California's Hidden Monster: The Ernie Christie Case
How a son's confession solved a 22-year-old murder and revealed a pattern of horrific abuse
On April 8, 1988, 27-year-old Lysandra Marie Turpin vanished in Humboldt County, California. For 22 years, her fate remained unknown. Then, in February 2010, her case took an unexpected turn—not through investigative breakthrough, but through confession.
Ernest Samuel Christie III, living on the East Coast in North Carolina, contacted the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office with a burden he could no longer carry. Now 38 years old, Christie had been just 16 when his father, Ernest Samuel Christie Jr.—known locally as Ernie—committed the crime. Decades of silence had finally broken.
Christie III provided law enforcement with a map leading to Turpin's remains, buried in a ditch near Fieldbrook, approximately 80 miles south of the Oregon border. When authorities excavated the site, they discovered charred bones, teeth, and fragments of clothing. A forensic odontologist positively identified the remains as Lysandra Marie Turpin, confirming what the younger Christie had reported: his father had kidnapped, held, and murdered her at his home in Fieldbrook. After killing her, Ernie Christie dumped the body in a ditch, covered it with tires, doused it in gasoline, and set it ablaze.
But Turpin's murder was not an isolated incident. As investigators delved deeper into the case, they uncovered evidence of a pattern of predatory violence spanning decades. Ernie Christie, a frequent methamphetamine user, had held at least one other woman captive in a location that defied belief: a hollowed-out redwood tree stump in Humboldt County. Inside the makeshift prison, authorities found carpet, plastic jugs, a hypodermic syringe, and clothing. This victim eventually managed to escape; she has since passed away. After the case reopened, investigators chain-sawed the tree stump open, discovering the horrifying evidence that corroborated her ordeal.
