Hey, guys. Willy Geist here, reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I get together with country music superstar, Kenny Chesney, to talk about the release of his latest album, and gearing up for another big stadium tour this summer. You can get our conversation now for free wherever you download your podcasts. It was It was late on a Saturday afternoon when Douglas Kirkland ambled down to the end of his driveway in the Hollywood Hills to check the mail. To the west, way out over the Pacific, you might have seen a line of bruised-colored clouds puffing themselves up. Looked like they meant business. La was in for some rain. It was at that moment that Douglas's wife, Françoise, who was futtering in the garage, looked up and noticed that a young woman in a white sports car had stopped in front of her husband.

It was a Miata, and there was a very pretty blonde girl in there with what looked was her entire wardrobe next to her. And she looked very frazzled.

Françoise overheard the girl in the sports car ask Douglas about a house that resembled a castle. Douglas said he didn't know what she was talking about, but Françoise did.

And I yelled out, said, No, the castle is that place on Green Valley. It's at the corner of a little street, and it's got statues all around it, a little turret, and all that. That's the castle. That's what we call the castle.

Relief washed over the young woman's face. Along with anticipation, anxiety, excitement, all mixed up in those big blue eyes. Douglas Kirkland knew the look. For decades, he'd been a celebrity photographer in Hollywood. He made his reputation taking iconic pictures of stars and those who had stars in their eyes. The young woman said thank you and pulled away. And as her red tail lights disappeared around the bend, Douglas turned to Frantz was and said, It's another one of those little hopeful girls who is going to a photoshoot.

I hope she's going to be okay.

Douglas was right, of course. The young woman in the white sports car was on her way to a photoshoot or what she thought was a photoshoot. Her name was Christie Johnson. She was 21 years old that day. She would not see 22. Christie Johnson disappeared February 15th after telling friends she was going to meet a man about a movie role. Yes, this is a story about what happened to Christie Johnson one Saturday afternoon, but it's about more than that. It's about dreams. And a man who told a lot of young women like Christie that he could make their dreams of Hollywood stardom come true.

He talked about big bucks. He named numbers of money that I can't recall today, but it was a lot of money. He said, Are you kidding me? He said, You're perfect. You're going to make all this money. You're going to be famous. You're going to be on all the talk shows.

It's a story about what can happen when the people who administer our courts play, Let's make a deal with justice. And it's about a group of victims and near-victims, determined to turn the tables on a predator.

He did try this ruse on all of us, and that seemed to be enough to bond us together. We all feel very connected, like a sisterhood.

They were everything to the case, and without them, we most likely would not have had a case. I'm Keith Morison, and this is, murder in the Hollywood Hills. The podcast from Dateland. Episode one, Bond Girl. That Saturday morning had begun like any other day for Christie Johnson with a phone call from her mom.

We enjoyed being with each other and doing things together and had a very close relationship.

That's the voice of Terry Hall, Christie Christie's mom.

So on that Saturday, on February 15th, we spoke on the phone, and she told me that she was going to the shopping mall. And I said, Okay, great. Don't buy anything because I'm going to pick something out, and it'll be your Valentine's present that I'll send you.

Which seemed like a fine idea. So Christie grabbed her purse, gassed up the Miata and headed for Starbucks. A photoshoot was the last thing on her mind that morning. No, that thought hadn't even occurred to her. Later that afternoon, Christie's roommate, Kari Barish, was getting out of the shower when she heard the door of her Santa Monica apartment open. From the crunch and crinkle sounds of shopping bags out in the living room, Kari guessed that Christie was back from the mall. Then came a knock on her bed room door. And when she opened it, there was Christie smiling from ear to ear.

You won't believe it, she said, I'm so excited.

This is the way Kari remembered it. Days later, in a phone call with police.

She goes, I met this guy. She was really excited. She says, Look, I'm breaking out in high.

As Kerry dressed, Christie continued gushing about a man she just met at the mall. The words were tumbling out so fast. Kerry could only catch one a word out of every five. Photographer, Bond movie, audition.

They're looking for a fresh face. They're looking for someone like in a James Bond movie.

Oh, yes. It was going to be quite a production. Shooting on location in Europe, she thought.

He asked if she had a passport because it would be out of the country for shooting. He would have to leave in a week. He said the pay was $100,000, which made me suspect.

Kerry might have been skeptical, but Christie's blue eyes were lit up to about 200 Watts. There was an audition for the part that afternoon. Christie couldn't believe her luck.

And then she said, Look what I got to wear.

And then Christie rummaged through her shopping bags and pulled out a man's white dress shirt, a black mini-skirt, and then a pair of sky-high stiletto heels.

She had to be real sultry and sexy. That's what they were looking for. They were going to give her a neck tie to wear, but as it she showed up in a collared shirt and a super mini skirt.

For the next 15 minutes or so, Christie modeled everything she'd bought for her audition that afternoon. Everything except the new sheer nylon hose she'd bought. No time for that now. She had to shower, do her hair, make up. The audition was at 5:30, and Christie didn't want to be late.

She said, I know the area where it is, and it's really nice. And she said, It may be legit, it may not. He said there were going to be other girls there.

Christie dressed, twisting and turning to better appraise her look. And what about that tattoo of hers? The hibiscus flower, her lower back? When she got in Florida that time on vacation, would he see it? Would it show up on camera? It didn't seem likely. She pulled on one of the two new pairs of sheer nylon hose she'd bought for the audition, and then her powder blue corderoys and that sleeveless shirt she'd bought last week, the one with the matching piping. Christie appraised herself in the mirror. She looked good. She could really do this.

She kept saying what they were looking for in the person because you had to show a lot of leg.

Then a hug for Carrie, and then Christie was out the door. Her costume on hangers, the stilettos tucked under one arm. Christie Johnson must have been up in the Hollywood Hills desperately looking for that landmark Castle house when her cell phone lit up with the word Mom. Maybe she was preoccupied, worried about being late, perhaps, or maybe she simply didn't hear her phone buzzing. But whatever the reason.

She wasn't answering her phone. I thought, well, you know how young adults are. Sometimes they choose not to answer their cell phone when they see their mother calling.

That's Christie's mom, Terry Hall.

Maybe she didn't recharge her battery, so I didn't think too much of it.

No, why would she? She and Christie talked for must have been a good 20 minutes before Christie went off to the mall.

Actually, that was the last time I spoke to Christie.

That's the thing about last times. You never know it. How could you know that this is it? It's over. It's the passage of time and the lead heavy weight of memory that brings that clarity, freighted with meaning and longing and regret. But of course, at the time, all of that was still unimaginable for Terry Hall.

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So Sunday morning, February 16, 2003, broke, gloomy, and overcast at Terry Hall's home in Los Gatos. 350 miles down the Coast, a chilly rain was falling around Christie's place in Santa Monica. Good day to sleep in. So Terry Hall waited until she was pretty sure Christie would be up before calling. But no answer. Terry tried again in the afternoon. No answer. Then that evening, no answer.

She wasn't answering her phone. I thought, No, that's strange.

You always talk to every day. Every day? Always?

It would be odd that we wouldn't. I mean, sometimes a couple of times a day, just even briefly. Sure.

So Saturday goes by on the Sunday. How are you feeling inside about this?

What are you thinking? I'm thinking to myself that either she hasn't recharged her cell phone, so that's why she's not picking up, or that maybe she's been in a car accident. I mean, all the normal things that a parent would think when they can't get a hold of their child. Of a low-grade anxiety. Right. Like, Gee, I wonder what's happening here that I can't get a hold of her.

The next day, Monday, Terry was up early. Her mind, a jumble of thoughts about Christie. The sun had just broken over the rooftops to her east when she reached for her phone again.

So that's why first thing in the morning when I couldn't get a hold of her on her cell phone again, I called her on her direct line at work. When I got her answering message on her work phone is when I became very alarmed because I knew she was always at work on time.

Eventually, Thierry got through to somebody else at the office who told her Christie just didn't show up, didn't call in sick either. That was concerning.

And they were concerned as well. And so at about this time, she was supposed to be in at work at 9:00, and now it's going to be 10:00, 10:30. I'm thinking, something is not right here.

No kidding. So Thierry called the Santa Monica police just to see if maybe Christie had been in an accident.

My first reaction was, Oh, my gosh, maybe her car has gone off a cliff. They haven't found her. So they suggested that I call all the local hospitals, which I did. I can't imagine how that must feel. I was almost void of having feelings. I was just on the phone the whole time.

Terry Hall spent a lot of time on the hole that morning, waiting to be transferred, waiting for someone who'd say, No, ma'am, we have no Christie Johnson here. No, no Jane Doves either. It was during those moments in between when some elevator music or hole music, Musack, droned in her ear that the memories would have come to mind. Memories of Christie and her brother, Derek, growing up in Northern California and Michigan before Terry's messy divorce from the kid's father, Kirk. Christie had been a beautiful child, sun-kissed blonde, skinny as a rail with a freckled nose.

She always had a peacefulness and a joy to her. And Always very easy to be around.

Memories. Those summers of the Sagatuck Yacht Club, Christie turned into a pretty good sailor there. We're going to win. Yeah, we're going to win. Who's ahead so far? We are. But It was in high school that Christie really began to blossom.

She could tie her hair back in a ponytail and wear no makeup and look absolutely smashing, or she could put on her high heels and a great outfit and look totally a different way, too, as well.

Thierry Hall was 46 that morning when she dialed number after number. Later, when I sat down with Thierry, her pale, gray, green eyes brightened whenever she talked about Christie and the time before.

As you see, a lot of the pictures were taken on the beach. Christie loved the beach.

How did she tell you she wanted to move to Los Angeles? Can you tell me about that?

Oh, gosh. We had lived in California for some time where Christie was born. Then we had moved back to Michigan. She wanted to come back to California because we would come out here on visits, and all of our family is out here.

So After Christie finished up her freshman year of college in Michigan, when she once again told her mom she wanted to move back to California, Terri said, Okay.

The plan at that time was for a temporary period of time, she was going to be living with her grandmother down in the Central Coast area and going back to college.

That was the year 2000. A few months later, Terry returned to California as well, and she settled in the Bay Area. But Christie stayed in Santa Maria with her grandmother and enrolled at the local community college.

How many of you right now are a little bit tired? You need a little pick me up?

Any of you? That's from a home video clip Christie putting on a public speaking demonstration for one of her classes. Her topic, how to make a vanilla latte.

The most important ingredient you'll need is the actual Espresso beans.

It was while Christie was living with her grandmother that she was bitten by the showbiz bug.

So that summer, she had the opportunity to work on a film that was being filmed down in the Central Coast area.

The movie people hired her to be a production assistant. Those long days on the set, hanging out with the crew, and it seemed to have a profound effect on Christie.

She thought, I would really like to be involved in this industry, but on the production side of it, on the other side of the camera. She actually went to a school for makeup artistry. She worked as a makeup artist for about a year in Los Angeles. Then after about a year, she thought, Maybe this is a good time for me to go back to school and get my college degree. It's a tough life. Yeah, right. It was a good experience, but she realized the value of going back to school. So she got an apartment with two other girls in Santa Monica.

Christie had only been in that Santa Monica apartment a few months when she met that man at the mall, the one dangling a chance for her to get back into the movies, but not as a makeup artist. No. This time around, Christie Johnson from Sagotuck, Michigan, was going to be a bond girl. The squad room at the Santa Monica Police Department was quiet as a tomb that Monday afternoon. Detective Virginia Obenchain had the second floor, Detective Bureau all to herself. The metal desks, the half empty coffee cups, the works. It was President's Day. Most people had the day off. But Detective Obenchain was catching up on some paperwork and frankly enjoying the solitude. She couldn't miss those footsteps coming in. She looked up and there was Patrolman Mark Holland. Something on his mind, clearly. Holland said he'd been working on a missing person's report. Just talked to the missing woman's roommate. The roommate said she hadn't seen Christie since Saturday afternoon. Said Christie had been going to meet a photographer. Holland could just tell something wasn't right. This didn't seem to be about someone who suddenly took a road trip on a whim. No, this one felt different.

And he was my old training officer. So I'm like, Okay, tell me what's going on. And he did.

That's Detective Obenchain.

And I said, I'm not feeling good about it either. It It felt like the Linda Sobek case. She was a Raider's cheerleader that went for a photoshoot and ended up being murdered.

Obenchain had been a patrol officer back in in '95, when Linda Sobek went missing. Wasn't her case, but she remembered the media coverage like it was yesterday.

The mystery surrounding model Linda Sobek may be solved today, and the news is not good. Police say the former LA Raider cheerleader her as probably a murder victim. And a Hollywood photographer reportedly told police where to find her body in the Angeles National Forest. Linda Sobek disappeared a week ago.

Linda Sobek, it turned out, had been murdered by that photographer. He was later convicted of luring her to a remote desert location with the promise of showcasing her face and body in a car ad. When I first interviewed Detective Obenchain back in 2006, she told told me she feared that was what had happened to Christie.

Unfortunately, young women tend to be vulnerable. They mean well, but they just don't have the life experience. A lot of these men are extreme con artists, and they're very good at what they do.

So you had that feeling when you got this case. Different from a normal missing person's case in any other respect or just-Different because she was known to contact her mother every day, and then all of a sudden, phone contacts stopped.

Multiple messages were left on her cell phone. Again, very unusual because she lived by her cell phone as her means of communication.

For the next 24 hours, Detective Openchain and a growing team of investigators did everything good investigators do. They put out an all-points alert for Christie's white Mazda Miata. They checked Christie's debit card account and found that on the Saturday, Christie disappeared. The card had been used at Century City Mall, Bloomingdale, that one at the guest store at 137, and then three miles away in a shocking pink building on La Cienica called Trashy Lingeré at 215. The check with store security yielded only one video clip. It came from guests. There was Christie paying for the black mini-skirt, her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a black ball cap, black short-sleeved T-shirt, white jeans. All in all, Christie had spent $356 that afternoon on the outfit for her audition. Exactly what the photographer told her to wear. At least that's what Christie told her roommate.

There were no other purchases made. And again, that's how she lived. Her debit card was her cash line, and all of a sudden it had stopped.

You knew something had happened.

We knew something had happened, whether she was in an accident or something. But something had happened to her.

Carrie Christie Barish, the roommate, had also told police that Christie had purchased tickets to a party in LA for that same Saturday night. So had she gone there? Had she met someone? Had anyone seen her? Investigation investigators checked with the rave party organizers, and sure enough, they saw Christie's name on the list of ticket holders. But unlike the rest of them, her name had not been checked off at the door. Christie was a no-show. But why? Where had she gone?

We tracked down where her last ping on the cell phone came from, and it came from the Laurel Canyon area.

That at least seemed consistent with the roommate story about Christie driving to her audition in the Hollywood Hills.

It's one of those that the hair on the back of your neck just stands up because you're going, Oh, that does not sound good.

And that is where the trail seemed to hit a dead end. Somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. Terry Hall, who'd come down to Los Angeles to be on hand, had been told very little by the police about what their investigation had found or failed to find.

And At this point, I didn't have any information as far as what the police officers had actually said to the roommate, her roommate, or what her roommate had said to the police officer. I wasn't getting the full story at this point.

The police were holding their cards close. No need to panic, they assured Thierry. They were doing all they could.

Thierry was very worried about her.

How did you handle that?

I basically tried to tell her what we were doing, and then it got to the point where we were getting more and more wrapped up in it. So I said, I'm going to have my captain handle Terry.

Yeah, because you couldn't really tell her what you thought, huh?

Well, I was still hopeful that she was alive, but I couldn't say I'm hopeful that she's alive. You just got to do it delicately.

Detective Obenchain had run down every lead she had and was no nearer to finding Christie than she had been on the day she first got the case. What goes through your mind in a situation like that? What are you thinking about her?

I'm basically praying that she's okay.

The Maybe he's keeping her somewhere, but she's alive. Yeah. Not badly hurt. Exactly. They run out of things to check. And what then? This is going to the police, going to the public?

Then it was going to the public.How was that arranged?Asking for the public. How was that arranged? The chief had a press conference, and he basically gave some of the details of Christie, how tall she her description, the type of car, and if anybody's seen her or her car, please contact us.

It was Wednesday afternoon. By then, it had been five days since Christie was last seen. The press conference had provided the media with photos of Christie and her white Miata, and with a carefully worded statement that read, A 21-year-old Santa Monica woman who may have been on her way to Beverly Hills to meet a photographer has not been seen for five days. For much of the LA media, another story about another young woman gone missing? There seem to be a lot of other stories vying for attention. As a reporter, I was aware of the missing person's case. That's Andrew Blankstein. He spent 23 years at the LA Times covering crime in courts before joining NBC. He said that in 2003, crime in the city was on the rise. A missing person's case rates, but in terms of covering crime day to day, once it hits that level where it's a homicide, then you're trying to go back and put the pieces together. And in some ways like detectives would. That press conference had been the police equivalent of a Hale Mary pass with time running out, but it worked. The next day, the police tip line started ringing.

It helped us tremendously. We got a call from a young lady on our tip line, and she told us that she had been approached at the Century City Mall.

What did she describe? Do you remember?

She said that she was approached by someone who said that he was affiliated with the next James Bond movie, and that she would make a perfect poster girl or James Bond girl. Bond.

James Bond approached to the Century City Mall? Those tidbits had not been released to the public. Detective Obenchey instantly knew this collar was someone she needed to meet face to face. This season on murder in the Hollywood Hills.

And he looked normal. Normal, and he just said, I think you're very attractive, and I just wanted to let you know that. Well, thank you very much. He told me he really liked my legs. I was wearing shorts, and that he was working closely with the James Bond movies.

He's a con man, and he's very, very good at it.

Murder in the Hollywood Hills is a production of Dateland and NBC News. Tim Beecham is the producer. Brian Drew, Kelly Laudine, and Marshall Hausfeld are audio editors. Carson Cummins and Keanne Reid are associate producers. Adam Gourfain is co-executive producer. Paul Ryan is executive producer, and Liz Cole is senior executive producer. From NBC News Audio, sound mixing by Bob Mallory and Katherine Anderson. Bryson Barnes is head of audio production.