The Emerald Triangle Bigfoot Killings

The Emerald Triangle covers Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties in northern California. It is cannabis country. Remote farms, little law, and old stories of Bigfoot in the woods. In the fall of 1993, journalist David Holthouse was at a friend's remote farm in Mendocino County.

Late that night, one or two men turned up at the cabin, and accounts differ on the number. One was visibly frantic. They had just found three bodies on a nearby pot farm. The men had been "mutilated, mangled, torn to pieces." Holthouse thought he heard one of them say "Bigfoot."

Their reasoning was simple. The marijuana crop had been trampled but left intact. Nothing pointed to a rip-off. So, the workers believed, a Sasquatch had done it. Hulu would later put the claim in one line: three men "torn limb from limb in a savage Bigfoot attack."

Nobody in the room said they had seen the creature. There was no size, no colour, no sound. Only what had been done to the victims, and a name for what might have done it. Holthouse kept quiet for years, because it did not sound believable. His own summary, much later: "Three guys were murdered on a weed farm in the fall of 1993, and they were murdered by a Sasquatch."

About 25 years on, Holthouse went back with a camera crew. The result was Sasquatch, a three-part Hulu docuseries directed by Joshua Rofé, released on April 20, 2021, after a SXSW screening. Holthouse talked to growers, hunters and police, who pointed him to Spy Rock Road near Laytonville, and to possible Hells Angels links. Locals warned him off, and the name of a person tied to the killings is bleeped out. One suspect was a local criminal nicknamed "Bigfoot."

He found "at least two, if not three, different multiple homicides that have gone unreported." A woman on a Spy Rock farm told him two men from LA were shot over a drug deal and buried on her land. According to Rofé, someone in the third episode effectively admits to being party to the events. Yet no bodies, missing-persons reports or police files from 1993 have ever surfaced, and Rofé says the team passed information to the authorities, who offered little response. Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman appears in the series as himself.

Reviewers agreed on one thing: Bigfoot did not do it. The series argues that a human killing was retold as a monster story, perhaps helped along by a nickname. Another theory holds that illegal drug operations used Bigfoot lore to scare off rivals and superstitious immigrants. A former grower known as Razor traced the stories to fear, to the feeling of "I might not belong here and something is going to take me out." Many killings in the region likely went unsolved because the victims were immigrants without ID.

One review notes that even at the end, Holthouse is not sure a murder happened at all. On believing in the creature itself, he is candid: "I can't say that I ever got there completely myself."

The case now sits in the story of Bigfoot as the alleged murder of three migrant workers in 1993. The series set it beside the Patterson-Gimlin film from Bluff Creek, with Bob Heironimus on camera, and filled the gaps with animation by Drew Christie. It remains a Bigfoot case without a Bigfoot. A creature known only by name, from a story told late one night in 1993.