Kristal Reisinger Part V: An Old Cabin in the Woods

Marty Shellabarger’s cabin is visited. Marty overdoses at his parent’s ranch in Moffat. The drug supply dries up after Kristal disappears.

Be Scofield is a prominent cult reporter behind the hit HBO series Love Has Won. She is the author of Hunting Lucifer: One Reporter's Search for Cults and Demons. Her work is cited by the NY Times, Rolling Stone, People, Netflix, and more.

November 15th, 2021

It was a cold October morning. The sun had just broken over the horizon. Our vehicle bumped and rocked along the rough 4WD-only road towards Rito Alto Creek ten miles north of Crestone along the mountains. It was remote and isolated.

The sign at the gate read PRIVATE PROPERTY, and VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. It said video surveillance would alert authorities to anyone on the property. I had been warned we could be shot or caught on video.

Down the road from the gate, a small patch of the barbed wire fence was bent, and we hopped over. We trekked through the woods quietly, remaining alert for any signs of activity. After dragging a small tree over the creek, we crossed and climbed up the steep embankment. A hundred yards later, the cabin poked through the trees. "Eric” went forward alone and scoped it out while I stayed back with another friend. A few minutes later he came back and said there were no cars, only an off-road cart.

I walked up to the cabin, and it looked clear, but I was wary a gun could appear in the window any second. Hunters or owners could have returned at any minute. We had no idea. Then the window shades started moving, and we panicked for a minute. “Look, it’s just the breeze blowing through the wind,” Eric said.

I walked around the house, slowly inspecting it. Eric walked up the back porch and peered in the second-floor window. “It’s really musty and old, like worn-out furniture, and smells real bad,” he said. We knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I filmed some video and took a bunch of photos, and we headed out after ten minutes, still concerned people may show up at any second.

Two sources very close to Kristal, who knew the underground scene well, told me Kristal’s body was brought to this cabin. Jack had told his mother he had been held at gunpoint and taken to an “old cabin in the woods.” He told her he saw a blonde woman in a tub of liquid and that there was a lot of blood. Another source said Kristal’s body had been spread out along the hills behind Marty’s cabin. Apparently they tried to use acid to dissolve the body, but it wasn’t the right kind.

Given that the cabin was locked and the windows had shades, we couldn’t see in much. But Morgan confirmed there is a tub in the cabin.

According to sources, the Shellabarger family has made a lot of money renting out the cabin and surrounding property to hunters over the years. Elk would walk through their land, and people would fly in from around the country to have the “ultimate” elk hunting experience, I was told.

When it wasn’t being used for hunting, Marty Shellabarger and his friends were doing meth and heroin there.

Catfish’s house cleaner Beth visited Marty’s cabin once. She said they were supposed to go to the springs, but instead her boyfriend drove to the cabin. “I walked in, and there were five people sitting around smoking meth,” she told me. Brian Jones was one of them. She was disgusted and walked out and waited in the car.

It was here at this remote cabin where Morgan saw an ounce of meth “just sitting on the coffee table.” It was worth around $1,000 at the time. And Morgan said Marty had more meth elsewhere.

I spoke to several sources who confirmed that Marty would often bring the drug circle to the Rito Alto cabin.

And when Morgan’s friend saw Brian Jones at Marty’s cabin, he panicked. He frantically pulled Morgan into the back bedroom and said Brian was there to kill him. Brian told them Morgan’s friend's life was spared because Morgan was with him.

Another time Brian Jones held a gun to Morgan’s head at Brian’s house for twenty minutes.

“Marty’s best friend was Delmer Jones,” the father of Brian, a source told me. He was the owner of the notorious heroin house that burned down in Moffat.

“People disappear around the Jones’,” a long-term resident of the area and someone deep in the scene told me. “It’s the scariest, most dangerous place I’ve ever been in my life. Scariest group of people. I’ve been held at gunpoint by Brian Jones and shot at while there.”

“There is another side to Marty. These people he hung out with—some are dangerous, a few are killers.”

“Marty was always trying to swap vehicles and borrow trucks,” Morgan said. This was despite him having a new truck. Another source told me in later years Marty was trying to destroy his truck to get insurance money. “They came to my house, and they said, ‘We're gonna drop some stuff off in Tres Piedras, (New Mexico).” Morgan said Marty was desperately trying to borrow a truck, but no one would let him. A friend of Morgan’s commented that it looked like they had a body in the back of the truck.

Morgan believed Marty was involved in the more nefarious aspects of the drug trade, possibly forced to move bodies. “Marty went a lot between Alamosa and New Mexico,” Morgan said. “He and Brian Jones would go to Tres Piedras, which is a known hookup site for heroin. It’s cheaper on the New Mexico side for some reason.”

“Marty may have been moving their drugs; it’s a really insidious thing, how this rolls,” a source told me. “It starts off with some dope, and the next thing you know, it escalates into other things, and they ask you to get your hands dirty in other ways,” he said. “The more dirt they have on you, the more they can lock you in to being their bitch.”

“The more dirt they have on you, the more they can lock you in to being their bitch.”

Zevan Garcia’s mother echoed a similar thing. “Zevan was also forced, like other people, to do something so against their will and soul that he more or less lost the willpower to live.” She said there were always rumors about Zevan knowing where bones were located.

Marty’s property is remote and isolated. You get the feeling of being alone and far from help or civilization. It’d be an ideal place to bring a body. It’s private property, and there are no neighbors. It’s just miles of trees, fields, and the creek.

In 2014, Marty was arrested with five others at the Alamosa airport for a plan to sell large quantities of marijuana. The Denver Post reported they, “planned to produce as much as 50 pounds of marijuana a month and sell it outside the state.” A source told me that the guy from Oklahoma who chartered the plane was a major meth and heroin dealer. A source thought Marty may have been getting his heroin supply from him as well.

“I RAN UPSTAIRS TO FIND Marty unconscious and not breathing on the floor of the upstairs apartment,” wrote James Knight of the Saguache Sheriff Department in his police report. “Megan (sister) was currently engaged in CPR compressions while Martin (father) was administering mouth-to-mouth."

It was September 21st, 2020, and Marty Shellabarger was overdosing in the apartment on his parent’s ranch in Moffat. His father and sister were in a desperate bid to save his life. Years of heroin and meth addiction had caught up with him.

The EMS team then arrived, and several people were rotating chest compressions. They used an “ambu bag and mask to force air into Marty’s lungs.” Two others started administering epinephrine via an IV.

“After I believe four doses of Narcan, multiple rounds of compressions, doses of epinehprine, and the AED stating no shock advise,” they called the time of death at 7:20 p.m. It was September 21st, 2020.

“His parents knew what Marty was doing all those years,” a source told me. “And they never stopped him.”

Like Catfish and Nate, Marty came from money: trust-fund-like financial situations with an endless supply of funds.

Marty Shellabarger died of an overdose just four months after Dready Brian Otten did on May 16th, 2020. And fellow Crestone resident John Bedard, aka Red, died of a meth and cocaine overdose on July 31, 2020, according to his autopsy report. He had moved to the Fort Lauderdale area. Red spoke briefly in the Up and Vanished podcast.

“KRISTAL’S DEATH HAS PUT A stop to so much bad shit in that area,” a source told me. “So many meth and drug supplies dried up.”

Many people I spoke with shared a similar feeling. Dealers became afraid after Kristal’s death; people became much more concerned about being caught. There was so much attention in that area, and people started hiding. Her death broke the network of power in the Crestone underworld.

Catfish moved to Raleigh, and the Crestone home was sold. Dready Brian is dead. Nate Maxwell’s house sold last year. Psycho Adre Baroz is in prison for murder. Zevan Garcia is dead. Marty Shellabarger overdosed and died. Other dealers are gone, in rehab, or are now clean. Brendan Pulver is on the run, fleeing an arrest warrant in Saguache.

“Her death was a sacrifice for the light,” a spiritual intuitive told me while in Crestone.