The Vanishing Point is released weekly every Wednesday and brought to you absolutely free. But if you want to binge the whole season right now, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus@tenderfootplus.com or on Apple podcasts. You'll also get exclusive bonus content. For more information, check out the show notes.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast and do not represent those of Tenderfoot TV or their employees. This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.

What is happening to these women?

Who do you think is preying on them? Are they the victims of trafficking serial.

Killers that have maybe set their sights.

On more rural areas? What do we know? Hi, I'm Celesia Stanton, and a few years ago, I was the victim of a huge financial crime, one that forced me to navigate the criminal justice system for the first time. It was that experience, actually, that prompted me to want to dig deeper into true crime stories, to tell them with the kind of nuance that I'd experienced firsthand. It all led to my podcast, Truer Crime, where I tell the stories of real people murdered, missing, and misled with more context, more nuance, and a lot more questions. I'm deeply interested in shedding light on the kinds of stories that we tend to brush under the rug, and that is what brings me here today, talking to you. By now you might have heard about the MMIP movement. It's the movement for missing and murdered indigenous persons, and it's been steadily gaining nationwide attention over the last several years. Recently, I joined the Tenderfoot TV team, and they've covered some of these cases in their series, up and Vanished.

One year has passed since Ashley Loring was last seen on the Blackfeet Reservation. There's something wrong happening in Montana and on these reservations, and the only way to fix this or move forward is to cover it and to talk about it.

There's been an uptick in exposure for cases like Ashley's, and yet many of these cases are still overshadowed. And ever since up and Vanished season three, we've been hearing about a lot of them.

I've been following your new season about Ashley Lawrence.

I'm sure you may have been contacted regarding the open and unsolved woman by.

The name of Aliyah Heavy Runner.

My sister, a mother of two, was recently killed by her boyfriend.

So now the up and Vanished team is going to bring you along the gorgeous Pacific Northwest Coast up to Hoopa, California, home of the Hoopa Valley tribe.

This lonely stretch of foggy coastline is what some think of as a doorway to heaven on earth, others as a gateway to hell.

There's a long list of unsolved cases here. We're going to look into five of them. This is the Vanishing point. An up and vanished series.

You have reached Tenderfoot TV. At the tone, please record your message.

Hi. My name is Laura Freighter. I'm an investigative journalist based in Oakland, California. I'm working on a bunch of stories for the two Rivers Tribune, the newspaper based on the Hooper reservation in Northern California. We have various missing people up there, various unsolved murder cases, along with a few missing people cases that have last.

Year, we were contacted by Laura Freder, a journalist who'd been covering MMIP cases in Northern California. She'd been writing these articles for the two Rivers Tribune, the Seoul newspaper in Hoopa Valley.

I got into these cases because I study federal Indian law as part of my PhD. And then one day I was thinking about getting back into journalism. I hadn't written for any publications in many years, and I was on a database looking at statistics regarding missing indigenous women in Humboldt county, and suddenly I see Emily Rizling on the list.

33 year old Emily Rizling, a mother of two, was last seen near this village in October.

And then in the preceding weeks, I could not get Emily off my mind. She's my age. She has two young kids. I thought, there must be, like, a newspaper in her community that's looking for coverage. And I can do that. I don't have to get paid. I don't care. I just want to be helpful in some way and use my PhD research in a productive way.

Laura discovered the two of her Tribune and reached out to the staff. Little did she know the paper was run by a sole employee, editor in chief Ali Hostler.

I found Ali on Facebook, and I sent her a couple messages. The craziest thing was, she never checks her facebook messages. She just happened to see my message that day saying, I want to write about Emily Rizling. Are you willing? You don't have to pay me. She called me up. That was gosh, 18 months ago now.

Laura researched Emily Rizzling's case for months, interviewing family members over the phone and following tips.

I wanted to write for the paper because I think that community news is democratic, it validates people's experiences, and you should see yourself in your local community newspaper.

Laura's first article was published last March.

Okay, do you want me just to go through each PDF or stop between highlights? All right, I'm reading from part one of Emily's, then back in October 2021, emily Rizling, 32, a mother of two young children and a member of the Hoopla Valley tribe, vanished. According to the York tribal police chief Gregor Rourke, the last confirmed sighting of Rizzling was on highway 169 on Pequin bridge on Monday, October 11, 2021. Since Rizzling disappeared, her case has been marked by rumors. You hear things everywhere at the store or people text you things. They say they heard something from someone else, but no one wants to talk.

There was only so much Laura could do. From afar and hundreds of miles away, allie had her hands full on the front lines of multiple causes, all while running the newspaper by herself. Without gaining as much traction on the cases as they'd hoped, laura suggested that they try to get the stories into an even bigger market.

With podcasting, we all know that it's incredibly accessible. It's the modern way of storytelling, it's global. And I wasn't super familiar with the American podcasting platforms because I'm not from the US. And then somebody one day at a yoga class says to me, have you heard of up and Vanished? And I said, I haven't, actually. And I looked it up and I thought, oh, they've actually covered a native woman for season three. So this seems like a great platform to reach out to. The rest is history.

Nestled deep in the rugged wilderness of California's extreme northwest, the Hoopa reservation sits on 144 sq mi of mountainous terrain and redwood force. When you search for it on a map, its border appears as a square box. And that is no accident. For generations, the Hoopa tribe existed peacefully, their lives interwoven with the landscape. But when the gold rush of the mid 18 hundreds lured in hordes of white settlers, the Hoopa way of life was disrupted forever. In 1851. The US. Congress created what we now know as the reservation system in California, four reservations were created. Hoopa was one of them. Today, 3000 people live on that land, many of whom are members of the Hoop Valley tribe.

How's it going?

What do you think of Hoopla?

I like it so far.

Yeah.

Feels like Scotland.

Did you drive in from Reading today?

From Eureka.

Oh, from Eureka.

This is Ali Hostler. She's indigenous and a member of the Hoopa Valley tribe. Not only is Ali extremely proud of her heritage, but she possesses an exceptional wealth of knowledge about the history of her people.

Hoopa is, in my opinion, the most beautiful place in the world. And it will always be the most beautiful place in the world. The Trinity River cuts through the mountains and flows through the Hoopa Valley. The Hoopa Valley is the heart of the Hoopa tribe, but our ancestral territory spans into the mountain areas too, quite a ways.

The 92,000 acres of land the reservation spans is only about one fifth of the Hoopa tribe's original territory. Through all these years, the Hoopa people have maintained their fight to reclaim their stolen land from the federal government.

We're very rooted in place. I know, like, during certain eras in the US. People have been like, I think we'll just know, get the heck out of here or go somewhere else or let's leave California. That's not an option for Hoopa people. Hoopa people are rooted here. This is home and it always will be. No one will ever leave. But Hoopa is a twelve mile by twelve mile square. It's a literal box that we were put in, but putting us in that box and limiting our food supply and limiting our cultural practices that we'd been functioning under and cultural rules and cultural law for thousands of years in harmony with the land. To see us crumble as a people in less than 100 years is really devastating.

In an article from 2023, ally wrote that the tribe hopes to regain over 10,000 acres of land, a victory that would allow them to manage natural and cultural resources that have been inaccessible to the Hoopa people for over a hundred years.

It's really off balance now. They've put in dams on all these rivers. The flows aren't the same. The fish runs have been devastated. We're out of sync. And I think that's where a lot of the unhealthiness of our people comes from now, like addiction, substance abuse, domestic violence, obesity, mental health disorders. I chalk that all up to the complete destruction of our way of life.

Ali runs the newspaper, yes, but her love for her community runs deeper still. It reveals itself in all the ways she continues to show up, in all the ways she champions causes for her tribe.

Working as a journalist in this community, I've sat in a lot of meetings, and I feel like we talk about the same thing over and over for years on end, and there's a lot of money pouring into this town for help with different things, but it's not getting where it needs to be.

Allie gave our team a tour of the land that her ancestors have called home for hundreds of years. As she showed them around, the somber truth of how her community has been neglected was inescapable even in the small moments.

Got to have a wood stove around here.

Oh, I bet.

Because you lose electricity constantly. Really?

Yeah.

How often lately? Like one or two times a week, and then sometimes for a week at a time. Like, look at this place. Over know tarps for roofs, trailers with tarps. Over just people are living like this. Children are living in this type of scene. I mean, if you just drive around hoopa aimlessly and look around, you'll see that the standard of living is really low.

With her Hoopa roots, ali, understandably, has a lot of relatives in the valley. In fact, she's related to not one, but two of the folks whose stories we'll be covering this season, and one of those is Emily Rizling.

Her case is one of the saddest cases because it was a whole year that there were so many opportunities to intervene, and her family begged for help, and the community begged for help, and the people who could provide that help didn't step up.

Having followed Emily's case for some time, allie introduced our team to the people who knew her best.

You.

I am Mary Rizling. Today I turned 25. I am Hoopa Yurok in Karuk. And I am the sister of Emily Rizling who went missing in October 2021. Growing up, she was my biggest role model. I wanted to be like my sister. I wanted to hang out with my sister any chance I got. I was like her little shadow, I guess. I have older parents, and so it was really me and my sister quite a bit. She was my second mom just smart, beautiful, the most caring. She was always there for me. If I needed something, if I needed someone to call, to confide in, it was her. She knew all my biggest secrets. I don't know if she kept them secrets, but she was still who I talked to. She was always there for me.

The Rizzling home is a living tapestry of Emily family. Photos are framed on every wall proof that Emily used to be here, that she smiled and danced, that she was surrounded by people who loved her. In a glass cabinet, they keep her moccasins, the leather almost untouched. All of it now just a memory of the time before everything changed.

Mental health was something that majorly affected her in the time that she went missing in that know, we didn't have the best relationship, and so we didn't spend a lot of time together in the know year or so.

The article that Laura wrote drew a holistic picture of the person. Emily was a loving sister, mother, and friend, but also, like so many of us, a woman with her own struggles.

Rizzling, a University of Oregon graduate who studied political science, suffered from severe health problems prior to her disappearance. I think people thought she was just on drugs or abusing other substances, Gonzalez explained. But what a lot of people don't realize is that it often starts with the mental health problems, and then people turn to other things to help them numb the pain.

Emily was a very outgoing person in high school. She was president of her high school class for four years. She was really a go getter.

This is Emily and Mary's mom, Judy Rizling.

After graduating from U of O, she went to work for a TANF program, and she helped a lot of other native people with resources, people that were having difficulties. When I said she was loyal, I always run into people that tell me how helpful Emily was to them in their time of need. After she had her daughter, postpartum psychosis kicked in, and she became pretty delusional. And it came to light that Emily was having some mental issues. And as that progressed, I think she started to perhaps self medicate. I don't know.

According to her family, despite their efforts to connect her to resources, emily would slowly lose everything. With nowhere to live and concerns about her ability to care for her children, social services got involved, and Emily's two kids replaced in the care of her parents.

It was hard for me to watch her not be with her kids or not take that responsibility. I know how hard it was on her son to not be with his mother when she no longer had a house, when she kind of let go of the person she was. It was really hard for me to see her do that without being frustrated in her. And so out of my immediate family, I was kind of the one to confront her about that. And that did kind of push her away from our relationship. So that's why the last few times when I saw her, I tried to let go of that. I didn't try to focus on all the bad stuff. It's more of I get a minute or two with my sister. I've thought about this a number of times, really trying to pinpoint when the last time I saw her was. I think she showed up at my mom's house. And I was watching her daughter at the time. I didn't quite know what to do at that point. Her mental health was pretty far gone. And I had her one year old daughter with me trying to take care of her.

I remember asking her where I could take her and she said, well, let's go to the bank. She had to get some money from the bank. I took her to the bank and I remember calling my mom while she was in there. I said, I don't know what to do. I really don't have anywhere to take her. I don't want to drop her off on the side of the street. It was really tough. According to the county, she couldn't be around her daughter at that time, so I couldn't just keep her with me. I ended up driving her out to Hoopa to her friend's house where she had been staying for the last few months. And it was like one of the hardest drives I've ever made. It was pretty rough, but I think that's the last time I saw her. And at least at the end of that, I was able know, give her a good hug and I just know, please stay safe. I told her how much I loved her. Yeah, at least I was able to do that.

Emily's life seemed to spiral further and further out of control until she was nearly unrecognizable to the people who loved her. In the depths of her struggle, she was often seen walking around town in various states of undress. Facebook posts on the Loka Hoopa page show that residents were concerned and frustrated that there seemed to be no help for the quote, naked woman.

I think California in itself is a rough place to have a mental illness, considering that you can't force somebody to get help unless they want it. So if someone is out of their right mind and doesn't think they need help, good luck trying to help them. And that's the case with my sister. At a certain point, she thought everything was going to be okay. So to telling her that it wasn't okay. This is not okay. Walking around naked. It's not okay. You couldn't get through to her. You couldn't.

Emily was oftentimes walking around nude and many times in hoopa. They would just simply pick her up and give her a ride to where she wanted to go. I was constantly begging them to pick her up on a 51 50, and they were always saying that she didn't meet the criteria for that code.

51 50 of the California Welfare and Institutions Code permits police and mental health professionals to transfer an individual experiencing a mental health cris, and they can do that involuntarily. The individual is brought to a facility for 72 hours for psychiatric evaluation and stabilization. To qualify, though, you have to be gravely disabled or considered a danger to yourself or others. Emily was determined not to meet either of these criteria. For families like Emily's, a 51 50 is often a desperate attempt to get help for their loved ones. When it isn't an option, families seek any viable alternative, including intervention from the criminal justice system.

She did get arrested for a small fire in the Hoopa cemetery, and they took her to jail. And really, as her family, we thought, this is our golden ticket to get her some help. And it's a small community. We knew the people in the DA's office, so we had already been talking to them about trying to find a dual treatment facility for Emily. And we went to court. Even though everybody was advocating to keep Emily in jail until we could find this help for her, the judge decided to let her go, and it was within a week that she disappeared.

You don't know what happened. You don't know if she was trafficked. You don't know if she was murdered. You don't know if she did suicide or what.

Emily's father, Gary Rizling, grapples with what might have happened to his daughter and how the system failed her.

None of the systems are working. They're really incomplete. It's a sad, sad, tragic thing that's happening. Emily is not the only one. I talked to my cousins. There's plenty of people that walk around hoop while either naked or yelling and screaming in the same boat.

The last confirmed sighting of Emily was on highway 169 at Pequan Bridge, located across the Clamorith River in a remote part of the Europe Reservation. Highway 169 dead ends at the end of the road. A bus full of children and a driver saw Emily that cold autumn day standing naked on the bridge. One student, the child of a tribal police officer, alerted his father. When Emily couldn't be tracked down afterwards, concern for her whereabouts grew.

I drove down there a number of times to where she went missing and drove around by myself and looked around. But we need people that are knowledgeable about investigations and how to find someone, people that can serve warrants, that can do interviews with people that are suspects. I believe if there was a proper investigation, she would have been found.

There was no sign of Emily. She just vanished. Mary told us that there wasn't a fully fledged search party until a foundation focused on wilderness safety got involved. Six months later, they got search dogs.

Cadaver dogs, and they did a three day search. And that was really the biggest thing to have happened in efforts to find my sister. It wasn't successful. The tribal agencies aren't equipped with enough people or knowledge to do something like that. That's why there's so many missing and murdered indigenous women and people on different reservations, because there just aren't the resources, the manpower to really do anything about it.

I've heard stuff from tribal police departments and everything, and people tell you why something can't be done. I think it's idiotic to say, well, we don't have the manpower and we're not trained. Somebody has the responsibility.

Hopefully, if there is another search, then we can get some answers. But at this point, we're at a standstill. It's just kind of sitting, you know, my mom calls law officials every week to try to get movement, and I.

Just keep calling Sheriff Hansel every week. It takes him about three weeks to finally return my call. I have told him my frustration with him and the EUROk police. Now there were some jurisdictional problems because Emily is a hoopa tribal member. She was last seen on the Yurok Reservation. And then there's the sheriff's department. So you know, who is going to look for her, who is going to investigate it.

So who's in charge?

When someone is murdered or goes missing.

On tribal land, particularly in reservations and.

Village areas, there is a maze of jurisdictions, of policies, of procedures, of who investigates what.

And unfortunately, the sheriff's department put it in the lap of the Yurok Tribal Police. That kind of got it off of his lap. Of course, I don't think that was the right decision. I really feel like they don't have enough manpower to have search done six months later. It has to be right away. It has to be immediate. You can't wait six months then to go and try to find somebody.

It was not uncommon for Emily to go for periods of time where nobody heard from her.

This is Chief O'Rourke, the chief of the tribal police department that was put in charge of Emily's case. He elaborated on his experience with the search for Emily.

So the family wasn't super worried before making a report until a greater length of time passed. And so, typically, when law enforcement starts a search, you start from a central point and then grid out from there. We weren't able to do that with Emily because we can confirm where she was last seen. But then we also had several unconfirmed reports of where she was rumored to bend or people she was rumored to have been around, and that was miles away when the formal police report came in of Emily being missing. I remember gathering my officers that were on duty and telling them, this is not going to end well, and we're going to get called to the carpet, and you guys need to document everything that you do on this. Know the terrain, the mental health, the substance use, the time of year, the circumstances. I didn't know how was going to end, but I didn't believe it was going to be a happy one.

Chief O'Rourke states that his department performed the best search possible, given the circumstances and resources. But Emily's family, well, they feel differently.

So has there been a thorough investigation? I don't think so. The Yurok police and Sheriff Hansel felt there wasn't enough evidence for another search, which, of course, I thought was absurd, because that's what we're looking for, right, is evidence. We strongly believe that there could be foul play involved. What made her not worthy of an immediate search is she not worthy of a full search because she was native? We're close to the ocean here. We have somebody that goes kayaking and disappearing. Oh, they've got the helicopters out. They've got everybody searching. Was my daughter not worthy of that? But you can never give up. I'm never going to quit calling them. I'm never going to quit asking them for help. You just become kind of a thorn in somebody's side until somebody does something. I'm 71 now. Am I going to know something before I die? Of course. We keep that little bit of hope that Emily really is out there somewhere. You can't give up on that, and I can't give up on that for her children. But the ODS are she is not. People that didn't want to talk to the authorities would call myself or Emily's dad and give them information.

Right. But the police just saw that as secondhand information, third hand information, and they really couldn't do anything because they wanted those people to come forward to them. And that was really frustrating.

Judy told us about rumors that she and Gary had heard about their daughter's case, including a map that they were told would lead to Emily's body.

Well, it was a woman that she had overheard a conversation. We even have a map that she drew, and it had a location where she felt Emily was buried.

The police would later tell us that the map could never be substantiated. After hearing all this, we spoke with Sheriff Hansel of Humboldt County Police. We wanted to talk to him more about Emily's case and the tips that had come in over the years.

One of the things that was really concerning is that there was a lot of people that knew information, supposedly, that didn't want to talk to us or basically said, oh, you should know the rumor out there is this said, okay, great, but we can't act off a rumor. Can't write search warrants off a rumor. If someone knows something, they need to come and talk to us. And we can write search warrants based upon first person eyewitness statements. If someone said, I last saw Emily here, she was hurt, someone hurt her a year or she was buried at a certain location. But people in small communities love to talk, and rumors get started, and that could be very detrimental to investigations. How a missing person's investigation works is if we have a last known location and someone missing on a trail, then we know where to start. If someone's reporting missing in the area of the Hoopa Valley Indian reservation, we don't know where to start. Without some kind of specific information, we're left at the mercy of who knew this person the most and where they could have gone. And that's the case of Emily Grizzling.

When we asked the family what could have happened, they couldn't say for sure. But they don't think any theory should be shot down. And they're afraid. Law enforcement has written off some leads prematurely.

She may have not been in the right mental state, but she would not have hurt herself. Law officials are saying there was no foul play. Even though she disappeared in a place with a lot of known convicts, she was hanging around a lot of little shady people. And I know that something just went wrong.

Police records say Emily's last known location was Pequan bridge. But this place that Mary's referring to, the one rumored to be associated with darker activity, where Emily would sometimes be seen, that's just past the bridge.

Some people refer to it as the end of the road, and it kind of is. There's not much there. There's no cell know, there's no stores. There's a couple houses, and that's all you're going to find down there at the end of the road. Broken down cars. It is a beautiful place if you think about the river, if you think about all the green forests. But since my sister went missing, I just think about how many people could be missing in that forest or that river.

Emily likely did not disappear around the Pekuam bridge. She disappeared at the end of the road. Now, don't get me wrong. There are old native families that have lived down there their whole life. But when you get to a remote place like at the end of the road, people that are trying to hide from law enforcement, it is the perfect place for them. There are at least six known felons that live in that area. She disappeared at the end of the road. You need to see the end of the road, and then you're going to have a different perspective of what could have happened to Emily. And when you see the end of the road, it's going to make you scared.

Next time on The Vanishing Point I.

Have several theories, but then after talking to everybody and like their different sightings. And their different stories. I kind of think something bad might have happened with her and they're just all trying to cover it up.

Do you think somebody knows?

I think yeah, definitely somebody knows something more than they're saying.

Do you think more than one person?

Yeah, I do.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Vanishing Point. This six part series is released weekly, absolutely free, but if you want to binge the whole season right now, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus on Apple podcasts or@tenderfootplus.com the Vanishing Point is a production of Tenderfoot TV, an association with Odyssey. I'm your host, Celicia Stanton. The show is written by Meredith Studman, Alex Vespasad and Jamie Albright, with additional writing assistance by me. Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. Lead producer is Jamie Albright, along with producer Meredith Sedman. Editing by Alex Vestesad with additional editing by Sydney Evans. Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan. Additional production by Laura Freder and Ali hostler research by Laura Freder and Taylor Floyd. Artwork by Byron McCoy. Original music by makeup advanity set mix by Dayton Cole. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group. Special thanks to Greg O'Rourke, the Kide 91.3 radio station in Hoopa, the Two Rivers Tribune and all of the families and community members that spoke to us. For more podcasts like The Vanishing Point, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us at tenorfoot TV.

Thanks for listening.