The Bakersfield Three - Episode 1

Hi, I'm Casey, host of the CaseFile podcast.

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Hi, it's Casey here.

A few days ago, we shared something a little different here on the Case File feed, episode 1 of our Case File Presents series, Missing Neum.

The decision to do so came after I spent some time chatting with Casefile listeners at our live shows and discovered that a lot of them had no idea what Casefile Presents actually is, or that we produce other podcasts aside from CaseFile.

I realized that if someone is a big enough fan of Casefile to attend a live show, but hadn't heard of Casefile Presents, then clearly we need to do a better job of shining light on the other stories we've put a lot of hard work into.

For those who don't know, Casefile Presents is our production platform.

The main show we produce is, of course, Casefile, but we've also produced a number of other podcasts.

Our level of involvement varies from show to show, but we've had a direct hand in all of them, whether it be financing, research, production, editing, or music.

I even narrate a few of them myself.

With CaseFile on a short break, we thought this would be a great time to spotlight some of the shows that may have flown under the radar for many of you.

These are series we've put our hearts into and are incredibly proud of.

Today, we're showcasing the Bakersfield 3.

The story begins when two young friends go missing in California.

In between their disappearances, a third friend is murdered.

As the case unfolds, the mothers of the trio take it upon themselves to investigate.

As they do so, they uncover devastating revelations, including one that shakes their entire community to its core.

The series is hosted by Olivia Lavois, an award-winning journalist who spent five years reporting on this case.

When I first met Olivia, I immediately knew I wanted to work with her.

She's tenacious, empathetic, and shares the same core values that Drive CaseFile presents, giving voice to victims and their families.

What makes the Bakersfield 3 so unique is that Olivia wasn't looking back on this story after the fact.

She was there from the beginning, reporting in real time as events unfolded.

On the ground for every twist, turn and shocking reveal.

And trust me, there's one twist in particular that you won't see coming.

The Bakersfield 3 is our most successful limited run series to date.

The series reached number 1 on the overall podcast charts in the US, a first for any Casefile present show.

To put that in perspective, Casefile itself has only reached as high as number 3 in the US.

Bakersfield 3 spent extended time at the top, also reaching number 1 in Australia and charting highly around the world.

So far, the series has been downloaded over 12 million times.

We're incredibly proud of this show, and if you missed it when it first came out in late 2023, now is the perfect time to jump in.

We're releasing episode 1 here on the Case File feed.

If you like what you hear, you can find the rest of the series by searching The Bakersfield 3, wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, here's episode 1.

There's no way two friends just go missing within a month of each other.

Somehow, some way, I know they're connected.

It's a haunting mystery, one that seems to grow more complex and dark.

The disappearance of Micah Holsenbake and Bailey Despot.

And in between those two disappearances, a murder in a Bakersfield neighborhood where crime is rather rare.

Is it three mysteries or one?

These three people knew each other, and they're all either at this point dead or missing.

There's something big about what's going on.

There's something,

something crazy about this case.

I gotta find her to hold her one last time,

even if it is just her bones.

We're just trying to find out where they are.

Just somebody tell me where they are, and we will go get them.

I will go dig.

I will go dig and I will find them.

Working in Bakersfield as a local news reporter was a unique time in my life.

I had a hunger and drive I don't think could ever be replicated.

I was a 20-something making no money, working often obscenely long hours, completely by choice.

Eating almost strictly microwave meals and fast food, and spending way too much time making sure my fake eyelashes and hair were just right.

I look back on the days where I'd wear heels and a dress while knocking on doors in a rough neighborhood in over 100 degree heat, desperate to find someone who'd give me a soundbite describing hearing gunshots, which, by the way, is almost always the same.

I thought it was fireworks at first.

And every time I'd get the soundbite, it was an accomplishment for maybe all of five minutes until the next breaking news event happened.

And I loved every second of it.

I lived and breathed it and felt a sometimes maddening need to be first, which is kind of the name of the game in local news, trying to break the big story, meaning you're the first reporter to uncover the information.

When I first started, I envisioned myself going to a local bar after work where there'd be a group of deputies having beers.

They'd welcome me to join them and I'd end up leaving every night with a big scoop.

But that never happened.

Not even close.

I quickly learned that usually if there's a significant event, like a homicide or armed robbery, all of us reporters hear about it at the same time through the police scanners we have blaring in the newsrooms 24-7.

We then all race out to the scene, elbowing each other, trying to get as close to the yellow tape as possible.

My old news director, Mike Trihey, used to say, you make your own luck.

So we'd persist with the ritual of digging, coming up empty, and trying again another day.

A built-in part of that routine for me at 17 News was to go to the courthouse once a week and look through search warrants.

Doing this probably hundreds of times, I can only think of a few instances when I found a search warrant that, was to put it simply, anything good, anything we'd put on the news.

99% of the time, any search warrants pertaining to a case the media would report on are sealed by law enforcement.

It's rare that one slips through the cracks and you're lucky enough to find it.

Despite all this, something kept bringing me back to court to look through them, still having that glimmer of hope that one day I would find something big.

That day came in early summer of 2018.

Though, just how big, no one could have known then.

I'm Olivia Lavois, and this is the Bakersfield 3.

Going through my stack that day, I started thumbing through a warrant that was for a crime that on the surface seemed pretty dull, an investigation into a felon being in possession of a firearm.

There's nothing newsworthy about a felon having a gun when they're not supposed to.

It happens all the time.

It's illegal, yes, but not significant enough to report on.

This warrant, though, was different because of one little sentence that mentioned a missing woman who I'd later learned was named Bailey Despot.

It then went on to describe a man named Arturo coming home while his wife was out of town and finding something odd.

Here's Arturo to explain.

I see bags in my front door.

I was like, wow, is my wife home?

She's supposed to be home like the next day.

And I say, well, maybe she's surprising me.

That's what I thought.

But the closer I got to the door, I noticed that that was not her luggage.

And I was like, okay, that's weird.

And I looked down and there was a note.

And it said,

Tell Batty that I love her, but I cannot be with her.

Arturo knew Bailey as a friend of his son's from high school.

He recalled his son recently telling him that no one had heard from Bailey for several months.

It kind of stung me a little bit.

I was like, well, she's missing.

Why is her bags here?

So I called him and I go, son, I go, is Bailey here?

And he was like, what?

And he goes,

no, she's not here.

I go, son, her bags are here in the front.

He goes, what are are her bags doing i said i do not know he goes well let me call her mom and find out

soon after bailey's mother jane showed up and i had never met her and uh we're talking she goes yeah this is her stuff so she started going through her bags and and poor lady she was so emotional like this is what i gave her for her birthday this is what i gave her last year and i mean she was just crying i was just like overwhelmed and she's like well who dropped them off and i said i don't know so we went through my cameras and finally I found the footage of who dropped them off.

I'm like, oh my God, that's Matt Queen.

And he's got a gun.

Bailey's mother, Jane, recognized the man, Matt Queen, as the guy she refuses to call her daughter's boyfriend, but it seems for all intents and purposes, he was.

And here he was, about a month after Bailey vanished, dropping off her things at a friend's home that really seemed like a random choice.

And when he dropped her belongings off, as shown in the surveillance video, he was armed.

The gentleman, he pulled up to the door.

And of course, nobody was here.

We're all at work.

So he puts the bags down.

Then he goes back to a suburban.

And then he comes back.

He gets the letter and he sits it on the back.

But when he bends over to set the letter down,

His sweater picks up and he had a gun on his back.

And me and Gene was like, wow, like, we're just stung.

Like, how about if one of us was to be home?

Like, what would the outcome would have been?

I don't know.

Jane called the police immediately.

After seeing the video for themselves, investigators went to Matt Queen's house to speak with him, where they found a loaded gun, which legally as a felon, he can't have.

Queen wasn't in jail for long, just a few days before he made bail.

But this warrant described how after his arrest, he called his wife from jail.

Yes, as I'd later find out, Queen had his wife and Bailey living with him under the same roof.

We'll get more into that later.

When Queen called his wife after his arrest that day, he told her to come get some things from his car before the cops could.

Behind the driver's seat, there's a backpack.

Gray and black.

Is it this?

Yeah.

Okay.

Take that in the house.

In that benefit package, all the letters and everything.

Yeah, it's all the evidence.

Death fucking.

she left on the, you know what I mean?

That James and Lyon shit.

It's all the stuff that she wrote up about her mom.

That's why I left you the phone, too.

The Snapchat is still on that phone.

You don't have to access it.

You know, I'll get you.

You open it.

In that Snapchat, it is all kinds of like evidence to show that Jane is not a fucking lying, manipulative, or crazy person.

It appeared Queen was telling his wife in the backpack there was evidence that, quote, she left, she being bailey he referenced letters and a phone with a snapchat account that would show bailey's mom jane acting crazy it seems at that point queen sense detectives were looking at him for bailey's disappearance and he blamed jane for that in addition to the letters and phone queen also asks his wife to see if his tools are there

okay

you're gonna have to take those to the job right away

I gotta go get him.

Careful.

I love you.

All right.

Bye.

Queen told his wife to go get his brother and have him take the, quote, tools in his car to the dump right away.

It sounded suspicious, of course, so according to the search warrant I'd found, detectives wanted to search Queen's home, vehicles, and phone for evidence that he could be involved in the manufacturing of illegal firearms.

It seemed pretty obvious to me that, sure, maybe if police discovered evidence of that, it'd be a bonus.

But what they were really after was evidence pertaining to the missing woman he'd been living with, Bailey.

I thought looking at him for illegal guns was just their way in.

And having this warrant was my way into the story.

I remember when I first saw Bailey's photo.

She's striking, tall, slender, with long dark hair and big green eyes.

There was something classic and effortless about her beauty.

She stood out.

But as I looked at photos of her on Matt Queen's Facebook page, what stood out even more was Queen's extensive, bizarre, and somewhat fascinating social media presence.

He had numerous posts about looking for Bailey that included missing flyers he'd made himself that said he last saw her getting into a black SUV with a heavyset man.

But what really caught my my eye were screenshot text messages he posted between himself and Bailey's mother, Jane.

One screenshot showed Queen sent this text to Jane.

At first, I thought you were simply an over-protective mother, and I respected that.

But it is now clear that Bailey was right all along.

You have a mental disorder.

Yes, Jane, I'm twice her age.

Get over it.

Find something else wrong with me.

You're obsessed with Bailey and it's not healthy.

I'm in love with her and if I'm not mistaken, she's in love with me.

Keep trying to drive a wedge between us, it's only weakening the strength in yours.

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Naturally, I had to hear what Jane had to say about all this.

You wanted to interview me and I was very hesitant, I remember, and you're like, well, I think the best thing is to get it out there.

And I'm like, yeah, but they're telling me I can't do that.

It might scare off the bad people or something.

Jane was in a tough spot.

At this time, a little over a month after her daughter's disappearance, detectives had told her to stay away from media, which, by the way, almost never makes sense in missing persons' cases.

How can someone be found if no one even knows they're missing?

Being told to avoid the news, but desperate to get the word out, Jane had taken to hanging literally thousands of flyers around town.

That first phone call, she was pretty disappointed to know that none of the flyers had caught my attention, apparently, as I explained I hadn't heard of her daughter's case until finding the search warrant that day.

If you haven't heard of Bailey's case, asked Jane.

Have you heard of Micah Holsenbach's case?

I told her I hadn't.

Well, he went missing a month before Bailey did, and the two of them were friends, Jane said.

Now this sounded a bit more complex than I initially thought this case was going to be.

Even more so when Jane explained how the connection between Micah and Bailey was made in the first place.

I found out that after Micah Holsenbak went missing in late March, Micah's brother immediately started his own investigation of sorts.

Someone he spoke with said he should try to track down a couple of people who might have information, including a young woman.

Bailey Parent?

That's weird.

That doesn't sound like anybody we know.

That's Micah's mom, Cheryl.

The name Bailey Parent didn't mean anything to them then.

But a few weeks later, Cheryl and her husband Lance were out in Bakersfield looking for Micah.

Sometimes they would drive around aimlessly aimlessly when they'd ran out of people to talk to.

That day, Cheryl and Lance spotted a missing flyer for a young woman.

How horrible her family is going through what we're going through, they thought.

Then they noticed the name Bailey.

Only the last name listed was different.

It was Despot.

The Bailey they were told knew Micah was Bailey's parent.

But something in Micah's dad, call it fatherly instinct, told him to do a little digging.

The flyers had clearly been made by the missing woman's mother, Jane.

But he looks her up on Facebook and he's like, Jane's last name is Parent.

That's Bailey Parent.

Oh

my God.

And there it was.

The name Micah's brother had been given shortly after Micah went missing.

The initial disconnect was Bailey and Jane having different last names, but there was no mistaking it.

This was the same Bailey.

She supposedly knew something, as what we had been told.

You better better talk to Bailey Parent.

Now knowing she too had gone missing, Cheryl says Lance had a horribly grim theory.

He said, Mike is dead and she knew too much.

Regardless of if the hunch was right, they knew there was something going on here.

We had no proof of anything.

We just knew they were gone.

Cheryl and Lance hadn't been getting far with detectives and were determined to get answers themselves.

So they reached out to Bailey's mom, Jane.

I was very leery.

I didn't trust anybody.

I didn't know who to trust.

I didn't trust them in the beginning.

They probably didn't trust me, but we had two things in common.

Our kids knew each other and they were missing.

Jane met with Cheryl and her husband at a restaurant where over pie and iced tea that sat untouched, they discussed the horrifying possibilities of what could have happened to their children.

They compared notes and commiserated over the difficulty of getting detectives to take them seriously.

After Jane told me all of this on that first phone call, the questions were endless.

So I put together a short and simple story with the little I knew.

It focused primarily on Bailey being missing and mentioned the possibility of a connection between her and Micah's cases.

After it airged, social media immediately lit up with theories, the most popular being that Micah and Bailey were lovers that ran off to Mexico to be together.

Among the comments, I remember seeing one from Lance, Micah's dad.

It said something along the lines of the connection between the two should definitely be investigated, and referred to Micah and Bailey as acquaintances.

I noticed someone responded to that comment, a girl named Sarah.

Her response read, I was a good friend of Bailey's and Micah was around a lot.

We knew him more than just as an acquaintance.

Also, I believe they are linked as well.

I clicked on Sarah's profile.

She had a few posts about Bailey's disappearance.

One read, You are a good friend, Bailey.

I know you're just hiding out somewhere, I bet.

You're a smart girl, and I miss you.

And so does Queen.

I love you, Bae.

I couldn't tell you how or why her and Bailey started hanging out, but they did.

That's Maddie, one of Bailey's closest friends.

She says Sarah went to high school with them, but Bailey and Sarah didn't connect until after graduation.

And they seemed to get close very fast.

The wildness about them is very much the same, and that is what drew them so close together.

Sarah and Bailey both loved the thrill, both acted like they didn't care much about what other people thought.

And I noticed they both looked very similar.

Same body type, same fair complexion, with the same long dark hair and green eyes.

I know that Sarah was dating

a different guy named Matt, and she's the one that introduced Bailey to Queen.

So that's how all that happened.

Sarah was dating a guy named Matt VandeCastiel, who was good friends with Matt Queen.

So when Bailey coupled up with Matt Queen, it seemed like that dream scenario.

Friends dating another set of friends, getting to double date and hang out all the time.

Both Matt's were much older than their girlfriends.

Matt Vandekastiel was 10 years older than Sarah and Bailey, and Matt Queen had lived twice the life they had with their 20-year age gap.

Queen had a wife and family when Bailey and Sarah were in elementary school.

Now the four of them were spending a lot of time together.

And apparently, before he went missing, Michael Holsenbake was spending a lot of time with them too.

When I got in touch with Micah's mom, Cheryl, she told me after Micah went missing, before she found out about Bailey and reached out to Jane, something strange happened.

I get this phone call out of the blue.

The gist of her conversation was,

my son is James Colstad.

James and Micah were friends.

And

James was killed.

James Colstead was murdered about two weeks after Micah went missing and about two weeks before Bailey's disappearance.

Here's James's mom, Diane, or Di, as we all call her.

I'm reading on Facebook that Micah's missing.

And I knew from conversations that James and I had that he had been hanging out with Micah.

When Di saw Micah was missing so close to her son's murder.

Something didn't feel right, just something in my gut.

So she contacted Cheryl, who, like Dai, had been doing her own investigating.

Cheryl and I talked a lot.

We were talking every day on the phone.

We were starting to do our research, you know, names, background checks on

different people, and just so many of the same names kept coming up.

It was around this time that Cheryl and her husband discovered Bailey was missing.

Suddenly, they found themselves looking at all three cases.

They were connected somehow.

We had gotten enough information that we knew they had shared friends.

As it was relayed to me that Micah, James, and Bailey all knew each other and their mothers were trying to figure out if the three were connected, I knew I had to get the three moms in a room together.

We agreed to all meet at Di's home, James's mother.

Di, a medical billing specialist, keeps her home and her appearance impeccable.

Cheryl, Micah's mother, a college finance professor, dressed the part.

Simple.

She'd let her hair start to gray and wore no makeup.

Bailey's mother, Jane, a special education care specialist, dresses casual but colorful.

Think jean overalls with a bright purple top and sunflower scarf tied in her hair.

As the three of them sat down at Dai's dining room table with me, I noticed how fragile they were.

Trembling voices with what initially felt like a sense of apprehension.

But the more we all spoke, I began to see a shift from anguish to a feeling of determination.

I didn't want to stop that day.

I think we talked for hours, didn't we?

We talked a long time.

I

I felt relief.

I felt like somebody's finally listening who wants to hear more than

Mike is missing.

They wanted to hear

what we thought was going on.

The backstory of why this happened to him.

And the notebook after notebook after notebook that we had filled with information.

I think we needed someone to give us that confidence that we could take this on.

And I think you did give us that.

Together, the three of them were emboldened and quickly adopted the motto, fight like a mother.

We began leaning on each other early on.

Because who else do you call?

And it was nice not to be walking that walk alone.

We could call each other any time, day or night.

Each of them brought a different skill set to the table.

Jane Bailey's mom was the one hitting the streets.

Well, I was the flyer girl.

I'm like, let me get out and do it because if I'm not out there searching or doing something, I'm like,

it's my sanity keeper.

She hung up thousands of missing flyers for Bailey and missing flyers for Micah and eventually a poster for all three of the cases that read, The Bakersfield 3.

Can you connect the dots for three friends?

When it comes to connecting the dots, Cheryl Micah's mom was taking all the bits of information on the cases and all the people that Micah, James, and Bailey had in common and organizing it.

My career was in research and data collection.

And so I knew how to take anecdotal evidence and I knew how to prioritize it and put it in a nice spreadsheet and make sure we passed it off to the right people and I knew how to look for information.

And James's mom die?

I'm the one that will make the calls and set up the appointments.

Yes, very much our schedule keeper.

They recognized immediately they were a powerful team.

If we were by ourselves, you can't hold it together long enough to do it.

In this, in our situations, none of us could have held it together and done all of those.

Yeah, the detective work we did, the Googlers and the calling and the...

Looking people up.

We learned how to look and track people down.

Interviewing people till two in the morning on the phone.

Taking notes with a crayon when you can't find a pen.

And convincing the local people to put us on their schedule and meet with us.

Talk to us.

I remember the first time they showed up to my news station with a binder of timelines and spreadsheets and even a color coordinated diagram of people who were in the circle of friends with Micah, James, and Bailey, complete with the individuals' photos.

I couldn't believe how much information they'd gathered themselves and how quickly they'd done it.

Frankly, it was almost a bit overwhelming as they mapped out a plethora of different crimes they believed this web of people might be involved in, ranging from mail theft to drug dealing to sex trafficking.

And it was all apparently happening in an area of town I didn't normally report on.

Very nice schools, nice neighborhoods, well, you know, large homes.

People, they talk about, oh, well, I live in this part of town, so that kind of stuff doesn't happen here.

Oh, yes, it does, and maybe two doors down.

You have no idea.

It was a lot to untangle.

The first, most pressing issue was understanding the ties between Micah, James, and Bailey.

Yes, they knew each other and had many people in common, but what was really going on with this group of people?

And were the cases really all connected?

It's one of the few times in my career where I've kind of almost been warned, hey, you don't want to dig too deep on this one.

That's next time on the Bakersfield 3.

Thanks for listening.

If you'd like to hear the rest of the Bakersfield 3, just search for it wherever you get your podcasts.

It's a CaseFile Presents production created by the same team behind Casefile with the same high standards you expect from us.

I hope you enjoyed the series.

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