This is an LA Times Studios podcast.

I was assigned by myself to go out to Indian Dunes that night.

And I questioned what was going on with the circumstances of how the deaths occurred. And they said it was involved in movie filming,

and there were pyrotechnics and a helicopter involved.

This is Thomas Buds, a former sergeant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

He's describing the night in summer 1982 when he was summoned to Buds, a former sergeant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

He's describing the night in summer 1982 when he was summoned to Indian dunes, about 35 miles north of downtown L.A.

It was a popular location for film and TV shoots, and set designers had repurposed it as a wartime Vietnamese village for a segment of Twilight Zone the

movie. At 2.20 a.m. on July 23rd, a plummeting helicopter had killed three people, the actor

Vic Morrow and two children he had been carrying across the water, while special effects detonated around him.

Sergeant Buds arrived soon after. It was not yet dawn. He stepped carefully around the toppled

chopper, its big blade sideways in the mud of the Santa Clara River. He examined the charred

remains of the mocked-up village.

He noticed there were huge scorch marks on the cliff behind the set. When I got there, a lot of the

people on the set had left. I had been informed that it was the final shoot for the film and that

there were probably 250 people that had been at the scene.

I knew my work was going to be cut out for me with a lot of interviews.

The people on the set took me over to the spit of land that the helicopter landed on.

And they had picked up some body parts and put them in a garbage bag.

Some of the parts were missing, however, and he ordered that the river be drained.

It smelled like gasoline. It was permeated with the smell of gasoline.

And right at the beginning there, it didn't seem like anything nefarious.

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