Decades before Troy Driver abducted, raped, and murdered teenager Naomi Irion in the Nevada desert, he and some friends lured a drug dealer named Paul Rodriguez up this driveway, deep in the woods of northern California.
Near a clearing where a horse trailer was stored, a car had been parked in the driveway with its hood up, as though it had broken down. Rodriguez, a hefty man, climbed out of his Mercury Cougar to see if he could help.
Driver had secreted a shotgun behind the horse trailer. As Rodriguez peered beneath the hood of the disabled car, his 17-year-old girlfriend, who’d been beaten and intimidated by him for months, snuck up with a shotgun in hand. She pulled the trigger, hitting Rodriguez with a close-range blast to the head.
After Rodriguez fell, mortally wounded, Driver and his friends stuffed the body into the trunk of the dead man’s Mercury Cougar, using a piece of fence post as a wedge. Then he and his cohorts drove through the dead of night, headed toward the coast.
They followed State Route 128, a two-lane rural highway. Just outside the hamlet of Navarro, they pulled over and dumped the corpse into heavy brush alongside the road.
I found my way to the ambush location in November 2023, after taking a couple of wrong turns in the hills of Mendocino County – not something you want to do during marijuana harvest season. At one point, when I spotted a man in a black mask videotaping me on his cell phone, I realized it was time to turn around.
After finally reaching the ambush site I walked up the driveway, gravel crunching under my feet. Because I knew that a murder had occurred there, it felt like the eeriest place ever. Even at midday the trees blocked most of the sun. A bird shrieked overhead, then flew away and left me enshrouded in silence.
