The following passage is excerpted from Secrets of a Marine’s Wife: A True Story of Marriage, Obsession, and Murder, journalist and author Shanna Hogan’s investigation into the murder of Erin Corwin, a young pregnant woman. The excerpt describes the San Bernadino County Cave and Technical Rescue team’s discovery of Corwin’s body at the bottom of a mine shaft.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
A festering odor wafted from the derelict mine shaft on the edge of the remote Mojave Desert, just north of California’s Joshua Tree National Park.
Stooping to examine the ten-by-ten-foot pit, caver Luca Chiarabini winced. The stench reeked of gasoline mixed with something putrid and indistinguishable. Flashlight in hand, he scanned the darkness, but the yawning chasm was too deep for the beam to illuminate the floor of the mine. Rising to his feet, he wiped the sweat from his forehead and gazed across the vast, endless wasteland. Creosote bushes and gnarled Joshua trees dotted the desolate open desert. Jagged rock formations loomed over the ground pockmarked with abandoned mine shafts—relics of the California gold rush.
Chiarabini, a wiry, shaggy-haired native of Italy, blinked hard and released a deep breath. Could this be it? he wondered. After all this time, have we finally found her?
For the past seven weeks, Chiarabini and his fellow volunteer cavers from the San Bernardino County Cave and Technical Rescue team had been on a mission most macabre. Teaming up with California homicide detectives, they were searching for the remains of a missing nineteen-year-old girl named Erin Corwin, the wife of a Marine. On the morning of June 28, 2014, Erin Corwin had left her apartment at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California. Her husband, Marine corporal Jon Corwin, had told detectives she was headed to Joshua Tree National Park to scout scenic spots for an upcoming visit with her mother. But Erin never returned.
She was three weeks pregnant.
Evidence pointed to foul play. Detectives believed Erin had been murdered and discarded in one of the more than one thousand mines and horizontal passages—known as adits—that fall within the Dale, Eagle Mountain, and Brooklyn mining districts, a cluster of shuttered gold mines fifteen miles east of Twentynine Palms.
The original search area had covered approximately two thousand square miles, including Joshua Tree National Park, the Twentynine Palms Marine base, and the unincorporated community of Amboy, a ghost town off historic Route 66. Detectives had tapped a professional local caver to draft a map of the mines in the region, highlighting the ones most likely to conceal a dead body. Using forensics and electronic evidence, detectives had narrowed the search to the mining districts just outside of the park, about a two-hour drive from downtown Twentynine Palms. Aerial searches had identified more than a hundred potential burial sites.
Searchers worked in teams, breaking into crews of two and three to check and clear each of the mines. Days began as early as 3:00 a.m. as summer temperatures soared past 115 degrees. To guard themselves from the fragile state of the abandoned mines, the rescuers wore long-sleeve shirts, helmets, and protective gear.
By the seventh week, hundreds of mines had been thoroughly searched and cleared from the lists. But there was no sign of Erin. As the expansive and costly search stretched on, hope had begun to fade and resources were dwindling. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department decided that this was it: Saturday, August 16, would be the last day they would officially look for Erin.
“We felt like we had one more shot at it,” recalled San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detective Daniel Hanke, one of the lead investigators on the case.
The sun was still high in the sky at about 4:30 p.m., when Chiarabini and his team headed to the very last location on their list—a 140-foot deep hole in the shadows of a sheer cliff. Approaching the pit, a glimmer of light caught the attention of one of the cavers on Chiarabini’s team. Near the collar of the mine, a spent brass bullet casing twinkled in the sunlight. The rescuer picked up the shell casing with a gloved hand and placed it in a plastic evidence bag. Kneeling beside the mine, Chiarabini peered into the darkness. Then he reached for the radio on his belt.
***
A few miles east, John Norman, coordinator for the rescue team, was clearing a different mine with his team when Chiarabini’s voice crackled on the radio.
“We found something. We’re at site 108,” Chiarabini said. “Could you come over and help set up the bucket cam?”
To expedite the search, Norman had created a device to record video from inside the mine using a one-gallon bucket, a generic GoPro camera, a floodlight, and model airplane batteries he borrowed from a neighbor. Dubbed the “bucket cam,” the device could be dropped down the shaft and record footage of the bottom of a mine, making it much easier for the team to evaluate prospective open graves.
At forty, Norman was lean with closely cropped dark blond hair that contrasted with his tan complexion. Gathering their supplies, Norman and his crew piled into the truck. After a half hour of crawling over the rocky and sandy terrain, he and his two teammates arrived at the site, joining half a dozen rescuers and sheriff’s deputies already huddled around the mine.
At first glance, the mine appeared to be little more than an anonymous hole in the ground—no different from the dozens of other mines they had searched. But immediately, Norman was struck by the smell. The rescuers had inadvertently stirred up the air inside the mine, and a noxious scent was now billowing to the surface.
“It was awful. Everyone on the surface could smell this really bad decay sort of smell,” Norman recalled. “It was like gasoline and possibly some sort of human decomposition.”
The vertical chute sloped gradually to one side, making it impossible to simply lower the bucket cam from the mouth of the mine. Instead, someone would need to descend into the hole, pass the gradient, dangle partway down the shaft, and lower the camera down to fish around the debris.
“Any volunteers?” Norman asked, imploring the other searchers. Glancing to his left and right, Chiarabini saw no other volunteers, so he stepped forward.
“I’ll go down,” he said. “I have a mask.”
A software engineer by day, Chiarabini joined the rescue team in 2010 and spent weekends volunteering on caving rescue-and-recovery missions. An intrepid adventurer, Chiarabini was typically the first to volunteer for a challenge. He retrieved from his backpack a face mask that covered his nose and mouth as the other cavers fashioned their equipment into an intricate rapelling system. A large tripod was situated above the mine. The cavers weaved a climbing rope through the tripod, latching it onto a truck. The rigging would allow Chiarabini to drop down the center of the mine and avoid touching the walls.
Belaying the rope to his harness, Chiarabini stepped backward into the hole, slowly descending into the darkness. A few feet underground, the air was dank and cooler. The clatters of crumbling rocks echoed off the walls as they tumbled to the mine’s floor.
When he got about twenty feet down, a gas detector on his belt alerted Chiarabini that the air was toxic and lacked oxygen. Because he was breathing oxygen through the face mask, he was safe. But the fumes stung his eyes, causing them to water.
“The smell of the gas was so intense,” Chiarabini remembered. “When I went thirty or forty feet down, it was just unbearable.”
Once he passed the slope, Chiarabini fed the rope through his gloved hands, lowering the bucket. The light attached to the base of the bucket illumined the shaft. Squinting, he could almost make out the outline of a body coiled on the floor.
“I couldn’t quite distinguish what it was,” he recalled. “From where I was at, it looked almost like she was headless.”
Just then, the voice of one of the detectives rang out from above, resonating off the rock walls. “Can you go any lower?”
Chiarabini mumbled quickly, “I’m almost suffocating here.” When he tipped back the mask to talk, his lungs burned.
After about fifteen minutes underground, Chiarabini was hauled back to the surface. He stepped away from the shaft, pulled back his mask, and started wildly coughing. The sticky scent clung to his clothes and hair and even adhered to his skin. Later, he would have to throw away his clothes because the smell would not dissipate, even after several washes.
Meanwhile, Norman took the memory card from the GoPro camera and inserted it into his personal laptop. He and Detective Jonathan Woods reviewed the footage. The video was dark and difficult to decipher. In the center of a pile of debris was a narrow object that appeared vaguely like the remains of a human being.
“It could be a body,” Norman told detectives. “It’s hard to tell.” Crumbling rocks covered the floor of the mine, along with a discarded tire and what looked like a propane tank, which seemed to be venting toxic fumes into the shaft. Remarkably, Woods told the crew that a propane tank and tire actually aligned with the evidence in the case. It was decided Chiarabini would descend into the mine again and lower the camera farther to gather better footage. By then, the camera’s memory card was nearly full, so Norman took the SIM card from his personal cell phone and inserted it in the camera.
On the second run, Chiarabini tried to get as close to the bottom as possible, letting the camera hover over the floor and swing for several minutes before once again being towed to the surface. Norman reviewed the footage.
“This time it looked very strongly like a person,” Norman recalled. “You could see what seemed to be feet, and maybe something like a face or a head.”
Conferring privately, the detectives considered their next move. It was essential to prove it was Erin’s body at the bottom of the mine, and they needed to capture a close-up image of her corpse on video. After a brief discussion, it was decided another volunteer would enter the mine and drop as low to the bottom as possible. Because he had a full-faced respirator with him that would protect him from the fumes, searcher Justin Wheaton, thirty years old, volunteered to descend farther than Chiarabini. Dressed in a set of coveralls and harness, he clipped onto the climbing rope.
An inch at a time, Wheaton descended below the surface. When he was just feet from the bottom, he called out on his radio, “Stop.” Hanging above the dirt floor, Wheaton focused the beam of light from his bucket cam on the ground. Then he saw her.
The obscenely broken body bore no resemblance to the pretty young brunette Wheaton had seen on missing persons flyers posted around the Marine base. Curled facedown, her knees were bent, arms splayed. Her body was in the late stages of decomposition, her skin withered and blackened. She was still clothed in the tattered remains of a pink shirt and jean shorts.
Gawking at the body, it was almost impossible for Wheaton to imagine the ghastly cadaver was once a beautiful, living person. Suspended inside the mine, just a few feet from the corpse, he called over the radio, “It’s her.”
Above ground, a somber silence fell over the rescue team.
“Everything stopped. It was definitely a powerful moment,” Norman recalled. “The seven weeks plus of searching had reached its conclusion. We were no longer in the search phase. We know she’s there; we know she’s deceased. There’s no one to save, unfortunately. At that point, our mission changes to recovery.”
The searchers and homicide detectives gathered to discuss options. The detectives wanted to retrieve Erin as soon as possible and suggested sending down another caver with a respirator. But the crew had concerns.
“I don’t think we can do this ourselves,” Norman told a detective. “This is more of a hazmat situation. It’s better to call the fire department or someone who does this every day.”
As the sun sank behind the mountain peaks, the search was called off for the day. Sheriff’s deputies were stationed at the site overnight to guard the crime scene. After packing up their gear, three of the searchers drove to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department to surrender all contaminated equipment that might be considered evidence. Meanwhile, the detectives made arrangements to bring in a crew of firefighters the following day. A helicopter would also be stationed near the mine, and a forensic dentist would be brought to the coroner’s office to identify the body once it was recovered. Recovery efforts would commence in the morning.
Erin Corwin would spend one more night on the floor of the filthy hole that had served as her tomb for nearly two months.
A massive search effort that had once spread across thousands of miles of desert was now focused on a single ten-by-ten-foot hole. The recovery began that Sunday at sunrise, as sheriff’s detectives, deputies, volunteer rescuers, and five firefighters from the elite San Bernardino County Fire Department’s Urban Search and Rescue team, plus three additional county firefighters, made their way to the Mojave. The firefighters, who specialized in mine searches, had all been trained to work in tight spaces with sophisticated breathing gear. At the entrance to Joshua Tree National Park, the fire trucks parked—they were too massive to traverse the treacherous hillsides. The firefighters transferred their equipment to the sheriff’s department’s SUVs and trucks.
By noon, more than a dozen public safety workers surrounded the mine. Most of the crew stayed huddled under a shaded red tent. The caving crew handled the rigging, spending the morning positioning the tripod above the hole and stringing together a maze of rope.
At about 3:00 p.m., when temperatures simmered at around 106 degrees, firefighter Brenton Baum entered the mine shaft. Lanky with cropped brown hair, Baum was admittedly claustrophobic. But his job consistently required him to push his personal boundaries. Wearing yellow coveralls and an orange helmet with a mask that covered his entire face, Baum was lowered into the mine until he was just feet from the corpse.
“It was eerie,” Baum recalled at being more than a hundred feet underground. “It was deeper than I had ever been.”
While suspended above the grisly scene, Baum used a camera to snap photos, which would later be used as evidence. Erin’s body was partially concealed by rocks and debris. An empty, translucent green Sprite bottle sat on the side of the mine shaft. A length of blue climbing rope was tied around a white propane tank smeared with blood and muck. Two dusty water jugs, etched with the words Property of the U.S. Government, were lying near Erin’s head.
Methodically documenting and collecting evidence, Baum delivered each item back to the surface. In addition to the rope and water tanks, he retrieved zip ties, pieces of black plastic, and about six to eight inches of black electrical tape. After nearly forty-five minutes underground, he was drenched in sweat and feeling fatigued. The fire captain decided to rotate Baum with another firefighter. When Baum emerged onto the surface and removed his respirator, he fell to his knees.
“When I took my mask off, I was hit with this smell all the sudden,” he remembered. “I smelt it in the top side because it was all saturated in my clothes. I started dry heaving.”
Changing places with Baum was Paul Anastasia, a burly veteran fire-fighter with coifed dark brown hair graying around the temples. Anastasia clipped the rope to his harness and narrowed the beam of his flashlight on the floor of the mine. But once he reached the bottom, he recognized that retrieving the body was going to be more difficult than expected.
“I realized that that was a false bottom,” Anastasia explained. “I had no idea how deep that shaft was.”
A wooden platform had been wedged into the shaft, cutting off access to lower sections of the mine. The floor was likely rotted and could easily collapse. If it fell through, Erin might be buried so deep she could never be recovered.
Suspended in midair, Anastasia gently examined the body. Erin’s head was thrown forward, her brown hair matted and darkened with soot. Looped around her neck was a braided nylon cord tied to two pieces of rebar. Later, Anastasia would learn the device was a crude, homemade garrote—a weapon used to strangle the life out of a human being.
Once the body shifted, Anastasia noticed something else. In the corner of the mine was a flat wooden stick with some sort of green cloth wrapped around the top and knotted with white twine. It appeared to be some sort of unburned homemade torch. Along with the propane tank and gasoline smell, it became clear that someone had tried to incinerate the body and the contents of the mine. Suddenly, Anastasia realized how combustible the situation truly was. If not for the lack of oxygen, the mine would have burst into flames.
Gently, Anastasia placed Erin’s frail corpse into two body bags, cradled both under his arms, and carried her to the surface. When he emerged, the sun had just slipped into the desert.
Erin’s body was flown by helicopter to the morgue, where a coroner and forensic dentist conducted an autopsy. She was so decomposed and disfigured she had to be identified using dental records. But by 9:30 p.m., the body was confirmed to be that of Erin Corwin.
“I felt it was a small miracle. I get emotional just thinking about that day,” Detective Hanke recalled. “All these hours we had worked and just thinking deep down inside she’s got to be somewhere in one of these last caves. She just has to be. And actually having that confirmed, it was just overwhelming emotion.”
The eight-week investigation was one of the most prolonged and technically difficult searches in the history of San Bernardino County. On the day they’d determined to be the last, Erin Corwin had been found.
The disappearance of a pregnant young wife in the summer of 2014 had astonished the military town of Twentynine Palms and cast suspicion on her Marine husband. But the discovery of Erin Corwin’s mummified corpse at the bottom of the mine shaft would expose an insidious tale of devious deception, lurid betrayal, and venomous hatred. Unbeknownst to the teenager, she was being pursued by a predator skulking behind a uniform at the world’s largest Marine base.
Erin’s brutal murder would unearth a mystery much deeper and darker than any mine shaft in the Mojave.
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Excerpted from Secrets of a Marine’s Wife: A True Story of Marriage, Obsession, and Murder. Copyright © 2019 by Shanna Hogan. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.
