America's tunnel of terror and the twisted secrets it hid until an obsessive detective walked right in

The desolate railroad tunnel up in the rocky hills above Los Angeles had long been tied to the darkest of evils.

Known as the ‘Manson Tunnel,’ it was just half a mile from the notorious Spahn Ranch - an abandoned western movie set that played home to Charles Manson and his family of followers during their reign of terror over LA in the summer of 1969.

The murderous cult was said to hang out in and walk through the pitch-black, 7,369-foot-long abyss to get to and from the ‘Manson Ranch,’ where they planned the infamous slayings of pregnant Hollywood star Sharon Tate and at least eight others.

By the early 1990s, as ‘Satanic panic’ swept across America, the tunnel had become further linked to the occult.

Devil worshippers were said to make pilgrimages to the desolate spot late at night to toy with Satanic activities.

Those who dared venture inside covered the walls with pentagrams and symbols associated with the occult and Satanism.

Above the entrance, a chilling message was scrawled in graffiti as a warning to anyone thinking about entering: ‘HOLY TERROR'.

It was inside this foreboding tunnel of darkness in Chatsworth Park that the butchered body of UCLA student Ron Baker was found in the early hours of June 22, 1990, on the night of the summer solstice.  

The 21-year-old had been stabbed 18 times, with one wound to the abdomen so brutal that his intestines were partly coming out of his side. His throat had also been slashed.

Around his neck hung a black string necklace, with a metal pentagram pendant.

The murder stoked further fear about Satanist and cult killings in a city that was still recovering from the legacy of the Manson family and the ‘Night Stalker’ serial killer Richard Ramirez.

But the details turned out to be even more terrifying and depraved.

There were hoax ransom calls to the victim’s family, a prime suspect faking his own kidnapping, and a purported secret military mission.

And, at the center of it all, two trusted friends who fantasized about committing the perfect crime - and almost got away with it.

‘It’s kind of a timeless story about greed, betrayal and pulling off the perfect murder,’ retired LAPD Detective Rick Jackson, and author of the new book about the case ‘Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective’s Obsession, and ’90s Los Angeles at the Brink,’ tells the Daily Mail.

In the early hours of June 22 1990, a group of teens stumbled across Baker’s body inside the tunnel. With the victim’s wallet and ID missing, police could only identify the man as ‘John Doe.’ 

The night before, Baker’s family had received the first of many bizarre phone calls.

Baker’s father Gayle had picked up the phone and was greeted by a raspy voice saying: ‘We have your son. Unless you give us $100,000 by five o’clock tomorrow, he will die.’

Gayle dismissed the call as a prank but was concerned enough to call his son.

His roommate, Nathaniel Blalock, told him Baker wasn’t home and that the last time he'd seen him was when he dropped him at a bus stop to go to a meeting.

The following morning, a second ransom call was made to the Baker family home.

Baker’s concerned parents again called their son’s apartment, this time speaking to his other roommate, Duncan Martinez, who said Baker hadn’t come home that night.

Baker’s parents reported him missing and the police soon connected the dots, realizing that Baker was the John Doe found slain inside the Manson Tunnel. 

Jackson, who led the investigation into Baker’s murder along with his partner Frank Garcia, tells the Daily Mail that the case instantly stood out to him as out of the ordinary. 

‘It was a pretty severe murder with the amount of stab wounds, and then finishing him off with a slash to the throat,’ he says.

‘We felt it looked like a personal killing as, generally, when it’s up close and personal and to slash the throat suggests a lot of rage.’

The ransom calls also struck him as odd, says Jackson.

‘Initially, a few things just gnawed at me a little. One was the fact that the caller would say "Mr Baker" and call him by his name.

‘The other thing was how did they get the Bakers’ number? If this was done by strangers then they had to have gotten it from Ron - unless they knew Ron,’ he says. 

Despite the bizarre nature of the case, in those early days of the investigation, Jackson says ‘nothing jumped out’ as to who might be responsible. ‘We had no direction at all,’ he says.

There were of course the undeniable occult ties which had to be explored.

The date of the murder was the summer solstice - a mystical day in the spiritual calendar.

And, Jackson quickly learned, Baker had been interested in Wicca - a Pagan religion where members practice peaceful witchcraft and nature worship - and had joined a student group called the Mystic’s Circle not long before his murder.

When police searched his room at the apartment he shared with his roommates in Van Nuys, they found an altar, a pentagram, candles and a knife.

‘We don’t know if it is an occult-related crime. We are looking at that very hard,’ Garcia told reporters in the days after the murder.

‘He was exploring avenues of magic and meditation, metaphysical stuff... We don’t know if at some point he graduated from the light to the dark side of that.’

Jackson says now: 'Our minds were open,’ adding: ‘They got less open to it the more and more we dug into the Nathaniel and Duncan angle.’ 

Jackson recalls the first time he met with Martinez at the three men’s apartment just days after the murder. 

Martinez came across as a grief-stricken young man who had just lost his best friend in the most horrific of circumstances.

Martinez and Baker had been friends for four years, since they worked together at Sears. They became roommates at an apartment in Hollywood and later moved into the apartment in Van Nuys together with Blalock.

Martinez had also become close to Baker’s family. He'd even delivered a eulogy at his funeral, paying tribute to the ‘most friendliest, sweetest guy’ and saying: ‘I just hope that it’s something I can get over because I love him.’

‘He was a very social guy. He was really warm to us, he said he was very upset,’ Jackson says of his first impressions of Martinez.

It was weeks before Jackson could speak to Baker’s second roommate in person as Blalock had left LA to go to a family reunion in Michigan.

When they finally met, Jackson says Blalock was ‘very cool’ and ‘cordial’, answered all their questions and ‘showed no signs of being concerned about being interviewed.’ 

Jackson recalls his partner Garcia making an interesting observation: ‘If he's lying to us he's the coolest motherf***er I’ve ever dealt with.’

Both Martinez and Blalock were cooperative and both of their stories were the same: Baker told them he was going to a Mystic’s Circle meeting that night. 

They had dropped Baker off at a bus stop to head to the meeting, and then Martinez and Blalock had gone on to buy beers and drink them in the grounds of a school.

But one thing that instantly pricked the investigators’ curiosity was when, during their first encounter with Martinez, he said he and Blalock had gone up to Chatsworth Park to look for Baker after learning about his alleged kidnapping - and before news broke that a body had been found.

When asked why they looked there, Martinez claimed it was somewhere Baker liked to go to meditate.

‘The weird thing about that is that usually kidnappers don't take their victims to places they want to go and like to hang out. They usually take them somewhere they can have control over them,’ says Jackson.

‘So that was the first real thing that in the back of our minds bothered us a bit. And eventually those started adding up over a period of time until we offered [Martinez] a polygraph.’

Martinez failed the polygraph miserably and the evidence increasingly started pointing towards Baker’s roommates. 

Then the case took another bizarre turn that no one saw coming. 

One night, a disturbing call was made to one of Martinez’s friends. 

In the call, a panicked Martinez claimed he had been kidnapped and was being held hostage in a North Hollywood warehouse.

‘As soon as it happened and we listened to the tapes, our suspicions were that it was bogus,’ Jackson says.

An investigation proved his suspicions were right: Martinez had faked his own kidnapping - and gone on the run.

The investigators began to learn about some of Martinez’s other fantasies and lies.

Among them was a wild claim he had been part of a secret mission for the Marines, and that Iranians and terrorists were now after him.

‘From that point on it became not a whodunnit but how can we get to the point that we can prove who did it,’ Jackson says. ‘That was the difficult thing. And it took a while.’

Then, more than a year later, Martinez cropped up on police radar again, this time 600 miles away in Utah.

He had been arrested during a traffic stop on an outstanding warrant for passport fraud in Boston.

Now facing federal charges and no longer able to hide from the LA murder case, Martinez decided to cooperate.

A ‘King for a Day’ deal was struck, meaning that what Martinez told investigators that day about Baker’s murder could not be used to bring charges against him in the future.

It was a limited form of immunity, meaning that Martinez’s statements could be used as evidence against other people and that he himself could still be prosecuted if other evidence came to light or if he spoke about the case to other people.

Under the deal, Martinez spilled his deadly secrets about what really happened that night.

He claimed that the three roommates had gone drinking in Chatsworth Park.

When they were walking back through the tunnel to return to the car, Blalock tripped and Baker made a joke about it, he claimed.

In his account, Blalock saw red and attacked Baker, stabbing him multiple times in the darkness.

Martinez claimed that, during the attack, Baker cried out to him, begging him to help him.

Instead, Martinez made a chilling comment: ‘Finish him off.’

In his version of events, Martinez said he urged Blalock to slit Baker’s throat as some sort of act of mercy to his fatally wounded friend.

Jackson didn’t buy it. ‘You don't do that to a human being - put them out of their misery by slashing his throat and think that’s legal and okay,’ he says.

The pair then left the park and Martinez - a man whom the Bakers had welcomed into their home and continued to do so after their son’s murder - made those taunting ransom phone calls to Baker’s father from a nearby payphone.

Jackson says Martinez constantly tried to downplay his own part in the murder.

‘He’s definitely a pathological liar,' he says, 'but generally he told us fairly factual information that we were able to prove.’

In fact, without even realizing what he had done, under further questioning, Martinez confessed that the heinous crime had actually been premeditated - and not the result of Blalock’s random fit of rage inside the tunnel after all.

He revealed that he and Blalock had, in fact, lured Baker to the infamous railroad tunnel that night claiming they were going to meet some girls and drink alcohol.

They had come up with the plan after watching the TV show ‘Dragnet’ and discussing what they would do if they were to commit a kidnapping. 

The plot then evolved to how they could kill someone and get away with it.

‘They took Ron up there for the purpose of killing him,’ says Jackson.

Martinez continued to cooperate with police, wearing a wire to visit Blalock in jail where he was already serving time for an unrelated robbery.

When presented with his own damning statements in the taped conversations, Blalock confessed to stabbing Baker to death and was charged with murder.

The discovery of Blalock’s rare blood type under Baker’s fingernails also proved he was the one who had carried out the stabbing.

With Blalock behind bars and his ‘King for a Day’ deal intact, for some time it looked like Martinez really had gotten away with murder.

He carried on as normal, enjoying college life at the University of Utah, where he joined a fraternity. 

But, it soon came to the attention of investigators that Martinez had been boasting about the story of Baker’s murder to almost anyone who would listen - ultimately breaking his immunity.

‘Eventually we got him basically because of Duncan being Duncan again and talking too much and telling too many stories of that night,’ says Jackson.

Martinez was arrested and also charged with his best friend’s murder.

The case changed hands multiple times in the LA County DA’s Office, as one lead prosecutor was pulled to lead the Menendez brothers’ murder case and the next to lead the OJ Simpson murder case.

Eventually, in the spring of 1996, both men went on trial separately, were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.

Then, in a shock move in June 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom commuted Martinez’s sentence.

Baker’s family learned about it in a news article.

Jackson and Baker’s sister begged the board not to release him, but Martinez walked free from prison at the age of 50. 

Now, he works as a film writer and director, according to his personal website.

The site says he spent 27 years in prison but makes no mention of his crime or the best friend he killed.

Jackson slams Newsom’s decision, saying he was shocked to see the lack of due diligence and transparency around the clemency review process.

‘24 people unanimously agreed - 12 for Duncan and 12 for Nathan - that they should get life without parole, after they had heard all the facts presented to them, unlike the governor who did not hear all the facts.’

The Daily Mail has contacted Newsom’s office for comment.

Jackson believes Martinez has not shown remorse for his friend’s murder - saying he saw the same ‘master manipulator’ at work during his parole hearing three decades on.

During the hearing, Martinez told the panel he was sorry and that he took responsibility for his role in Baker’s murder.

But, just two months earlier during a risk assessment to determine his suitability for release, he told a psychologist he thought he was legally innocent of murder and that his conviction had been unfair.

‘That to me is not taking accountability, which is one of the tenets of what a parole board expects in terms of accepting responsibility for what happened,’ Jackson says.

Martinez did not respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment or an interview prior to publication.

Following Martinez’s release, Blalock has also filed a clemency application with Newsom’s office. It remains pending.

To this day, Martinez and Blalock have always given slightly differing versions of what happened - specifically over who came up with the initial plan and why they did it.

Jackson says ‘we’ll never really know’ the true motive for Baker’s murder as the two killers have never told the whole, truthful story.

The way Jackson looks at it, the two killers don’t fit the mold of one being the mastermind leader and one a willing participant.

‘I think their personalities allowed this to happen,’ he says.

‘It started with the TV show and I can just visualize in my mind them adding building blocks to the plot one after the other on how to do this and it just kept on growing.’

Ultimately, the plot to kill UCLA student Ron Baker is up there among the most disturbing murders in Los Angeles history.

It may not have been the sacrificial, cult killing that it was first feared to be and which added fuel to the Satanic panic already whipping up a storm in the City of Angels.

But Jackson points out that Baker’s roommates-turned-killers did use the occult to orchestrate their heinous murder plot.

‘It was set up for that night because Ron was looking to do something to celebrate the summer solstice and they were looking to try to get him to go with them somewhere. So I think that night was chosen specifically by the suspects,’ he says.

‘So in a way, even though the murder wasn't specifically about the occult, the occult was used by the suspects to help set things up - and to get Ron to the railroad tunnel.’

Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective’s Obsession, and ’90s Los Angeles at the Brink by Rick Jackson and Matthew McGough is published by Mulholland Books on March 4