You'll Never Find My Body

It is not commonly known that one of the most productive gold mines in California’s history is twenty-five miles east of Valencia, near the high desert community of Acton. The discovery of precious minerals in the region shortly after the Civil War brought prospectors, who burrowed into the hills and gullies like giant gophers. Some of the tunnels, with colorful names such as Red Rover, Puritan, and New York, descended hundreds of feet. Henry T. Gage, who became California’s twentieth governor, from 1899 to 1903, owned several of the mines. Years later, when his relatives reopened the New York pit, hoping to find a new vein of gold, they renamed it the Governor.

These caves and tunnels may have enriched a few in earlier eras, but they turned into daunting problems for homicide detectives in recent times. The odds of finding a murder victim tossed into one of the caverns bordered on zero. Yet, dedicated officers, like Frank Salerno and Louis Danoff, kept trying. With a team of helpers, they searched the Governor and Red Rover mine areas to follow up on tips and clues. “That area is known for a long time to be a site where bodies have been dumped. Around Santa Clarita, all the way up to Palmdale, Lancaster, and the Antelope Valley, it has been a dumping ground where bodies have been, you know, murdered and hidden for decades,” stated Danoff.

Giving an example, Danoff explained, “Prior to this Ann Racz investigation, there was an LAPD murder in which the victims were missing and never found. A few clues turned up and we joined LAPD investigators. We set up a search in which we went back to the Acton area. We lowered video cameras into the mines. So we went up there in the search for Ann Racz and used the video camera technique again, but found nothing.”

Spring weather in the Santa Clarita Valley turned into broiling summer heat. On July 17, Danoff met with Emi Ryan and her daughter Kathy inside the well-cooled ambience of Tips restaurant on hamburger hill. They reviewed the investigation’s progress, discussed John Racz’s behavior, and recapitulated facts about Ann’s routines. Kathy brought a Thomas Guide mapbook of L.A. County, with certain pages marked, and gave it to the detective.

Back in his office, Danoff created a document containing Ann’s dental chart, thumbprint, and a physical description of her to be circulated to every sheriff’s department and coroner’s office in California. He obtained her prints from records of her application to teach in Los Angeles County. The detective also asked that the information be distributed to all fifty Departments of Justice throughout the United States. This provided an opportunity for data to be matched in both civil and criminal case searches. On the slim chance that Ann had voluntarily left and might apply for a job somewhere, Danoff explained, she would probably be required to submit to fingerprinting. Occupations requiring fingerprints include teachers. The description included her height, weight, hair color, scars, and other information.

Because John Racz insisted that Ann had gone on a trip, Danoff arranged for Interpol to receive copies of the flyers. He wanted to be certain that if she entered any one of the 186 countries served by the international police agency, there would be a chance of her being seen.

Over the next couple of years, Danoff would renew the profiles, and arrange for redistribution of them.

Frank Salerno oversaw distribution of flyers to bus stations, LAX, Flyaway, other shuttle services. He made certain they were posted at all restaurants and businesses on hamburger hill near Lyons Avenue, and sent a few to the Firestone sheriff’s station, where John Racz had once worked.

Homicide detectives do not have the luxury of limiting their investigation to a single case. Salerno and Danoff worked a thick stack of other murders simultaneously. While their dedication to solving the mystery of Ann Racz never flagged, they couldn’t give it all of their time.

Summer and fall raced by with no encouraging developments. Christmas and New Year’s Eve left only frustration for the investigators, as well as for Ann’s family.

On January 13, 1992, four days before Ann would have turned forty-three, news of human remains discovered in the Antelope Valley struck Danoff with the force of a .45-caliber slug to the chest. He hadn’t forgotten the frustration he felt seven years earlier when a jury had freed Steven Jackson from charges of murdering Julie Church. Now, construction workers excavating a site no more than 150 paces from Jackson’s residence unearthed a skeleton. Dental records left no doubt about the identity of Julie, who had vanished in 1981. She had resigned from her job and stopped at a Lancaster tavern to celebrate. A witness reported seeing her walk out of the bar with Jackson, the manager of a local board-and-care home. No one ever saw her again.

As part of the investigation team, Danoff had helped convince the district attorney to file charges against Jackson, even without finding the victim’s body. A prolonged trial, lasting twenty-two months, had resulted in a not guilty verdict. The Los Angeles Times had carried the story of his exoneration on January 17, 1985, Ann’s thirty-sixth birthday.

Never having doubted Jackson’s guilt, Danoff still believed that Steve Jackson killed Julie. Now the detective felt grinding pain, knowing that this man could never be brought to justice. The Constitution’s clause of double jeopardy gave him a free pass forever.

The lesson couldn’t have been spelled out more clearly: don’t rush to judgment! Danoff would continue digging into the case of Ann Racz until enough evidence could be found to avoid another courtroom failure.

To keep the investigation fresh, Danoff arranged for the story to be covered by a television show called Murder One, on February 22, 1992. He explained, “The purpose is to get information out to a vast number of people in far-off areas, and to keep public interest at a high level.”

On the first anniversary of Ann’s disappearance, Danoff paid a visit to John Racz. He brought with him the last letter Ann had written to Bob Russell, just to see how Racz would react. But it elicited no emotional breakdown, not even a wrinkled brow. It would later be implied that Danoff showed the letter to Joann during the visit, but he adamantly denied it. Instead, Danoff stated, Racz handed it to his daughter and allowed her to read it.

More tips came in the middle of May, leading Danoff to head up a search of the Santa Clarita Valley industrial center and the Magic Mountain Parkway, not far from the amusement park’s array of thrill rides. Officers also spread out through the hills of Sand Canyon, Brandywine Canyon, Placerita Canyon Road, and Meadstone Road. A few of the searchers trudged the dirt roads branching off these main thoroughfares. They found nothing useful.

In June, Danoff’s search teams hunted the length of Los Pinetos Road, adjacent to State Highway 14, five miles from hamburger hill. This stretch, known as the Antelope Valley Freeway, branches east of I-5, just below Santa Clarita, passes through the old gold mine community of Acton, and takes travelers to the vast Mojave Desert. When NASA’s space shuttles return from outer space, the route is filled with sightseers headed toward Edwards Air Force Base to watch the majestic aircraft land. Danoff had another type of viewing in mind on his drive to the desert. Hikers had reported seeing possible human remains, but their sighting turned out to be another false alarm.

A few of the tips Danoff received actually did result in locating bodies, or body parts. He explained what happens when these grisly discoveries are made. “Initially you go out there to examine exactly what has been found. Sometimes it requires an excavation. You bring in a team from the L.A. County Coroner’s Office and they will do an archeological dig.”

Another sweltering summer sent heat waves rising from the hills and canyons. On July 28, Danoff led another search in proximity to the Antelope Valley Freeway, along Spring Canyon, parallel to the road for several miles, then unpaved Heffner Road, ten more miles farther to the east, and finally Indian Creek Road, close to the old Governor gold mine in Acton. They returned to the same area two weeks later, this time with a horse-mounted posse. The rugged countryside and mounted lawmen could well have been right out of the Wild West days. After digging around a dozen possible burial sites, perspiring, and taking salt tablets to ward off heat prostration, they drove back toward Los Angeles, pulling horse trailers, empty-handed.

More mounted posse hunts took place that summer along dirt trails crisscrossing the Santa Clarita Valley and the Antelope Valley. Riders from other Sheriff’s Stations helped Danoff scour even more remote sites in the Santa Clarita Valley, Antelope Valley, Spring Canyon again, and Tick Canyon. “I went back many, many times over those areas. We’d had several telephone tips. The second reason is the Thomas Guide map book, the one Kathy gave us,” Danoff said. One of those pages showed the back roads, including Davenport Road, of Aqua Dulce. It appeared that John Racz had marked these obscure routes.

Some of the search-and-rescue teams drove four-wheel vehicles along twisting trails and dirt roads. “We didn’t know if she was disposed of, what kind of vehicle was available to take her to certain areas. And some of the areas you wouldn’t want to go into without a four-wheeler. The areas I personally searched in this region, you could get into with a conventional car. It might be a little crazy, but you could do it and you could get out okay.”

Time after time, the searchers came back with nothing. Maybe a lawman with less grit might have allowed repeated failures to dim enthusiasm, but Danoff had the hide of a rhinoceros. Before August ended, he led probes and excavation crews in digging up twenty-six possible burial sites they had identified. In the miserable heat, during which fires often ravaged rural L.A. County, Danoff took the precaution of having fire-suppressing teams accompany his gang into dry forests and brushland.

Before August came to a close, Danoff received a phone call from a woman who belonged to Ann’s Elizabeth circle group at the Newhall Presbyterian Church, along with Dee Ann Wood and several others. Pamela Cottrel had first contacted Dee Ann Wood to ask her advice about contacting the detective, and Wood had encouraged it. Cottrel informed Danoff that she had observed something the detectives should know about, and wanted to tell him before she moved out of state. Her husband, a military pilot, had been transferred to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and the family would soon be moving there.

Both Salerno and Danoff listened as Cottrel said, “I have noticed a lot of construction in an area not far from Ann’s home, a lot of earthmoving. I have a daughter who wants to be an engineer and build things. She asked me if we could go watch the bulldozers. So we sat by the side of Lyons Avenue and observed the heavy machinery covering and reconstructing hillsides.” Much of it took place within a half mile of the McDonald’s on hamburger hill, but, Cottrel said, she and her child also visited several other sites. “They were getting ready to pour concrete and I made a note of that. I used to help my dad pour concrete on the farm, so I was familiar with the procedure.”

The investigators had also seen construction work in those areas, but noted a few specific sites Cottrel mentioned for follow-up examination.

Worry plagued Danoff and Salerno that Ann’s body might have been buried on a site excavated for a new building, where she could lie underneath a thick layer of concrete for decades. On September 10, 1992, based on Pamela Cottrel’s observations, they searched an area being readied for future buildings at Newhall Ranch Road, about four miles north of hamburger hill and east of Magic Mountain. It would have been an ideal place to dump a murder victim before the bulldozers moved in. But it proved to be futile, as similar efforts had in the past.

Danoff contacted the popular television tabloid Hard Copy in October and arranged for the airing of a segment on the missing woman, hoping that someone with viable information might see it. The nationwide, and even international, coverage might eventually turn up something.

More expeditions took place when fall weather turned Santa Clarita’s trees into bursts of golden colors in November. Danoff led groups of searchers through a half-dozen sites that month. On November 28, several people met the sheriff’s team at an assembly point and led them to a man-made cave. Danoff crawled into the hidden, dark cavern. Aptly named “Bootlegger Cave,” it had been the hiding place for illicit booze during Prohibition in the late 1920s. Among the detritus accumulated for most of a century, the detective found an area inside paved with cement. He could picture crates stacked there containing bottles of bathtub gin, and men, clad in pin-striped suits, black shirts, and white ties, carrying tommy guns and hauling the liquor away in Model A Fords.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, Danoff and Salerno revisited the Bouquet Canyon area and a dirt road extension of Newhall Canyon Road. The final search of 1992 also marked another ending.

It turned out to be Frank Salerno’s last effort on the case. In January 1993, he took a medical leave of absence from his job, and remained away until he retired the following August. Nevertheless, Salerno kept in contact with his partner’s persistent efforts to untie the Gordian knot of Ann Racz.