forests, either."

Still, Winter said, the mountains regularly give up their dead.

"Sometimes bodies are dumped and found rather quickly, and then sometimes after we've had heavy rains hikers will locate human bones in the sands," he said. "We have a specialized team that responds to skeletal remains, and they sometimes go out two or three times in a month, and then for a couple of months we don't have anything.

"But it happens all the time."