The True Story Behind Netflix's Murder Mountain Is Horrifying

Murder Mountain introduces the story of Garrett Rodriguez right at the start of the series and focuses on his disappearance throughout. Rodriguez was a young surfer and fishing enthusiast who — though his family begged him not to — decided to take two years off and move from San Diego to Humboldt County in December 2012 to work on a marijuana farm. He began growing marijuana on a ranch in an area known as Rancho Sequoia, which first became a popular location for marijuana farming in the late '70s. However, he wasn't there for long before friends and family realized that they hadn't seen Rodriguez since sometime between Christmas 2012 and New Year's Eve, and Rodriquez's father officially reported him as missing in April 2013.

Rodriguez wasn't the first person to go missing from Rancho Sequoia, however. The area earned the nickname Murder Mountain after the 1982 murder of Clark Stevens, who had reportedly been murdered by the San Francisco Witch Killers, a serial killer duo composed of married couple Suzan and Michael "Bear" Carson. Rancho Sequoia was also allegedly the last place where Robert Tennison was spotted before he went missing in January 2009, after he went to the area to get paid for a construction job.

Rodriguez's family hired a private investigator named Chris Cook, who quickly learned neighbors suspected the young man was dead. Cook reported her findings to the local sheriff but found that law enforcement did not seem interested in the case. Rodriguez's 1998 Dodge Ram four-wheel drive pickup — which he drove from Ocean Beach, San Diego, to Humboldt County — was then found in late May, about a month after Rodriguez was officially declared a missing person. The truck was discovered in a remote area nearly 20 miles from where he worked, and though the discovery was strange, there were no signs of foul play.

Growing frustrated with the stagnant case, a team of eight men in the nearby town of Alderpoint formed a posse known as the "Alderpoint 8" hoping to find answers on their own. The Alderpoint 8 confronted a man they believed to be the suspect and then forced him at gunpoint to take them to Rodriguez's body. An anonymous call was made to the sheriff, who later confirmed in December 2013 that the body was Rodriguez, shot to death and buried in a shallow grave off of Jewitt Ranch Road, in the Harris area of Humboldt County.

As of 2018, there have been no arrests or formal charges for the death of Garrett Rodriguez, and as of January 2018, there were 35 people on the California Attorney General's database of missing persons from Humboldt County, making it the county with the highest rate of missing persons reports in the state of California.

This alarming number of disappearances recently gained national attention when Bekah Martinez from Arie Luyendyk Jr.'s season of The Bachelor was reported missing in November 2017 after Martinez told her mother that she was going to work on a marijuana farm in Humboldt County. News of her disappearance was included in a North Coast Journal article, titled "The Humboldt 35," and though it turned out that Martinez was fine, plenty of others still were not.

Lt. Steve Knight of the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department told CBS San Francisco that disappearances may be so prevalent in the area because local marijuana farmers don't feel comfortable working with law enforcement. For them, marijuana is their livelihood, and they fear what the introduction of a concentrated police presence in the area will do to their community and their farms. Humboldt County may have once been known best for its marijuana output, but as Netflix's Murder Mountain explores, the area has become known for something far more insidious, and the problem will only continue unless people are willing to talk.