Was Rhonda Casto Pushed Off A Cliff By Her Boyfriend Or Was It A Tragic Accident?

[Music] hey guys welcome back to my channel so before I get started with today's video I quickly wanted to tell you about something really important if you are a viewer of this channel and have been for a while you probably have heard of ELISA tourney I have done a video on her case I have also had her sister on my podcast I will link both below but it has become extremely close to my heart and right now Sarah attorney really needs help getting justice for her sister ELISA and you can be the ones to help us she started a petition on the White House website and you have to reach 100,000 signatures in order for the White House to respond but if you do they have to so since I had you guys sign a different petition when I did that video I just wanted to bring it up real quick and ask if you guys would take the time to sign it it'll be linked below that would really mean a lot to me if you are a fan of true-crime content and you think justice is important I definitely recommend you checking out that case because ELISA Turney should have had justice a very long time ago however the case I'm going to be talking about today is also in my opinion a major major miss justice this case is absolutely bizarre I can't believe things went down the way that it did and just looking into it was one of the most frustrating and angering processes I feel like I've ever done when preparing for a video this case truly blows my mind I can't wait to hear what you guys think about this one although I have a pretty strong feeling I know how most of you are going to feel about it once I get into it today we are going to be talking about Ronda Casto and Steven Nichols so let me tell you a little bit about Ronda first of all so Ronda actually as you can tell is beautiful and she actually was a model she lived in the Portland area and she was known by her friends to be very sweet very caring really fun very outgoing was known to bring you know a light to any room was just a fun person to be around back in 2005 Rhonda's mom ended up finding a Craigslist listed by a man named Steve Nichols for a bedroom in his three-bedroom condo he said he was a recently divorced man and he needed help with rent so they decided that it would be a good fit for them because he seemed like a nice guy and Rhonda's mom Julia ended up really liking him when she was living there you know she just thought he was a nice person and would possibly be a good fit for her daughter so she actually was the one who introduced Rhonda Casto to Steve Nichols and Steve was just completely blown away by her even though she was quite a bit younger than him I felt she was into me too I could tell that she valued intelligence and I've always thought that that's one of my strongest asset I think she was attracted not so much to his looks but to his his what he had his condo his money is you know his status he was 30 years old and she was 20 years old it's hard for me to imagine dating a 30 year old man when I was 20 you know not to pass judgment on anyone else who dates I don't really care how old people are when they date but I do feel like in a relationship like that when there's a 10-year age gap in a major gap in maturity that there could be some abusive kind of almost parenting coming from one of the people the older person in the relationship in some circumstances and that's what really kind of starts to happen with Rhonda and Steve when they started dating Rhonda was absolutely showered with gifts from Steve actually eventually Steve actually bought them a brand-new two-bedroom condo and the two of them by themselves moved into that and then three years later they actually had a daughter named Annie and people around Rhonda most of the people around Rhonda say that she truly loved being a mom that it was a new light in her life that she was feeling inspired as a mom she just was thriving as a mother and one thing that Steve and Rhonda really had in common was their love for the outdoors and they spent a lot of time outside together they lived in Oregon which is a gorgeous state any great place for outdoor activities hiking and camping kayaking stuff like that now when you look at their life together it's really hard to get a clear picture of exactly what life was like for Rhonda because when you hear from her family you get a very different story than when you hear from Steve some people that were close to Rhonda said that she really wanted to marry Steve she was itching to marry him in fact just couldn't wait to get married she wanted to have that security for her family to feel like they were all finally just one and Steve even claims that they were planning to get married in the summer the summer of 2009 he said that they even looked at wedding rings Steve claims that she really wanted to get this super nice expensive ring that was gonna cost upwards of $35,000 and he wanted to get something closer to 15 that's like absolutely mind-blowing to me but hey I don't even have a wedding ring I lost it a few months ago and haven't replaced it so however when you talk to people who were closest with Rhonda her mom her closest friends they paint a much different picture of how she was actually feeling a lot of them were saying that she was actually very unhappy in her relationship that somewhere along the way things went toxic and she was feeling out of control of her life apparently Steven her fought all the time and the relationship was just becoming so much work she had even been telling some people that she wanted to leave Steve and take the baby with her but let's jump to March 16 2009 when Rhonda and Steve woke up that day they saw that it was a gorgeous day in Oregon and they decided that they wanted to get outside and go hiking and it's called Eagle Creek Rhonda's mom Julia was gonna be watching Annie for the day and Rhonda was really excited about getting up to this hiking trail now this area is known to be absolutely gorgeous I mean really lush organs just a beautiful state but they also have a lot of trails that are known to be pretty risky and dangerous that are really first skilled hikers only now one thing that's absolutely crazy is that right before she left Rhonda mentioned to her family that maybe Steve would propose to her that day in fact she specifically said he's either going to propose me or he's going to kill me she said that he's either gonna propose to me or kill me at that moment they all laughed it off as a joke now another weird thing that Rhonda apparently said and this is too steep so I'm not sure I mean you have to decide for yourself what you think but but Steve said that Rhonda asked him a question as they were driving up there he claimed that she said if anything ever happens to me will you take care of our daughter I think this is the sketchiest thing ever I have personal doubts that Rhonda even said this but if she did I wonder if she had some type of sense steve says that after this he questioned her about this statement and she said that she had been having dreams that she would die before the age of 25 and she was 23 at this time which is just really creepy but we don't even know if she for sure said this so they finally got to the area that they wanted to hike they parked the car and went off on the trail and it is very unclear about this time I mean Steve claims that it's kind of a blur half of it he won't talk about for legal reasons so we don't have a super clear picture of what happened but according to Steve it began to rain and Rhonda decided to hold like a blanket or a towel over her head and run with it as fast as she could along the trail and scream I'm superwoman he says that she wouldn't stop and he thought it was dangerous but she kept going and he claims that she told him basically I used to come up on this trail with a bottle of vodka and a bag of weed and I would bring it all up to this trail and I was fine back then it's no word on me something along those lines so he's thinking okay whatever she's high on weed maybe and she's running because Steve has a very different version of Rhonda than a lot of people in her family he claims that she did pretty much every drug Under the Sun there's really not a lot of proof for any of it other than they cannabis use and some alcohol but he talks about her in a very degrading way as if she had like a major drug problem and even though he says that he thought that she might have been high while she was running with the blanket he did absolutely nothing to stop her from running I mean this trail is incredibly narrow and it's a huge drop-off like I'm talking 200 feet of a drop-off like there's no chance of survival if you fall but Steve claims that at one point while she was running she took a turn too hard and slipped and fell right off the cliff I don't know how far down it was but she went off the trail no Steve says he doesn't remember anything after this really what do you remember mmm that part I'm not gonna take you through did she tumble forward what did you see next question he at some point called 9-1-1 and told them that she fell off the cliff and i'll let you guys hear the call well I need help I'm at Eagle Creek okay and what's going on there my girlfriend's off the cliff and I hike back I'm in like off your Eagle Creek Trailhead right now yeah I'm very curious to hear what you think of the way he was talking on the phone I mean it's so hard cuz of course everyone deals with grief differently yes but I do think it's something that you should factor in when deciding if so much to be a person of interest and I feel like that phone call was very strange and Steve claims that he doesn't even remember making the 9-1-1 call he doesn't even remember how he got back to his car to make the call I don't remember a lot actually I'm talking that period he basically told the 9-1-1 operator that he spent an hour so hiking down to get to her and then realized that she was dead and it was too late what were you thinking at that get her again I think you think she had survived then and you would save her I didn't have a clue but then he also said he stayed with her for an hour trying to give her CPR he said he was cold and wet because he had fallen into a river and he had hypothermia so by the time that all this happened and the police finally arrived it was 6:30 p.m. police started questioning Steve about what happened and he told them the same story that he told the operator however police say that he was very matter-of-fact about the whole situation and wasn't showing any type of emotion whatsoever police said that he seemed most concerned about himself and the fact that he could be dying of hypothermia but then there was one final detail that Steve eventually added to the story that absolutely blows my mind Steve says that once he finally hiked down to Ronda and realized that she was dead tried to give her CPR and all of that that he was so cold that he decided to rest his head on her body right onto her chest and that's where he fell asleep there was nothing there she was dead and uh just fell asleep on top of her you fell asleep yeah I was so tired and so cold I just didn't have any energy left and I put my head on her chest and I fell asleep he says that he eventually then woke up and that's when he decided to go to his car and call the police and that's why it took so long and I know everyone deals with grief differently of course but falling asleep on someone who just died seems like probably one of the weirdest things I have ever seen a person of interest do in a case as soon as people heard this and just looked at his story as a whole started putting it together red flags were definitely raised about Steve could he have done this would he have wanted to harm Ronda when did you begin to think that something had gone wrong that night when I tried to call her and I couldn't get her she left a knee so much that I I just figured she would call and check on her you know and then when it got later and later I started thinking what's going on why aren't they answering why isn't she answer her phone I was just totally shocked I couldn't believe it was just it was awful when the police first got there they actually did not know where exactly Rhonda was and Steve was too concerned about himself in his hypothermia to really worry about making sure they found her he actually was getting angry at them for not taking his hypothermia seriously and wanting to treat him right away and treat him as the urgent issue meanwhile the police were more focused on finding this woman and confirming that she was actually dead because sometimes people think people are dead and they're really not so their job is to get to this person immediately and confirm it for themselves police eventually did find her body and one thing that really stood out to them was Steve had told them that her body was like right next to the side of a river and they actually found her 50 feet from the river so did he move her body secondly her body was in a position that was kind of curled in half sort of leaning to the side and kind of hunched over and this is not a position that you would find someone in if someone had been trying to give them CPR another thing they thought was very weird about the scene is there was no evidence of anyone being around her the ground around her was untouched there were no tracks of anyone being there no shoe marks I mean there was definitely no evidence of someone sleeping on her chest so police eventually contacted Rhonda's family and told them the news and they were just devastated but what was interesting is her mother Julia and all of Rhonda's siblings all thought immediately that maybe Steve had actually pushed her police went to Julia's house to talk to her to see if they could try to understand the situation better get as much information as they could and the weird thing is is Steve all of a sudden just shows up there after being in the hospital he said that he came to pick up Annie their daughter and he definitely wasn't getting a warm welcome I think he was starting to kind of send the tension you know starting to feel guilty and wig out a little bit so this is when he got mad me ended up telling the police that he actually had planned to propose to Rhonda on that hike so police ended up asking you know if you were going to propose to her then where's the ring and this is when Steve said must have fallen out on the hike very convenient so police weren't sure what was going on but they I think sensed that all of this was very sketchy and they said that it would be best if Annie stayed with her grandma for the night so a few days later the autopsy results came in and it said that the injuries were consistent with default not some type of head injury or blow from somebody else from someone attacking her there was no sign of foul play necessarily unless she was pushed Rhonda's family firmly believed right off the bat and we're very certain that Steve must have pushed Rhonda off the cliff especially because she hadn't mentioned it to them the autopsy also showed that she did have a little bit of THC in her system but she did not have any other major drug and she was definitely in no way impaired it was like a trace amount of THC THC contain your body for a long time so she may not have even have used it that day so police continue to question Steve and try to figure this out and at this point he really started to push the idea that she jumped that she was committing suicide he said that she had bad postpartum depression that she had gained a lot of weight while she was pregnant and that she wanted to lose weight because she was a model in one of the interviews he literally described her as disgusting he said she felt disgusting just the way he talks about her reminds me so much honestly of how Michael Turney talks about Alyssa turney really in such an abusive demeaning way I mean Steve never has anything to say about rond it seems like he seems like he puts so much blame on her and just shits on her personality all of the time Rhonda's family on the other hand said this isn't true she wasn't suffering from depression she had anxiety but she was on medication for it they said that she was in no way suicidal and never had mentioned it to anybody else so then 10 days after Rhonda had passed Steve finally clean for her life-insurance policy now Rhonda was 23 a lot of young people don't have life insurance policies why did she even have one and this was a 1 million dollar life insurance policy and this is when police found out that Steve had taken this policy out only a few weeks before she died and he claims that she wanted it and that they each took out a million dollar policy on their lives so bizarre oh when they're 20 years old or 23 22 years old it's an insurance policy for a million dollars who does that kind of stuff who goes hiking in the wintertime in Oregon when you have a dead person's last words being he's even gonna propose to me or he's gonna kill me that's pretty damning so police obviously are like why the hell are you pulling out a policy that large on Rhonda and this is when Rhonda's family told police that a few years ago Steve had somehow lost a large amount of money and they believe that this was his way of making that money back Rhonda's family started cluing the police in about all the fights that they were having behind the scenes all the things that they were telling them and multiple witnesses were telling them this you know friends her family said that at one point he even pushed her down a flight of stairs and there were pictures taken of the bruises on her back but Steve claims that those bruises are from a shoulder surgery right before they went on their hike they had a little scuffle on the stairs and he put some bruises on her back and she took pictures of them in the mirror so even though there was no direct evidence that Steve had done anything to Rhonda police are definitely feeling like this guy is sketch this is weird who takes out such a huge life insurance policy on someone so young his whole story didn't make sense especially about falling asleep on her body it just wasn't looking right and I'm sure most of you feel that way so police started diving more into Steve's past and they found out that he had actually been married before and not only was he married he also got named to hunt of altercations with his ex-wife according to deposition transcripts his ex-wife was literally strangled by him at one point and she also accused him of trying to push her off of the balcony at their old apartment she claims that the nanny saw him trying to do that and was able to stop it before she was killed so obviously that is a huge red flag now despite his ex-wife filing a police report Steve was never charged with anything Steve completely denies everything that his ex-wife says and said that he never tried to hurt her so a few months went by and nothing was really going on in the case until finally Julia came forward with some major information it turns out that Steve and Rhonda's younger sister Melanie actually started an intimate relationship years back when melanie was only around 15 years old and Steve was around 30 or at the time Julia says that Melanie had told her mom this and that for a while she didn't believe her but after all this happened she decided to report it she actually thought that Melanie was making it all up to try to break up Steve and Rhonda so sounds like a really toxic situation to be honest I just can't imagine not believing my daughter I'm sorry I feel so bad for this woman she clearly has so much pain about what happened with Rhonda but like don't see how you wouldn't believe your daughter if they said someone sexually assaulted them that's just it's really unfortunate no Steve admits that this really did happen and he says that he regrets sleeping with Melanie but because of this Steve could definitely now be charged with a statutory rape and this is absolutely bizarre but Melanie claims that Steve actually came to her after Rhonda died and said that Annie was still at the age where she really wouldn't remember Rhonda not Melanie could slide right in as her mom pretty much and the three of them could live their life happily ever after together this guy next level psychopath so Melanie obviously is like no so she goes to the police and they decide to set up a sting operation and the point of this is to try to get Steve to admit what he's done over the phone so Melanie ended up calling Steve while police were recording and they started talking about their past times together but despite her efforts and trying to get him to admit that he did something to Rhonda he never said anything and the call didn't really help the case move forward in any way weird in any way so for the next two years there was never any major leads there was no new evidence and the case pretty much came to a standstill and he was at this point that police unfortunately had to tell Rhonda's family that they were not able to file charges against Steve for the death of Rhonda they just simply didn't have enough to charge Steve with murder so Steve ended up getting full custody of Annie and not only that he made the decision to never let her see Rhonda's family again in fact at this point Steve decides to move to China he said he wanted to get away from everyone clear his head and focus on his daughter he said that he was just really depressed from losing Rhonda and he wanted to take a knee and start a new life together and get a fresh start and outlook on life so from the time that Annie was about a year and a half years old to the time that she was four years old she had no contact with Rhonda's side of the family at all then in 2014 a new DA came into office and decided to take a second look at this case and just kind of look at all the evidence against Steve again the DA ended up creating a secret grand jury and they ended up in dining Steve for murder and a huge twist but because Steve was still living in China at this time they weren't able to arrest him so they actually had to make a plan to trick him to come back they told him that there was a problem with Annie's visa and he had to come back to Oregon to fix it and he actually fell for this and they flew back to the United States and when he got to the San Francisco Airport they said that there was some type of problem with his bag and they actually ended up him into custody he was charged with both first-degree murder and for his underage activity with her sister so during the pre-trial the judge ended up ruling that all of the evidence related to Steve's previous marriage where his ex-wife said he tried to push her off the balcony was completely unable to be used in this case they said that the jury would be too persuaded by the evidence but that's the point dude so the prosecution decided to create a simulation of what they think happened to Rhonda they got a life-sized dummy that was about the size of Rhonda and they went to the exact spot and just started pushing her off in different ways I mean if photos of the body and they basically found that Rhonda would have had to be pushed hard by someone else to have landed where she did we made a number of attempts to try to get what it took to get that weight of a person to land in that area where her body was found was a conclusion the conclusion wasn't provide a hard push to get the crash-test-dummy at the point where she came to rest however the defense hired their own forensic expert who claimed that when you use a scientific formula that he was able to calculate that the prosecution's claim about her not being able to have gotten that far without being pushed was just an accurate and he said that they could be off by as much as 50 feet so this is when the judge decided that they shouldn't even hold a whole trial because there was just not enough good evidence so instead the judge asked the prosecution should just offer Steve a plea deal I got a call from Kerry Rasmussen the prosecutor and she slowly told me the news about him taking a plea I just said I was screaming on the phone to Kerry no no you can't do this please don't don't plead out and Steve decided to take this plea deal so basically first-degree murder charges were dropped but he had to plead guilty to negligent homicide for years the district attorney's office has believed that mr. Nichols is responsible for the death of Rhonda Casto but this case is not about belief it's about the facts that can be presented to a jury at trial what is your plea to the charge of criminally negligent homicide guilty and to the charge of coercion guilty he said that he does not actually agree with it he simply just took the plea deal to not go to jail like anyone probably would they basically argued that if he really thought she was tripping on drugs and running around then he should have intervened and tried to save her life if she was out of control and that's why he got negligent homicide he also had to register as a sex offender for what he did to Melanie and he took a third degree sexual abuse charge for that and the judge sentenced him to 14 months but he had already been in jail for 14 months during the parole period while he was waiting for his trial so he was actually released on parole obviously Rhonda's family was just absolutely outraged and so were people in the community I mean they were disgusted by the result of this Steve still says to this date he has nothing to do with her death accident or murder murder murder from a mother's heart and mind you are certain of that I am a hundred percent certain of that he's evil he's totally evil in March of 2018 a judge terminated Steve's parenting rights to Annie she now lives in a foster home and her mom's life insurance money is actually saved in a bank account for her Annie will eventually get this money when she is 18 this is just to me another huge injustice and these cases make me so angry I can't believe the things that some people get away with I mean I truly feel that Steve did this I mean the way that he talks about her his story just doesn't add up the fact that Rhonda had mentioned being afraid that he would push her off the cliff or that they were having all these problems in their relationship just oh I hate the way this ended up I feel absolutely terrible for Rhonda's family I can't imagine how you would feel to let this guy just get away with this I mean one thing that makes me feel good now is that Steve says he's lonely he has no friends no one in life and he just is depressed and lives this lonely life and I wish him the most miserable existence of all time my heart goes out to Rhonda's family and to Rhonda it drives me crazy not knowing her side of the story because you hear a bunch of different versions of what was going on in her life but no one can just ask her and that's such a bummer that when you pass away like this when someone takes your life that you can't speak for yourself it drives me absolutely insane thinking of all the things that she'd probably want to say today I really want to know what you guys think of this case so leave me a comment below and tell me your thoughts but that's it for me today guys I hope you're having a great day be sure to subscribe and he hit the notification and you haven't already I do remember you say that I am the worst remember that but be sure to do that [Music] you you

Channel: Kendall Rae

Views: 1,990,006

Rating: 4.9522538 out of 5

Keywords: kendallraeonyt, kendallrae, kendall rae, 48 hours, eagle creek, rhonda castro, oregon, crime, hike, stephen nichols, cbs, news, mystery, true crime, eagle creek trail, kendaily, mile higher, mile higher life, mile higher podcast, unsovled, unsolved case, cold case, dateline, mysteries, unsolved, unexplained, investigation, investigative, buzzfeed unsolved, unsolved mystery, strange, unsolved mysteries, kendall rae vlogs, crime watch daily, id discovery, cold case files, unexplained mysteries

Id: ipZy2H1HmOY

Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 18 2019