Post Mortem | Justine's Voice for Justice

**Anne-Marie Green** (0:10)
Welcome back to Post Mortem, I'm your host Anne-Marie Green. And today we're going to be discussing the case of Justine Vanderschoot, who in 2003 went missing from her parents' home in Auburn, California. Now, law enforcement quickly suspected Justine's boyfriend and his roommate.
With me here to discuss this case is 48 Hours correspondent Natalie Morales and producer Gayane Keshishyan Mendez. Thank you so much for joining us again, ladies.

**Natalie Morales** (0:38)
Good to be with you, Anne-Marie.

**Gayane Keshishyan Mendez** (0:39)
Thanks for having us.

**Anne-Marie Green** (0:41)
So listen, as usual, everyone, a reminder to you that if you haven't listened to this 48 Hours episode, you can certainly find the full audio version just below this episode in your podcast feed. So go take a listen or go watch it wherever you get your 48 Hours, and then come on back for this conversation.
You start the hour with a conversation with Matt Scribner. He's the equestrian who had actually first spotted, first a freshly dug hole in the ground, and later he goes back and it looks a lot different. You're on horseback. And I think that something that maybe might be missed is that this is an area that's actually kind of hard to get to.

**Natalie Morales** (1:23)
Yes, yeah, absolutely. And Matt Scribner, he was key to the testimony in this case by giving investigators that timeline of when he saw this freshly dug hole and then going back later and then seeing a mattress and debris covering that hole. Now, what was really intriguing about this is that, had he not been eight or 10 feet above ground on a horse, he probably might not have seen that. But I loved being able to do the interview on horseback because that's how he saw it. And it also provided for us a little bit of a different element and a way into this investigation than we normally do.

**Gayane Keshishyan Mendez** (2:08)
A key element of the case is that this location was so hard to get to, at least the prosecution argued, and Brandon being able to lead detectives right to it without any hesitation in the dark through sort of rugged terrain, even the investigator, the original investigator on the case, didn't know how to get there. Matt was the only one who was able to lead us every single time because he just grew up on these trails, and so he knew it like the back of his hand. There's a couple of road signs, but once you're there to actually get to the spot where the burial site is, there is nothing marking it. It's just feeling your way and knowing where to go, and he couldn't really give us verbal directions.
We had to have Matt as a guide every time, and he was just very generous in doing that.

**Anne-Marie Green** (3:04)
I learned something about you, Natalie. I did not know that you were an equestrian yourself, and the horses are pretty interesting as well.

**Natalie Morales** (3:12)
Yes. Oh my gosh, the horses are incredible creatures. They are, I think both of them were wild Mustangs that had been tamed or broken. And the horse that Matt Scribner was riding, his name was Astro.
And they were so amazing to be on, but also so relaxed and chill, surprisingly, given that we had camera crews all around them.
And also, we used drones. And we were a little concerned using the drones because, I don't know if you know this, but when they round up wild Mustangs, they fly helicopters over them. And so there was some concern that the drone and that sound that they make, you know, that buzzing noise might freak the horses out a little bit. Thankfully, you know, we kept the drones far away from them. The horses seemed to be pretty fine with it. And so we got the footage that we needed, and we were able to do the interview, and it all came out great.

**Anne-Marie Green** (4:12)
When I saw kind of the image of the debris, I thought, is that a mattress?

**Gayane Keshishyan Mendez** (4:16)
What is that?

**Anne-Marie Green** (4:17)
And then I thought, how do you even get stuff out there? You know, what was this place like back then?

**Gayane Keshishyan Mendez** (4:23)
From what we've been told, and also from some of the evidence photos we've seen, you know, back in the early 2000s, and this crime happened in 2003, it was really a dumping ground, you know, where you would have maybe unhoused populations coming through. There was an abandoned trailer there.
So just all kinds of debris. And so a mattress was really not out of place.