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Shadows In The Pines

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True crime podcast focusing on crime in the Pacific Northwest.

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28 episodes
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#118
Saturday · 34 min
When The Northwest Goes Dark
As October approaches, the Pacific Northwest seems to take on a different feeling. The days grow shorter, the shadows stretch longer, and old stories seem to come alive. Join me for a fireside journey through Northwest folklore, mysterious waters, legendary creatures, haunted places, and the stories woven into the landscape around Spokane. Because maybe the Northwest isn’t haunted… Maybe it simply has a very long memory. Welcome to Mini Pines. 🌲
#117
September 28 · 53 min
Jay Cook & Tanya Van Cuylenborg - Part 1
In November 1987, 20-year-old Jay Cook and 18-year-old Tanya Van Cuylenborg left Vancouver Island for what was supposed to be a simple overnight trip into Washington. Jay’s father needed materials picked up for the family business, Tanya came along, and they expected to be home the following day. They never made it back. In the first ten parts of this episode, we get to know Jay and Tanya before following their route into Washington, the frantic search after they failed to return, and the discoveries that turned one missing-couple investigation into a multi-county double homicide case. We dig into the physical evidence investigators recovered, the unidentified DNA profile known for decades only as “Individual A,” the cruel anonymous letters sent to the families, and the years investigators spent trying to put a name to the man connected to the evidence. Then, more than thirty years after Jay and Tanya were killed, investigators turned to forensic genetic genealogy. Matches from distant relatives allowed genealogists to begin constructing family trees, eventually leading detectives to a previously unknown name: William Earl Talbott II. But a family tree wasn’t proof. Detectives still needed his DNA. And ultimately, one discarded paper cup would give them the answer they’d been waiting three decades to get. Shadows in the Pines — Jay Cook & Tanya Van Cuylenborg
#116
September 23 · 31 min
Dayton Leroy Rogers - Part 2 - The trials
We continue with the story of Dayton Leroy Rogers
#115
September 13 · 57 min
Dayton Leroy Rogers - Part 1 - The Crimes
Dayton Leroy Rogers: The Molalla Forest Killer — Part 1: The Crimes Before Dayton Leroy Rogers became known as the Molalla Forest Killer, women in Oregon had already survived him. In Part One, we follow Rogers from his earliest documented violence through the crimes that eventually exposed what he had been doing. We look at the teenage girls he attacked years before the murders, the women who knew him as “Steve the Gambler,” and the survivors who described bondage, knives, isolation, and escalating violence. Then, on August 7, 1987, 25-year-old mother Jennifer Lisa Smith screamed for help from inside Rogers’s truck in a Denny’s parking lot. Strangers ran toward her. One tried to save her life. Others tried to stop Rogers from escaping. And when he got away, a witness chased him long enough to get his license plate. Within hours, Dayton Rogers was in custody. Twenty-four days later, a bowhunter entered the Molalla Forest and discovered the first of seven women hidden there. This episode is about the crimes, the survivors who lived long enough to tell investigators what Rogers had done to them, the evidence connecting his truck and repair shop to the women in the forest, and—most importantly—the women themselves. Jennifer Lisa Smith. Riatha Marie Gyles. Elizabeth Marie “Lisa” Mock. Nondace “Noni” Kae Cervantes. Christine Lotus Adams. Maureen Ann Hodges. Cynthia Diane “Dee Dee” DeVore. Tawnia Jarie “Tawnie” Johnston. Eight women. Eight names. They deserve to be remembered as more than the reason we know the name Dayton Rogers.
#114
September 13 · 39 min
Mini Pines - The Big Burn
The Big Burn In August of 1910, three million acres burned in two days. At least eighty-five people died, and nobody can say exactly how many, because most had been hired off barstools without anyone writing down their names. Outside Wallace, Idaho, a forest ranger named Ed Pulaski put forty-some men into an abandoned mine shaft and held the door until his body quit. That’s the part everyone remembers. This one’s about the rest — and about the argument that broke out afterward over what the fire had taught us. We got it wrong, and we’re still paying for it every August.
#113
September 8 · 1 hr 40 min
Aidan Spear - Found, But No Answers
Aidan Victoria Spear — Found, But Without Answers In January 2022, 21-year-old Aidan Victoria Spear was supposed to meet her mother, Jessica Brown. After years of struggling with addiction and homelessness on the streets of Tacoma, Aidan had told her mom she was ready for treatment. Jessica began making the arrangements. Aidan never arrived. For more than four years, Jessica searched for her daughter, following leads, digging through messages and trying to understand what happened during Aidan’s final known days in Tacoma. Then, in January 2026, human remains were discovered in an isolated wooded area of Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Spanaway. In April, authorities announced they had been identified as Aidan. Aidan had finally been found. But what happened to her remains unknown. In this episode of Shadows in the Pines, Dan and Bekah look beyond the missing-person flyer to tell Aidan’s story: the little girl her family adored, her childhood in Washington, the struggles that changed her life, her mother’s attempts to help her, the people surrounding her before she disappeared, the conflicting information Jessica encountered during her search, and the investigation that continues today. We are also beginning a larger commitment with this episode: to bring sustained attention to missing and murdered Indigenous people throughout the Pacific Northwest and to make sure the human beings behind these cases are remembered. If you have information about Aidan’s whereabouts or activities around January 24, 2022—including information that could help investigators better understand the people she was communicating with or where she went after speaking with her mother—please contact the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office at 253-798-7530 and reference case #2205300666. You can also contact Shadows in the Pines with information, corrections, memories of Aidan, or other MMIP cases that deserve attention: Call/Text Dan: 509-844-8036 Email: shadowsinthepinespodcast@gmail.com Website: ShadowsInThePines.com Aidan Victoria Spear was more than a case number. Her story matters, and we’re not letting it go.
#112
August 31 · 33 min
Mini Pines - Mel Waters
In 1997, a man called a late-night radio show to report a bottomless pit outside Ellensburg, Washington. Nineteen feet across, fifteen miles of fishing line, no bottom. Over five years the story grew a resurrected dog, a government payout, and a wombat sanctuary — then the man vanished for good. No hole was ever found. No Mel Waters ever existed.
#111
August 31 · 27 min
Big Show News
A quick update on what we’ve been working on this last week
#110
August 22 · 37 min
Mini Pines - The Man Who Carried His Own Key
The Man Who Carried His Own Key You hike eleven miles on snowshoes to a locked Forest Service cabin. You have the only key. And the stove is warm. For thirteen years in the 1930s and ’40s, someone lived off the locked backcountry cabins of north-central Idaho, letting himself in and out without ever breaking a thing. The men who worked that country had a nickname for him before they ever had a face. They called him the Ridgerunner. In this episode of Shadows in the Pines, Dan and Bekah head into the Idaho backcountry to uncover who the Ridgerunner actually was, how he managed to open seemingly every lock in two national forests with a strip of metal cut from a meat can, and what Forest Service workers discovered beneath a sheet of canvas on a ridge above Skull Creek in February 1945. For years, his story became the stuff of wilderness legend. But the real story is stranger, darker, and far more human than the legend that survived him. Some legends are made from what a man did. This one is made from what he was running from. Shadows in the Pines New episodes every Sunday at 8 PM Pacific.
#109
August 17 · 1 hr 56 min
Bryan Kohberger Update
Bryan Kohberger pleaded guilty to the murders of Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin. But that plea ended the case before a jury ever heard the evidence, before experts were cross-examined, and before some of the biggest unanswered questions surrounding 1122 King Road were tested in open court. Now, with Kohberger attempting to withdraw his guilty plea, those questions matter again. In this episode of Shadows in the Pines, Dan takes another look at the evidence and the parts of this case that still don’t sit right: the handling of the knife sheath, the identification of the white sedan, the complete absence of identified victim DNA from Kohberger’s Elantra, the late-night Moscow trips, unidentified DNA, conflicting accounts from inside the house, the seven-and-a-half-hour delay before 911 was called, and the destruction of 1122 King Road before any trial took place. This isn’t an argument that Kohberger is innocent, and it isn’t about blaming anyone for surviving. It’s about asking questions that never received complete answers. Four young people were murdered. Their families deserve to know exactly what happened.
#108
August 15 · 45 min
Mini Pines - The Hahn House
The House Made of the Hill: The Wilbur-Hahn House At the end of a dead-end road on Spokane’s South Hill sits a century-old house built directly into the basalt beneath it. It’s beautiful, historically significant, privately owned—and by local reputation, one of the most haunted houses in Spokane. But the documented history of the Wilbur-Hahn House is stranger than most of the legends. Built in 1916 as an elaborate “love cottage,” the house passed from mining wealth and a marriage that lasted barely two years into the hands of Rudolph Hahn, the man newspapers would eventually call the “Mad Doctor of the South Hill.” His years there brought enormous parties, illegal liquor, radio towers, Jimmy Doolittle performing aerial stunts overhead, gunfire inside the house, the death of his wife Sylvia, a manslaughter conviction, and eventually Hahn’s own violent death. Then the house sat vacant for years, and Spokane supplied the rest: a woman seen on the staircase, screams from the basement, slamming doors, arguing voices, shadow figures, disappearing bloodstains, secret tunnels and stories of money hidden somewhere on the property. Some of those claims have roots in documented history. Others fall apart once you look closely. This episode separates the history from the haunting and the people who actually lived and died there from the legends that grew around them. The House Made of the Hill: The Wilbur-Hahn House.
#107
August 10 · 1 hr 20 min
Kit Mora - Missing In Omak
Finding Kit: Missing in Omak In the summer of 2021, sixteen-year-old Kit Mora left Yakima for what was supposed to be a temporary stay with their biological mother in Omak, Washington. By November, their closest friends and family had stopped hearing from them. Kit stopped posting online. They stopped attending school. And yet months would pass before anyone realized this teenager had seemingly disappeared. In this episode of Shadows in the Pines, we follow Kit’s story from the people who knew and loved them through a welfare check that left serious questions, 33 unexcused school absences, a runaway classification, and an investigation that didn’t fully begin until more than a year after Kit’s last known communication with the people closest to them. Kit is Indigenous and nonbinary, and their disappearance also brings us into the larger crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People and the gaps that can exist between schools, child welfare, local police, tribal authorities, state agencies and federal investigators. Kit Mora is still missing. If you know anything about Kit’s disappearance, contact the Omak Police Department at 509-826-0383, the Washington Attorney General’s Office MMIP Cold Case Unit at 844-770-7900, or the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678. Finding Kit: Missing in Omak — Shadows in the Pines.
#106
August 8 · 33 min
Mini Pines - Bridge Of the Gods
The Bridge of the Gods There was a bridge across the Columbia River. Not the steel one at Cascade Locks with the toll booth and the hikers walking single file — the first one. Stone and dirt and the broken bones of a mountain, wide enough to walk across, with the river running underneath it in the dark. For a long time, the people who told you about it were not believed. This is the story of a tired man in a canoe who wrote down the answer in 1805 and didn’t know it. A young novelist who heard the story from Klickitat elders, believed it when nobody respectable would, and died at twenty-nine without ever learning he was right. A botanist and his wife who spent the winters of the Great Depression counting dead trees in the freezing shallows of the Columbia, racing a dam that was about to drown the evidence forever. And the tree rings that finally answered the question — not to the century, not to the decade, but to a single season. It’s also the story of a girl named Kalliah, who was a year and a half old when the Army hanged her father, and who refused for the rest of her life to leave the river. The mountain came down in the winter of 1446. The story survived four hundred years to tell us so. Lamplight on the Trail — folklore, landmarks, and lost history of the Pacific Northwest.
#105
August 4 · 2 hr 2 min
The Murder Of Mandy Stavik
The day after Thanksgiving in 1989, 18-year-old Mandy Stavik left her family’s home in the small community of Acme, Washington, for an afternoon run along the roads she’d known her entire life. She never came home. What followed was one of the Pacific Northwest’s most haunting unsolved murders. Despite an extensive investigation, a massive search effort, and crucial biological evidence, detectives spent nearly three decades without knowing who had taken Mandy’s life. Then an ordinary conversation between two women, a determined detective who refused to let the case die, and a discarded plastic cup changed everything. In this episode, we trace Mandy’s story from the quiet roads of Acme through one of Washington State’s longest-running homicide investigations, following every step that ultimately led to justice nearly thirty years later. Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of murder, sexual assault, and violence that may not be suitable for all listeners. If you enjoy the show, please follow Shadows in the Pines on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and consider leaving a five-star review. It genuinely helps more people discover the stories of victims who deserve to be remembered. New episodes premiere every Sunday at 8:00 PM Pacific. Keep your eyes open and your footsteps light… because in the pines, the truth never stays buried.
#104
August 1 · 28 min
Mini Pines - Stick Indians
Don't Whistle Back: The Stick Indians of the Pacific Northwest There's a rule some people in this part of the country still follow: don't whistle at night. No explanation offered. Just — don't. Because something will hear you. This episode is about what's on the other end of that whistle. The Salish called them tsiatko. The Nisqually called them Seatco. In English they became the Stick Indians, or the Night People — though the older tradition holds that naming them at all is a way of drawing their attention. We trace what the historical record actually preserves, drawing on the work of Arthur C. Ballard, an Auburn city clerk who began sitting with Puget Sound elders in 1916 and writing down stories from people born before 1880. Beings who sleep by day and move at dusk. Who never cross water. Whose language is a series of whistles, low to high, carrying impossible distances through the trees. We walk through the rules the legends encode — don't go out alone after dark, don't disrespect them, don't say their name — and what those rules were quietly teaching about survival in the deep woods. We also look at the related traditions that get flattened into one another: Dzoonokwa, Slapu, Sasquatch. And we're honest about the modern cryptid layer that's grown up alongside the living tradition, and where one ends and the other begins. The forests here are old, and they are large. Take that seriously. Mini Pines explores the folklore, mysteries, and layered histories of the Pacific Northwest. New episodes wherever you listen.
#103
July 20 · 1 hr 10 min
The Lewis Clark Valley Murders - Part 3 - Lance Voss
The Lewis-Clark Valley murders remain one of the Pacific Northwest’s most haunting unsolved mysteries. Between 1979 and 1982, five people either disappeared or were murdered across southeastern Washington and north-central Idaho, leaving investigators to wonder whether they were hunting a single offender who operated undetected for years. In the conclusion of our series, we follow the investigation as detectives begin laying decades of evidence side by side, transforming what were once separate cases into a single, sprawling investigation. We examine why one man became the focus of so much investigative attention, why suspicion alone has never been enough to support criminal charges, and how advances in DNA testing and investigative genetic genealogy continue to keep hope alive for the families still searching for answers. We also look at where these cases stand today, the work of investigators and family members who refused to let them be forgotten, and the questions that remain unanswered nearly half a century later. If you have information about the disappearances of Christina White or Steven Pearsall, or the murders of Kristin David, Kristina Nelson, or Brandy Miller, please contact the appropriate law enforcement agency. Even the smallest detail can matter in a long-running investigation. New episodes of Shadows in the Pines premiere every Sunday at 8:00 p.m. Pacific. If you enjoy the show, please follow, rate, and review us wherever you listen—it helps more people discover these stories.
#102
July 18 · 26 min
Mini Pines - Gumberoo of the Cedars
Deep in the cedar and spruce forests of the Oregon coast, where the fog comes in sideways and you can lose fifty feet of visibility in the time it takes to blink, the men who logged those slopes in the 1880s and 1890s had a story. It was called the Gumberoo. Coal-black, barrel-bodied, and completely indestructible — bullets bounced off its glossy hide, axes glanced away, even a charging elk got knocked backward by its own momentum. It would eat anything, couldn't be hurt by anything, and the only way out of an encounter was to lead it toward fire and hope you were standing far enough back when it went up. Tonight we're getting into the Fearsome Critters — the monsters of the American lumberwoods, born in bunkhouses, carried from camp to camp like gear — and specifically into what the Gumberoo was actually doing for the men who told stories about it. Because it wasn't just a campfire tale. It was a very specific kind of story, invented by people doing genuinely dangerous work in genuinely unforgiving country, about the one thing no amount of skill or strength could protect you from. Something that turns your own force back on you. That doesn't resist. That returns. Pull up a chair.
#101
July 13 · 1 hr 18 min
The Lewis- Clark Valley Murders Part 2
The Lewis-Clark Valley was already living with unanswered questions after the disappearance of Christina White and the murder of Kristin David. Then, in the span of just a few months, the investigation took a devastating turn. In Part Two of our deep dive into the Lewis-Clark Valley murders, we examine the disappearance of two-year-old Ricky Barnett, the vanishing of Kristina “Brandy” Miller and Kristina Nelson after a short walk to a neighborhood grocery store, and the mysterious disappearance of Civic Theatre volunteer Steven Pearsall later that very same night. As investigators struggle to make sense of an ever-growing list of missing people, unsettling similarities begin to emerge, raising a question that will haunt the Lewis-Clark Valley for decades: are these isolated tragedies, or are detectives witnessing a single investigation unfold before them? Join us as we continue following the evidence, the timeline, and the people forever changed by one of the Pacific Northwest’s most enduring unsolved mysteries. 🎙️ New episodes premiere every Sunday at 8:00 PM Pacific Time. Follow Shadows in the Pines on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you’re enjoying the show, leaving a rating and review is one of the best ways to help others discover us.
#100
July 6 · 1 hr 9 min
The Lewis-Clark Valley Murders Part 1
In April 1979, twelve-year-old Christina White left a friend’s house in Asotin, Washington, and never made it home. Two years later, University of Idaho student Kristin David disappeared while riding her bicycle between Moscow and Lewiston. Her murder would send shockwaves through the Lewis-Clark Valley and leave investigators asking whether these two cases were connected—or simply heartbreaking coincidences. In Part One of our deep dive into the Lewis-Clark Valley murders, we follow the investigation exactly as it unfolded. From the quiet communities that shaped these victims’ lives to the desperate searches, witness interviews, and mounting questions, this episode traces the first chapters of one of the Pacific Northwest’s most enduring unsolved mysteries. Join us as we separate fact from speculation, examine the documented evidence, and begin uncovering a case that has haunted families and investigators for more than four decades. New episodes premiere every Sunday at 8:00 PM Pacific Time. Follow Shadows in the Pines on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you’re enjoying the show, leaving a rating and review helps more listeners discover us. This episode discusses violence, murder, and crimes involving children. Listener discretion is advised.
#99
July 4 · 32 min
Mini Pines - Bigfoot Of The Selkirks
The Selkirk Mountains are among the oldest and most remote wilderness areas in the Pacific Northwest—and for generations, they’ve been home to stories of something that walks upright through the trees. In this episode of Mini Pines, we explore documented Bigfoot encounters, Indigenous traditions, eyewitness accounts, mysterious tracks, and why the Selkirks have quietly become one of North America’s most active Sasquatch regions. From a hunter’s unforgettable encounter near Sasquatch Lake to modern reports from the Idaho Panhandle, we separate documented history from legend and ask why these mountains continue to produce the same stories decade after decade. Whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, the Selkirks are a place that has a way of making you look twice into the tree line. Follow Shadows in the Pines on Spotify and visit ShadowsInThePines.com for more stories from the Pacific Northwest.

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