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 stands on an old movie, Backlot, where Hollywood legends once walked. Anne Bancroft, Rita Hayworth, Zatily Wood. Everybody, quiet off, sir. It was a place where famous directors created celluloid dreams. Think John Ford, Igmar Bergman, and Billy Wilder. And now it's a mall, a monument to commercial splendor that caters to the daily desires of anybody with a credit card. But as in days of old, the celebrities here still have their names up in lights. It's just that the Marquis' names now are Nordstrom, Macy's, Bloomingdale's. It was here at this 1,300,000 square foot open air shopping mecca in the Century City area of West LA, that in February 2003, 21-year-old Christie Johnson was approached by a man who seemingly materialized like a ghost from the mall's backlot days. A talent scout on the proud for a fresh face.

I began with him portraying himself as some entertainment producer involved in the entertainment industry.

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

He was a smooth talker. He probably told the young woman she was pretty, said she ought to be in pictures. And then, of course, he told her he could make her showbiz dreams come true. Everybody thinks they could be a great actor.

We can all act.

They want to believe.

And if you want to believe, you're going to fall for this.

Yeah, he looked good.

He had a nice suit on, and he was very well-groomed.

Attractive. In this episode, you'll hear from a woman who will tell us about her close encounter with that man.

He said, We've been casting all day, and you're the look we want. You're perfect.

You'll hear about her confrontation on the streets of West LA.

The guy looked visibly shaken. That Mark was going, What's your problem? How dare you do this to girls?

Will take you inside the effort to find Christie Johnson. We're going to go up the hill to where Sunset Boulevard and Palisades Drive meet. And inside the manhunt for a potential predator who was hiding in plain sight like a face in the crowd.

Where is she? Where he went to? Where he went? He went from the corner disappeared again.

He wasn't anyone that was a monster type. He was not in their faces. He didn't walk in front of them, stop their path. He presented himself as a professional.

I'm Keith Morison, and this is murder in the Hollywood Hills, a podcast from Dateland. Episode 2, The Man at the Mall. It was a short article buried on page 4 of the local section. But on this Friday morning, the one person in Los Angeles who needed to see that article saw it. Her name was Susan Murphy. Maybe it was the smiling picture of Christie Johnson that caught her eye that morning, or maybe it was the headline that read, Search Underway for Missing Woman. But whatever it was, Susan Murphy stopped turning the pages of the Los Angeles Times and read the lead sentence, 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, police said Wednesday. The last sentence in the article asked anyone with information to call a tip-line number. Susan Murphy.

It mentions this beautiful young lady who disappeared after going to meet a photographer, and And that's all it says.

That reference to a photographer might have caused a few readers to stop and think. After all, over the years, there had been other articles about women who were raped or murdered by men pretending to be photographers. But for Susan, a part-time magician with some showbiz experience, that single reference to a photographer was like a splash of cold water. That's because weeks earlier, Susan had been approached by a man at the Century City Mall. The man was tall and thin and wearing khaki pants and a tan jacket. He said he was a photographer. Susan's memory of that encounter, things she later learned about the man, were still fresh in her mind.

I call it women's intuition. I just knew. My heart dropped.

That it was the same guy?

I thought, What if it is the same guy? I called that that very day, and I called Santa Monica Police Department. I just started my story, and they said, Can you hold on? And they immediately put me in touch with the lead detective on the case, Detective Oben Shane.

At about 4:00 that afternoon, Susan walked into the old Santa Monica police building, took the stairs to the second floor, and met with Detective Obenchain. They talked for close to an hour. Susan told the detective the same riveting story she later told me.

It was totally an ordinary day, that's what I thought. Leaving work, going to go meet a friend for dinner. And just like any woman, I was there a little bit early and thought, I'm going to go shopping. So I ventured into the Macy's and start looking at some sweaters when this man approached me.

With her big brown eyes, radiant smile, and lustrous shoulder-length brown hair, Susan Murphy has no doubt heard her share of pickup lines from strange men over the years.

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. Coming on to you a little bit or- Coming on to me. I'm like, Oh, that's very nice. It's really not going to ruin my day to hear someone say that. Sure. But then he left. He left. He walked, walked away a little bit, and then he came back. He said, I'm a director of photography, and we're casting for the new James Bond movie. And he said, We've been casting all day, and You're the look we want. You're perfect. It's making me really excited to actually meet someone I think would be great for this role. I'd love to talk to you more about it.

Susan knew it was a pickup line, but still, she was intrigued.

My dad was in the FBI, and so a part of me has that sense that this might not be all in the up and up. But I didn't even tell him anything about myself. I'm like, Oh, really? I said, That sounds really cool.

So it wasn't that you were bowled over by the idea that you might be You discovered like you're in a drug store somewhere. No, it was- It was, Here's a guy coming on to me using that. I'm going to see where this goes.

Right, which I've heard a million times, even in Comedy and Magic. So I thought, Oh, dear. I feel like I had enough experience to know better. This guy, I just want to see what he's all about.

Was there something just in the back of your mind thinking, Well, if it is true- Of course, yeah.

If it's true, hey, cool. That'd be great. How fun would that be to be a bond girl? I think every girl has a dream about that.

The man said his name was Victor, Victor Thomas, and suggested they grab a seat over by the food court talk.

He bought me a snapple, and then he started to tell me about the opportunity and it's going to be a big comeback with Sean Connery and Fierce Brosnan, which is weird because aren't they both James Bond? So how could they both be in the same movie? And that's why I thought that was odd. And he was just telling me about it's a very small role. He'll be in the very beginning and describing the billboard I would be on, and I would be on the billboard. Be on the billboard? I'd be on the billboard. I'm like, for a really small role? He said I would make $100,000 for the role. And for such as, I'm a member of SAG, and I know that it's a day player part, and you aren't going to make that much money doing that. So all my little bells and whistles are going off. I'm like, This is something. This is not right.

Too good to be true? Yes, probably. But somewhere in the back of Susan's mind, a little voice seemed to whisper, What if it's What if this man is for real? What if the opportunity is for real? For a few seconds, Susan was so lost in her own thoughts that she barely heard what the man was saying. Then his voice broke through the fog.

And he said, I want you to meet me tomorrow for an impromptu audition. Everyone's going to be there. I'm going to bring you in. They're going to be very excited to see you because you're exactly what we're looking for. And I want you to meet me on a street corner below Santa Monica Boulevard. And I thought, Okay, here's my I said, Can you write that down for me? And so I had him use my pen and my pad of paper. He wrote down where to meet him.

There was just one thing, he told her. The producer and director had a very specific look in mind. Very important, he said, for Susan to dress the part.

He said, It's very important that I wear black stilettos as high as possible. And he mentioned a lot of designers that he would like me to wear. And then he said, A black mini-skirt, preferably But any mini-skirt would be great. Pantyhose. Pantyhose, not nylons, because nylons just go to the thigh. Pantyhose, they go all the way up. A white man's shirt, hair slick back, really tight in a ponytail, and a man's tie, and he said he would provide the tie.

Do you have all those things?

Some girls don't. I'm a girly girl. I have all those things.

When Susan left them all that night, she had every intention of meeting the guy the next day for the audition. But on the drive home, she had second thoughts. She decided to call the Screen Actors Guild.

I called New York in the LA office because they're open 24 hours for problems that actors may have on the set. It says, Anyone casting for a James Bond movie right now? No. Ding, ding, ding. Clue.

Next, she called the Los Angeles Police Department.

Was put on hold because obviously this isn't a crime. This is all a crime in getting a girl's phone number. Sure. Or asking her to meet.

So you never did get a chance to talk to anybody?

I did talk to somebody and they put me on hold because it wasn't I didn't call 911. I just called Los Angeles County Police Department.

Did it feel like you were being put on ignore? Hoping you to hang up eventually?

Because I knew that it sounds bizarre, but I think a part of me was just tired, tired of women being victimized. A lot of my girlfriends are models or actresses, and I hear these stories all the time, and I was just feeling my oats a little bit.

And so Susan hung up the phone. She had an idea, a crazy idea maybe, but this This Victor creep, if Victor was even his real name, he needed to be taken down. And she, Susan, was just a woman to do it. She would be the Avenger. Of course, she knew she needed some extra muscle in case things got physical. So that night, she asked her boyfriend to come with her to the audition. That was a good decision.

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You ready for what's coming? It was early afternoon when Susan Murphy's boyfriend, Mark Wilson, parked his car about a block away from the intersection of La Cianica Boulevard and Romaine Street in West LA. This was where Victor Thomas had instructed Susan to wait for him to take her to the audition.

The whole time he's going, Susan, why are we doing this? He's like, You know it's bogus. I'm like, I know it is. I just have to. I want to go.

Susan and Mark glanced around looking for some sign of a film crew, but saw none. Instead of wearing the black mini-skirt and stilettos, Susan had decided to wear a pair of cargo pants and tennis shoes. No way she was going to stand around in a street corner and that get up.

I thought, wearing a mini-skirt and high heels on a corner.What does that makes you in a very vulnerable position. Who knows what people would think of me on a street corner like that. So I brought my mace with me.

On top of that, Susan had her boyfriend, a former London Bobby, to back her up.

He's second-degre a black belt, a member of the anti-terrorist squad in London. He can take... Also a police officer in London, or he was.

Before sliding out of the passenger side, Susan reminded Mark of the plan they'd discussed.

I said, I want you to see me standing that are waiting for him. And I said, If I start to motion or walk towards you, that's when I want you to get out of the car.

So you would give your boyfriend a signal?

A signal that if things weren't going right, get out of the car immediately and help me out.

Susan walked to the designated corner and waited and waited.

I knew this guy thought, he's going to show up. So I'm standing there and literally out of nowhere, he just appears. It appears like magic poof. There he is. And he's dressed very, very nice. Maybe it's real. Maybe it is real. He's dressed very professionally. And he asked me where my car was parked, and I said, Oh, just down the street somewhere. And he said, What car do you have? And I said, Oh, I just lied about what car I had. Now he's asking some odd questions. And he goes, Okay, well, we really need... He said, First of all, I'm very unhappy. You're not wearing the outfit. He's like, This totally is going to take too much time to get me changed and everything else. He was very unhappy with me.

Was he visibly angry?

He was visibly angry, but he just said, I'm disappointed in you. We talked about this. Come on now. I was very specific about what I wanted you to wear, and you're not wearing it.

What did you say to that?

I said, I don't know what I said to it. I just said, tough. I don't know. Tough. I'm not wearing it.

The man demanded to know if she'd even have the outfit with her. She said, yes, she said, waving the black mini-skirt she had in her hand.

And he said, it was time to go. He starts to touch me to push me somewhere. He said, We're going to go get a drink first. On that street corner, he pointed to the building.Go get a drink first?So let's go get a drink and talk about the process a little bit more. And I noticed that it was an abandoned building it looked like to me. It didn't look like there was any activity or any a bar or a restaurant in there. So I said, Okay. I said, Well, first of all, I'm not going anywhere with you. I said, I need some identification first. I said, That's first and foremost. He said, Oh, I don't have any identification. I said, You don't. I go, Where is it? He goes, I left it on the set. I go, You did. On the set? On the set. I said, Oh, okay. All right. Well, I'm not going with you. I'm sorry. He goes, But you're going to make $100,000. I said, My life is more important than that.

So at this point, you're just cutting him off?

Cutting him off, right. That's it. How did he react? He was disappointed, very disappointed. 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. I said, I can't go with you. You're a stranger. I was incredulous. The fact that he thought I would actually go with him without identification or go to some strange place. You got to be kidding me.

It It was then that Susan started motioning for her boyfriend to intervene. That man she knew as Victor Thomas suddenly decided she no longer had bond girl potential.

He was like, You know what? You're not right for the part. He saw that I was motioning somebody. You're right for the part. He realized you were with somebody. Realize I was with somebody. He's like, You're not right for the part. You're not right for the part anyway. He's like, Just forget it. And then he starts to walk away, briskly walk away. And I'm turning around at this point to see Mark. I'm like, Come on, come on. And so by the time he got there, the guy's gone.

Like he appeared from nowhere and he's gone to nowhere.

He disappeared again. This guy is smooth.

He may have been out of sight, but by now, Susan and Mark were like hounds on the scent. Mark, the former cop, was furious. They got back in the car and they started circling the block over and over, looking down alleyways, peering into storefronts.

And finally, we were driving by a driveway near that street corner, and we see him dusting himself off and walking down the driveway. Then Mark parks the car, he gets out, and he has a confrontation with him, just saying and frisking him, too, because he wants identification. He wants to know who this guy is. He knows how to do this? Yes, of course. He knows how to frisk. And I saw him batting him around and And the guy... I was looking... I was scared, too, because I'm like, What's going to happen now? And the guy looked visibly shaken that Mark was going, What's your problem? I'm going to drag your carcass into the police station. How dare you do this to girls?

The man Susan knew as Victor Thomas said little during the pat down, though he did tear up a few times. When Mark failed to find any ID in his pockets, he demanded to know who the man worked for. Disney radio was the answer. But Mark wasn't done.

He goes, Give me your phone number. And so he takes the phone number down and he was, I'm calling. I'm going to call right now.

The ex-cop had the situation well in hand up to that point. There was just one thing. He'd left the cell phone he was going to use to verify the man's employment status in the car. Mark went back to the car to get it, and Susan said that's when Victor Thomas made his getaway.

He just decides to break free from this whole confrontation and starts to... Going through traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard. To ran away. He ran away. I want to say he wasn't running a marathon.

But he was getting the heck out of there.

But he was getting the heck out of there because he knew that he was caught. So Mark goes back to the car and just furious. He said, He said, Thanks a lot for being involved in this. And I'm like, I knew it. I said, What's up with this guy?

It took Susan Murphy about an hour to tell that story to Detective Obenchain. And once she was done, the Detective said she had one request. Would she mind staying a bit longer to describe the man she met at the mall to a police sketch artist? Susan, of course, said yes. They'd been at it for close to 2 hours. The witness and the artist tucked away in a small room off the detective bullpen. One racked her memory, trying to convey a visual impression with words. Well, the other tried to translate those words back into a recognizable an image with pencil and paper. Sandy Enzlo of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's office was the artist that day, drawing and adjusting pencil lines, shading where experience told her the image should be molded. Susan Murphy was Sandy's eyes, her only means of seeing and depicting the man Detective Obenchain desperately hoped to find. The work was slow. Susan Johnson said the eyes were a little droopy of the corners. His face long. Yes, like that. His eyes. Kind of squinty? Well, Sandy worked on that sketch at the Santa Monica Police Building. Christie Johnson's family and friends were doing all they could to generate media interest and public support for their efforts to bring Christie home.

It had been six days since Christie was last seen alive.

I'm hoping that they will apprehend the person that has taken Christie, and they will also find Christie.

That's Christie's mom speaking to a local TV reporter.

You have not given up on it?

No, not at all.

But now the rough outline Signs of the investigation were well known that Christie had met a man at the Century City Mall who had invited her to a movie audition in the Hollywood Hills, that she had been asked to wear a specific outfit, that her phone had last pings cell tower that afternoon in the Laurel Canyon area. For Terry Hall, it all seemed so unbelievable. How could her daughter have ever fallen for such a ruse?

Christie was a very savvy, smart young woman, and for her to have been convinced to go to a situation such as this, I thought to myself, this must have been a very experienced predator.

On February 22nd, 2003, Christie's parents took to the air in multiple interviews to mark their daughter's 22nd birthday and plea for her safe return.

I love you so much, and there's so many people that love you so much.

That's Terry again.

If you can get your phone, call anybody that you know of just to say, I'm okay, just to give us some of signal that you're all right.

It's Christie's birthday, and she deserves a lot more than where she's at now. And that's Kirk Johnson, Christie's father, speaking on NBC's Today show from his home in Michigan. I just pray to God, and this whole community is praying for Christie's return. And I just pray that this individual can watch this show, and I have one thing to say to him, let her go. Just let my daughter go. Let her go back to the family that loves her and do the right thing. As one day blended into another with no word of Christie, Kirk Johnson flew to LA to plaster missing posters on walls and help volunteers pass out leaflets to commuters with pictures of Christie and her white Miata. We're asking people to keep these in their vehicle in case they see something. It was on a dismal, drizzly Monday morning, nine days after Christie went missing, that the case got its second big break. Christie's white Mazda Miata had been found in a parking garage shared by two hotels near the Century City Mall, the Century City Plaza and the St. Regis. The car had been sitting in a valet parking spot for more than a week.

Since the the day after Christie was last seen. The parking attendant who had been on duty that Sunday morning told investigators that at about 5:45, he saw a man enter the driveway of the St. Regis and park a white Mazda Miata in the valet area.

And the valet said, You can't park there.

That's Detective Virginia Obenchain.

The driver gets out, throws him the keys, and says, Then you valet it, and walks away. The valet only saw him for a few brief seconds and really could not describe him very well other than a male white.

The Mazda Miata. Did you find any evidence?

The Miata was completely wiped clean. There weren't even Christie's fingerprints in there.

What did you think when you saw that?

That was not a good indicator.

Why?

If you have nothing to hide, then why hide it?

The discovery of Christie's car landed like a gut punch to her family. Her older brother, Derek, who was in the Air Force and preparing for another tour of duty in the Middle East, had thought up until then that Christie would eventually turn up alive and well.

I thought it was just a big misunderstanding where Christie had done something silly and feels really bad about it.

That's Derek.

Or she's just gone on a trip and forgot to tell people, or she just ran off with a guy, went to Mexico for a week. I didn't think anything had happened.

But now, well, after her car was found, even Derek had to admit things looked bad.

I'm going to start saying, It was like, There's something really wrong here.

It was then that the family announced they were escalating their search efforts by opening the Christie Johnson Recovery Center. The center was to coordinate groups of searchers who wanted to help look for Christie.

What we will be doing is going through a whole training process with volunteers.

I have a lot of people here that I need to get out into the field.

Soon after opening its doors, the Christie Johnson Recovery Center had a team of volunteers in the field. To go up the hill to where Sunset Boulevard and Palisades Drive meet. We know the jeans she was wearing. She had a shopping bag with her.

Yeah, Bloomingdale shopping bag.

For volunteers like Erin Tolland, Christie Johnson's fate hit close to home. Tolland was about Christie's age.

So sad. She was so young, and her life is either over or missing. If I didn't help, I would have felt worse than if I was just painting or sitting at home doing nothing.

Day 8 of the Christie Johnson missing persons investigation dawned wet and dreary across Southern California. It had been 10 days since anyone had seen Christie. But on this rainy Tuesday, the Santa Monica police had something they wanted to say. They called a press conference, and with a row of uniformed officers to his right and a composite sketch on an easel to his left, Santa The monarchy of Chief of Police, James Butts, stepped to the microphone. The sketch, of course, was the result of Susan Murphy's collaboration with LA Sheriff's Department artist, Sandy Enzlo. The chief was careful to not divulge Susan's identity or details of what she had told the police. This witness said the subject in this composite stated that he wished to photograph her in a photoshoot related to a specific movie production. This was the same movie production that Ms. Johnson said that she was going to audition for. The sketch depicted a long-face white man who looked to be in his late 30s to early 40s. He had wavy dark hair, his eyes wide set, maybe a little squinty, full lips and a long, straight nose. As sketches go, it wasn't bad, but it was, at best, generic.

Still, it's released by the Santa Monica police was news. The sketch was carried on the local news that night, and in the papers the next day.

Once we air the sketch, we had a parole officer, Maryanne Larios, call us, and she asked for a fax of the sketch.

That's Detective Virginia Obenchain again.

As soon as we faxed her the sketch, she called back and said, That happens to be one of my paroles.

Was the parole really the man depicted in the sketch, the man Susan Murphy and her boyfriend had confronted on the streets of West Hollywood? Or was he just one of thousands of men in Southern California who might have met the description? Detective Obenchain didn't know. But for the first time since Christie Johnson was reported missing, the detective had the name of a potential suspect, and that was a start. Next time on murder in the Hollywood Hills. I just felt like I wanted to catch him doing I don't know what, but I wanted to corner him. That a little dangerous?

Yeah, probably.

I wouldn't recommend it.

Three hikers were up in the Lookout Mountain area, and they thought they saw a body.

What police don't say is just as important as what they do say. And this was one of those cases where they didn't say a whole lot, and I knew, actually, that said a whole lot. Murder in the Hollywood Hills is a production of Dateland and NBC News. Tim Beecham is a producer. Brian Drew, Kelly Laudine, and Marshall Hausfeld are audio editors. Carson Cummins and Keanne Reid are associate producers. Adam Gourfane 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.