Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - Fade to Black I 2. Crocodile Tears

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

After a visit from a CIA officer claiming to be Gary’s friend, Wendy starts to wonder: Who was Gary Devore and could he have been leading a double life? The search continues as friends, family, and even Hollywood action stars form their own search party. Unlock all episodes of Witnessed: Fade to Black, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BITCH BITCH Alex on. This is our first Christmas tree in our little house at the beach. One hour later. I know.'re still. I'm shutting off the light. That's Wendy and Gary DeVor in happy times. This is Dutch. There were no iPhones in the 90s. No, no. Gary's filming this with one of those bulky handheld camcorders.

A drink in his free hand. Teasing Wendy about taking forever, as usual. Four hours, 27 minutes and 30 seconds. Shut it off! Shut it off! But Gary doesn't shut it off because it's their first Christmas in Manacito and it's also Wendy's birthday, December 23rd. Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear you've lying about your age for the last year. Happy birthday to you. I'm 47, I got flowers. Wanna see my flowers? Wendy's beaming, keeping eye contact with the camera, as she moves from showing off her birthday flowers

to a gift from Gary. I'm opening something Gary got. I have a new pair of earrings, Sharon, and you know they're the car that you love. Oh, Gary, they're gorgeous. They're gorgeous. They're gorgeous. I'm putting them on.

Oh. Yeah, they look great. You like them? Yeah. These are some of Gary divorce last known lines of screen dialogue. Just simple home videos he made with Wendy. You like them? Yes, I love them.

I picked them out. I must like them. I'll put them on. Yeah, but I knew you liked them. Yeah, I do. These are hard to watch even now. So imagine being Wendy on June 29th, 1997. A little more than 24 hours after Gary vanished.

Wendy had barely slept, and pouring over these home videos, it wasn't just some exercise in nostalgia, an attempt to find some joy in an otherwise terrible time. The Santa Barbara Sheriff's detectives had advised her to gather pictures and videos of Gary. So the news media could run them as part of the search effort. But as Wendy scanned the videos,

her mind turned to that bizarre car ride she'd taken with Gary's mentor, director John Irvin. He'd planted the seed that there were aspects of Gary's life she didn't know about. Like that script he'd been writing when he disappeared.

The big steal. He had finished the script and polished it. And a lot of it was classified information, and I did not understand that in order to get classified information, you have to be entitled. You have to have clearance. She was starting to wonder, by putting real information into his screenplay, Gary might have placed himself in real danger. In watching these videos of what had been

the happiest days of her life with Gary, she now had to ask herself, was any of it real? I started thinking, what the hell was he doing? Who was the other side of this man that I was married to? From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, I'm Josh Dean and this is Witness Season 5, Fade to Black. Episode 2, Crocodile Tears. On Sunday morning, June 29th, 1997, most people in America were talking about one thing. But in Gary and Wendy's house that morning, no one was talking about Mike Tyson by Tyson has

But in Gary and Wendy's house that morning no one was talking about Mike Tyson biting off a chunk of a van der Hall of fields ear Gary's friends had come for the fight party they turned on the TV But then cops had shown up to take that missing persons report of the missing host and that became the main event Some of those friends had stayed the night and now the living room was piled with blankets and sleeping bags. Those who'd come for the fight party were now turning into a search party. I mean, there was so much going on about the disappearance, you know. In the beginning, when he went missing and we couldn't find him. That was weird feeling, you know? Because when you feel attached to somebody

and they disappear, Gary, where could he be? That's Gary's best friend, David Devin, one of those who stayed the night. The landline in the small house had been ringing off the hook all day. In each time, Wendy dropped everything to answer, hoping it might be Gary, calling to put an end to this madness. But instead, the phone just brought more of it.

When this happened, all the studios called and said he's one of us, he's our guy. You know, what it would be like to not have that kind of amazing coverage. But they all called and said, he's our guy, he's one of us. You have carte blanche. You can go on every talk show. You can hold a picture of it. And indeed, the news media smelled a story and reporters all over Southern California were moving fast.

Here's the screenwriter who's well known and it was getting attention in LA. So as a reporter, this was a big deal for me. Laura Evans Manitose was working as a general assignment reporter at KYET, the local ABC affiliate in Santa Barbara, where the biggest news story is usually wildfires or mudslides. So I got off the morning show and I got word that Gary DeVore was missing. So my photographer and I got in the car and we went to Wendy's house. And yeah, I was thinking this is a great story. This is also a woman in a lot of pain. Well Wendy dealt with the media on slot. Her guests, some of whom had never met before,

began working together to help. And so, Phil and I, this friend of Wendy's, we formed a good relationship. Within hours of Gary's disappearance, Wendy had put up a $10,000 reward for any information leading to his whereabouts. We put together the reward poster and all that. The poster featured a photograph of Gary as he was the day he left. Bearded 55 years old, 5 feet 11, 185 pounds, dark graying hair, rugged features. An equal size to the photo of his face was a close-up diagram of his most distinctive physical feature. His broken, deformed, right pinky finger.

A football injury in high school had permanently fractured it, and it stuck out at a right angle. Anyone who met Gary, notice that pinky. It stood out like that, and he would never have it fixed because I know he thought it was sexy. I mean, it was a conversation piece. He had big hands, very rough hands, and it looks tough, you know? Wendy's friend Phil Combest, a former writer and producer on hit TV detective shows like

Magnum PI, had been at Wendy's side when the real detectives had shown up to take her missing persons report. Although Phil had only ever written fictitious police scenes, it was clear to him that the cops in this case only hours old had already reached a conclusion. You know, the police that were involved in this were not that interested in anything except the possibility that Wendy killed him. Given their complete lack of confidence in the police, Phil and David decided to undertake their own search.

They'd head out to the area near the Mahavi Desert Denys, or Gary made his last call to Wendy. I found a guy with a bloodhound who met us out there. He was a professional tracker who told him to bring something with Gary's scent on it. So I had Wendy take me into Gary's closet. And Gary's closet had a rose of western cowboy hats. And so I found one that looked like a good thing and what they really wanted was a band. As a backup, they also brought one of Gary's sneakers.

He was a jogger and had a pair of shoes that was especially well-used, hundered. And we drove out there to the desert with Gary's hat band and a sneaker. Word of Gary's disappearance had spread fast in Hollywood, which was even before social media, a very small and well-connected place. RKO Pictures, the studio Gary owed the script to, had already reached out to Wendy, panicking. They wanted to know if he'd left behind a copy of the script at home on a desktop computer, or some place. Wendy was fairly certain Gary had taken his only copy of the script with him on his laptop, but now it was due in a few days, And the studio's financing was dependent on its delivery. And soon, even the action stars Gary wrote for were

reaching out. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Dam are not people that I could ordinarily reach out to. These are people that Gary worked with in his career writing features. These are two of the men who cared about him, who liked him enough to be as horrified as I was that he never made it home. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the biggest box office draw in the world at this time. And he'd starred in Gary's film, Rodio. It's a few a lot of people that did, and now it's you, a turn. The two remain friends, and when Arnold heard that Gary was missing,

he hired detectives to search chop shops in Mexico. On the theory that Gary was carjacked, and his Ford Explorer was stripped for parts. Arnold had sent men down to Tijuana to check the chop shops and to find any evidence he could. Then there was Jean-Claude Van Damme, the Belgian kickboxing star whose films Time Cop and Sudden Death, Gary had improved or possibly rescued by doing punch up work on the dialogue. Now Van Damme, who viewed himself as a box office rivaled Arnold, took things further. John Claude Van Dam got in a car and drove to Nogales to go and see if there was any way that he could help find anything to do with Gary's disappearance.

Nogales, Mexico, is just across the border with the U.S. and has long been a destination for cars stolen across North America. The idea that John Claude was there personally trying to kickass and find Gary was something Wendy found deeply moving. To think that they did go so out of their way to try and help, it was unexpected and I was so grateful. I really thought, you want to hear how stupid I am? The minute that I heard that Arnold Schwarzenegger was active in trying to find Gary, I thought he would. I had the biggest action stars in Hollywood searching for my husband.

They were searching for their lost screenwriter. I didn't think it could possibly fail. When David Deben and Phil Combest made it to the desert that day to begin their search, things started to get weird immediately. They came across this telephone pole with this big sign that said Gary on it. I mean legitimately, what else could it have been? As she says this, Wendy shows us a photograph taken by David that first morning. As they turned off the freeway, the two men spotted a telephone pole with a small handwritten sign on which someone had spelled out the name Gary.

From that sign, they followed a small trail into the desert for about 100 yards. It ended by a brick hut that had collapsed and was in ruins. 100 yards. It ended by a brick hut that had collapsed and was in ruins. The Bloodhound found no scent of Gary, so they had to chalk this bizarre sign with Gary's name on it, up to coincidence. A decision that's never sat well with Wendy. I mean out in the middle of the fucking desert and it says Gary on it. I mean there's an arrow up at the top aiming. The area where Gary disappeared was one of his happy places. Gary was obsessed with cowboys and westerns. He often carried a film camera with him,

photographing potential locations for films he'd like to make. Sometimes just for scenes that existed only in his head. The last paying from Gary's cell phone was a few miles from Fasquez Rocks. A national historic site was stunning vistas and rock formations. It serves as LA's mini monument valley. A dramatic location where countless westerns and TV shows have been filmed. All the classics from Star Trek to blazing saddles. David and Gary had

produced the heat, a movie pilot they'd shot nearby a few years earlier. Now out searching for him, spooked by the strange sign with Gary's name on it, and with temperatures rising to well over a hundred degrees, David felt very unsettled. We went out, walked all these little roads, holding the hatband, holding the sneaker, and then the dog smelled something. And Phil and I are trying to figure out if we should take the sneaker of Gary's that we bought and try and go deeper into it.

When seemingly out of nowhere, a cop car pulls up two sheriff's deputies. They get out and start asking what these two are doing here with a bloodhound and one dirty sneaker. Well, we're looking for a friend of ours who was lost and trying to find him. And he looked at us, he said, you guys cops. Now he's stuck with me and Phil, a Jew,

and I don't know what the fuck he was. He said Phil, a Jew, and I don't know what the fuck he was. Phil, a combat. He's looking at me like I'm trying to hide something. The last thing I ever thought I was going to be called, or being, was a cop. And boy, he gave us a look. You guys are in the wrong place. Back at her home in Manasito, Wendy was having an unusual encounter of her own.

The reporters had left and she was alone in her bedroom, resuming her search of home videos when there was a knock at the front door. According to Wendy, she opened it to find two men in suits flashing what appeared to be federal government IDs, but only one of them really spoke. He introduced himself as Chase Brandon. He said he was a friend of Gary's and that he was with the CIA. He looked vaguely familiar to Wendy, but she couldn't place it.

Chase said he'd been to the house before for a party. His relationship with Gary was personally said. They were were friends and as he stood there in our living room He acted like he was emotional and he said I'd like to Just go in there alone into Gary's office and just look at stuff and I said fine The door to Gary's office was a few feet down the hall. And he went in there and he shut the door. I assumed that he was there to help. He emerged a few minutes later, having gathered himself, and told Wendy he was staying in touch.

Then he left. Everything about this was odd. Here was the CIA showing up at Wendy's door, but not to offer help, just condolences and tears. I trusted these people. I mean, if you don't know anything about this world, and I certainly didn't, you feel almost so grateful that there's someone from something like the CIA coming to try and look all I wanted to do was recover him. I wanted to know what had happened. I wanted

to save him. So this looked like a potential hero for me. There's a mystery on the Caribbean island of Bernada. So I just want to ask to be clear, did you ever see the body of Maurice Bishop? No. You're sure? Absolutely. 40 years ago, the remains of the Prime Minister went missing, and we've been trying to figure out what happened.

I can tell you, in my words, this thing stinks. I'm Martin Powers with the Washington Post. The empty grave of Comrade Bishop is out now. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. If you have a seriously pissed off your indoors, a couple of years ago, I started investigating a murder in my wife's family. Why would I do something so stupid? Well, partly because I've come to suspect

that the woman who was killed is haunting the house I grew up in. It was a weight in the beard like somebody was in it. I woke up because my bed was shaking. So it would be like, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, but mainly because I think someone in the family might have got away with murder. Am I in laws? Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake,ry and Pineapple Street Studios, this is Ghost Story, a podcast about the things that come back to haunt us.

Follow Ghost Story on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Ghost Story ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus. With no hard leads to work with, Wendy started sorting through her memories, all the way back to the beginning with Gary, wondering what she might have missed from the first time they met. Mr. Speaker, if you were in the air last Thursday, especially if you're flying to the Los Angeles airport, you might have been delayed because Air Force One was sitting on the tarmac while our president was getting a $200 Hollywood haircut.

That's the sound of Bill Clinton's first presidential scandal. Before allegations of White House blow jobs, it was blow dryers. In a ridiculous media moment, now remembered as Hairgate, reporters once ran with the narrative that President Clinton delayed an official flight out of LA in order to get a haircut from Kristoff, who was then the it stylist for celebrities and power players around Hollywood. Wendy and Gary were among the regulars. It's where they first met. He was having his hair cut by the guy who colored mine and he got up the...

Gary was in for a cut one day when he overheard Wendy talking to her stylist about her mom, who was quite sick. When the stylist got pulled away to deal with actor Richard Dreyfus, Gary spoke up to offer a few words of support. Wendy hadn't even seen Gary's face yet, but she liked something about what he'd said, his sense of caring. Gary left the shop after their brief exchange, but moments later returned and walked up to Wendy, still in her chair.

And he said, I work out of my home and I don't get to meet people very often. And, you know, I'd really like to get to know you. I'd like to have coffee with you or something. And he said, so here's my number. Just call me in and I'll make myself available to you. Wendy had already made up her mind. There was something about him. I said, well, then why don't we just go have a cup of coffee now?

And finish my hair up and we went and we had a cup of coffee. And that was like the beginning. To Wendy, Gary seemed the consummate Hollywood creature. It wasn't just a success in writing blockbuster films with giant movie stars. He had a serious reputation in town as a ladies man. Yeah, no, he was really a player. And the women that he had been with and the women that he knew

was stuff I had avoided. Gary had been married three times. He was known not simply for dating women who were beautiful or desirable in some way, but for being with women in Hollywood who were powerful, independent, different. Gary's first wife was African-American singer Maria Cole. While her name is little known today, when Gary married her, she was the widow of singer Nat King Cole. We both had been with other people, but it was really weird to me when I found out who

Gary had been married to. She was the widow of one of the most famous people that I ever knew about, ever, Nat King Cole's widow. His second wife was Sandy Newton, actor and now news anchor in Palm Springs. His third was Claudia Christian, the sci-fi star we heard about last episode. And the list goes on. He dated singer Janna Jackson and famed rock and roll groupie Pam DeVars. In the year before he gave Wendy his phone number, Gary had an entire chapter written

about him and produced her Julia Phillips bestselling memoir, You'll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again. Julia Phillips, who died in 2002, is the first woman ever to win a best-picture Oscar. She made some of the greatest films of the 70s, the sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, Martin Scorsese's taxi driver, and Steven Spielberg's close encounters of the third kind. She used her memoir to eviscerate the male power structure in Hollywood, but then devoted an entire chapter to praising Gary DeVore. Here's a passage as read by our producer Megan Domes. Gary, with a western twang in his voice, laced heavy with testosterone.

I have a brief affair with Gary. He says it's our way of becoming friends. I think it's because he's written lines that I really admire. Gary and I slide comfortably from lovers to friends. As Wendy looks back now, none of these details even slightly suggested that Gary might have been anything but what he claimed to be, a charming screenwriter.

Certainly not a spy. She saw no red flags, even with the colorful dating history. In the end, when he took the plunge with him because of the way he made her feel. You look for a little excitement in your life. And Gary, if nothing else was a little excitement, let me tell you. And it wasn't like Wendy was some innocent, fresh off the Greyhound bus to Hollywood. She was a successful voiceover actor by this point, with a romantic past of her own.

Wendy's most recent job had been supervising dialogue and Ridley Scott's film Black Rain, starring Michael Douglas and Kate Capchow. I, sweetheart, you remember me, don't you? Between voice gigs, Wendy ran a surgeon's office in Beverly Hills and was raising her daughter, Brittany. She was an independent, self-supporting woman. And I have a very strong personality.

I was called an upstart. Yeah, it wasn't a compliment. When he came from a background of extreme privilege, mixed with a certain kind of alienation. Her parents were both first-generation Jews. Her paternal grandfather made a fortune, and not legally, at least at first. He was a bootlecker during prohibition, and then when prohibition ended, they became legitimate

distillers. His business partner was Joe Kennedy, father of President John F. Kennedy. When he was raised in Palm Beach, Florida, playground of America's rich and famous, Joe Kennedy lived down the street, blonde, blue-eyed girls were everywhere. But when he was different. I was tall. For my generation, I was five-nine. I was exotic.

I had very black hair. She was the eldest of three sisters, close to her father, but had a difficult relationship with her mother. She would never have wanted to be a mother. These women didn't have a choice. They had to get married in that generation. And remember, the first birth control pills were on until 1965, and she did everything that was right.

Meaning, her mother did everything expected of her, except to have a warm and loving relationship with her daughters. By the time Wendy was 13, her mother began traveling, leaving Wendy to her own devices. While it's easy to look back at the early 60s as a more innocent time, the young privileged kids Wendy found herself running within Palm Beach were fast company. A common fixture in the neighborhood

was President John F. Kennedy, who according to Wendy, he would slow the car up and say hi, nothing else. He had run out really. Two days before he was assassinated, he stopped and said hello to me. In his car driving down the street, I was, we lived on the other corner. He was down in Palm Beach, before he went to Dallas.

And Wendy says, there was a reason she kept having these run-ins with President Kennedy. Beyond his neighborliness. He was having an affair with the girl around the block from me while he was a president. And I used to walk down to his house with her. And I'd sit outside with the secret service guys and drink Coca-Cola while she went inside with him. I mean, we thought it was all pretty cool. I think I was 14. I think she was 16, maybe almost 17.

Wendy's older adventurous friend soon enlisted her help as a wingman in another dangerous escapade. One that would form a lasting connection for Wendy later in her life Wendy's friend needed her on a double date I've never had a date I was 14 years old she asked me if I wanted to study with her she said call your mom and ask if you spend the night over with me this of course was a lie see Wendy's girlfriend was actually involved with a much older married man, and he was friends with a famous actor who happened to be in town that night. The actor's name was Sean Connery. So Wendy, a young teenager, found herself having cocktails in a top West Palm Beach restaurant

on a date with James Bond. We're all sitting at dinner in this restaurant and they'd brought the drinks and they'd brought the appetizers as far as it got and all of a sudden my mother came in and you should have seen the faces on the people facing the door because she looked like she was completely out of her mind. And she came charging in there, grabbed me by the back of my neck and my shoulder, dragged me up, started screaming at them, and dragged me out. And that was my entire introduction to Sean Connery.

What Wendy saw as her dark, weird, freakishly tall Russian Hungarian Jewish looks were precisely the features that drew people to her. And one day, while walking down the street in Palm Beach, Wendy was discovered. First job I ever had was build, build glass and a beer java on sheet. I mean, calling Tragera, I would model for all of them. To satisfy her mother, Wendy went to college to study nursing, but Ford models signed her and brought her to New York. She also fell into some work as a share lookalike.

When you find out you have a double, you have a double. Share an eye, I mean, you couldn't tell us apart. So. Wendy would end up in People magazine as America's most famous share look alike. She tried developing a career as an actor, but if you play Share Once, you can only ever play Share after that. Wendy ended up running into Sean Connery again on the NBC Universal Law and had a relationship

with him. She went from Sean Connery to Judd Hirsch, star of taxi, and eventually spent 10 years with a successful TV producer. And what would be her last relationship before Gary? Meeting Gary was kind of like a growing up event. Well, I thought I was growing up already. I thought I was growing up, I was 20, didn't you? I think that with Gary, it was a different thing. I was growing up. Already. I thought I was growing up. I was 20, didn't you?

I think that with Gary, it was a different thing because I was a grown-up. Now, that growing up event in meeting Gary was turning into the biggest test of her life. Why hello there, welcome to Radio Rental. If you're new around here and haven't heard, I'm your host, Terry Carnation. On Radio Rental, we play tapes of the scariest true stories you've ever heard. That's right, we've got real scary stories told by the people that actually experienced them.

We've got stories of paranormal peril, near-death experiences, stitches in the space-time continuum and more. Stories like these. This person was looking for me. They start to take these long strides towards me. I was freaking out. We started seeing it everywhere we went. It would be sitting there watching us. I've never ran so fast in my life. And it's all set right here at Radio Rental. The video rental shop of your worst nightmares.

Radio Rental is available now. Listen one week early and add free on 10-Dirt Foot Plus. Slay the holidays with Reaconating Superstores PC Holiday Insiders report. Serve Appies under $16, like PC Pellenta Fries, PC Cranberry, Bree Pace Trebytes, and PC Eggplant Parmesan Esfol liatelle. Wow, only at your super holiday store. Criminologists say that when a person goes missing, the first 72 hours are critical. It's when clues are the freshest

and when victims of foul play are more likely to still be alive. Experienced investigators know that they're working against the clock in this early period. In each passing moment, simply increases the odds that a loved one will never be found alive again. Since Wendy had reported Gary missing, authorities had seemingly done everything except to actually look for Gary. They've gone from suspecting Wendy to suspecting Wendy and her friend Phil Combas to gotten rid of him together, and now they were preparing Wendy for another

possible movie. As the FBI told me when they came in, very few men go missing. And when they do, the highest percentage of them go missing on their own accord because they can, and they want out of whatever their life is. And so the authorities started to dig hard into Gary's past. His marriages and his well-earned reputation as a player. A million different ways they asked, could it be that he had left Wendy for another woman? Phil, who was present for the whole ordeal, remembers feeling strongly that cheating wasn't a likely scenario for Gary.

I'm not saying this because I was, you know, I drove back a hundred years with Wendy and became pretty close to Gary. Over the time I knew him. There was no fear. There was nothing like that. He found Wendy and that was that the way he was. Yeah. It's true.

It's a different thing. One hundred percent conquering my mind whenever people bought it up to me at that time I say it's just not possible. No, he had decided, you know, it was a decision he made. He had decided that I was what he had been looking for all of his life, and he was not going to fuck this up. Faced with the questions of whether she might be wrong about Gary being loyal, it occurred to Wendy why she was never jealous.

If Gary had a double life, it had been his obsession with work. But after that driving in the mountains with director John Irvin, the call from government's security specialist Frank Thorwald, and especially that visit from CIA officer Chase Brandon, Wendy was now looking at Gary's career as a screenwriter in a very different light, had she missed something? The fact is, if you hold Gary's early career up to scrutiny, there are some oddities worth zooming in on. Small, weird things that could, if you squint,

at least point to the possibility of a secret life. Like his entry into Hollywood. In his 20s, Gary DeVore got his first grouting job on the dating game. It was on the staff of this show that Gary met his oldest friend, David Devon. He also met another longtime friend, the dating game's producer and creator, Chuck Barris. Barris is famous for hosting the GONG show, a fixture of daytime TV in the 70s. I love to be gay, to look dancing with kids. Ferris is famous for hosting the GONG show, a fixture of daytime TV in the 70s.

It was a live performance competition game show, like The Voice, except the performers all seem to be crazy people living out of their cars. Yeah, love me for this thing. And the joy of the show was in seeing them gonged off of it and into oblivion by the judges. And this is the other reason people remember Chuck Barris. And this is the other reason people remember Chuck Barris.

In 1984, Chuck Barris published his memoir, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, in which he claimed that while revolutionizing American TV with game shows that pushed the boundaries of sexual innuendo and bad taste, he was also working as a secret CIA hitman. That's George Clo. See I operative at night. I think it was a hobby. That's George Clooney playing CIA operative Jim Bird in 2002's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The film was Clooney's directorial debut based on Chuck Barris' book. Wendy had never really considered Barris' claims to have been a CIA hitman, but as she

reviewed her past with Gary, she did remember something that seemed strange. At their first coffee together. He said, I have someone that you have to meet. And the first person he had me meet was Chuck Barris. Naturally, they all met at the Ivy. The LA power player hotspot for meals and deals. You know, everybody was at the IV at that time. We went in to the IV one night and they moved a table of people to give him his favorite table.

He was very interesting. He was nothing like the game show guy. Nothing. He had an entirely different personality, very bright. But to Wendy, that initial encounter Gary arranged with Chuck Barris felt strange. Like, he was assessing her. And it was like I was being approved. At the time, Wendy perceived all of her meetings with Gary and Chuck Barris as simply part of his Hollywood life. But since that visit from CIA officer Chase Brandon, Gary's relationship with Barris began to look very different.

Brandon, Gary's relationship with Barris began to look very different. Later, when all of this stuff started to emerge and then the book was out, did that Chuck had written, I started to put things together in a different way. I didn't know if I was right, but Gary was always in touch with him and when he spoke to Chuck sometimes he needed total privacy. And then there was Gary's first produced film, Dogs of War. If he chose Christopher Walken leading a double life as an amateur bird watcher and secret hitman. Bird watching is a quiet business.

Oh, would you know? You're not CIA, are you? Well, you're hardly KGB. Thanks for the drink. How would you know? You're not CIA, are you? Well, you're hardly KGB. Thanks for the drink. There you are, are you? You're a fucking CIA! The script was based on a novel, and Gary was hired to rewrite it. He didn't originate the story.

Still, how was it his first film just happened to be about a secret hitman? But it was the cartridge with John Irvin that truly haunted her. Wendy had always seen John as one of Gary's closest Hollywood friends as a kind of protector. Yeah, John Irvin was literally one of Gary's most important friends. I mean, they were connected all the time when one wasn't on location. When he had viewed the socializing they did as part of Gary's job in the Hollywood dream factory, at the same time, she knew Gary tried to be different. To distinguish his fictional writing in scripts about crime and tough guys, Gary did serious

research. He read books, sought out reporters and government sources. When Wendy met Gary, he described himself as working almost like a journalist. When I first moved in with him, he said to me, you're going to get calls, you're going to pick up the phone, and now and then you're going to get a call from the CIA, from the New York Times, and he made it sound very generalized. And he said, because I call and I write and ask for information for my books.

And I never thought another thing about it. Until now, given the warning from John Irvin and the odd visit from Chase Brandon, Wendy was really taking what the police said to heart about Gary having a possible double life. Or at least she wasn't able to completely dismiss it. But if Gary really had been living a secret life,

she still didn't feel it involved in other woman. The answer is, in Wendy's opinion, had to lay hidden somewhere in Gary's intense connection to his work. In the hours and days following his disappearance, Wendy had spent some time alone in Gary's office. He had this gigantic setup in one of the rooms he used as an office, overlook in the ocean and the beach.

And she began to see it in another way. And he had that divided into two sides, which I now understand what the two sides were. You know, one was the writer and the other was his other life. Whatever suspicions Wendy was having, she didn't vocalize any of them until Phil and David returned from their fruitless search in the desert. A college roommate named Jean had arrived that day from Austin to support Wendy and was helping to prepare dinner.

Jean was only half-listening, but as the group debriefed about the search, and Wendy shared the story of her very weird visit from an emotional CIA officer, Jean perked up. She hadn't seen this CIA officer arrive, and didn't know he was in the house when she'd gone into Gary's office to get something from her suitcase, but she'd left in there. Expecting the office to be empty, Jean had instead come upon Chase Brandon. Remember, Brandon had shown up claiming to be distraught and asked if he could have a moment alone in Gary's office to collect himself. Today, some 26 years later, Jean still recalls the odd encounter, as she described it to Wendy.

I walked in there and he was bent over the desk. He had his back to me when I walked in. And I thought it was odd at the time. And I think I kind of surprised him because I just walked in. And he was looking at Gary's computer. And I didn't say a whole lot and I got what I wanted and then turned around and walked out. We asked her if Chase seemed upset. No, he seemed surprised.

Somebody asked me that. Some detective asked me that question. And I remember saying, no, he, to me, he looked like he had not been crying. He was surprised. Wendy went into Gary's office as soon as she heard Jean's account. Nobody had looked at or touched anything in there since Chase left. But Gary's computer had been turned on and it had crashed.

It was frozen and it said, are you sure you want to erase the big steal? To delete the big steal. That was what was on the computer after Chase Brandon left. To Wendy, it looked like the CIA in the person of Chase Brandon apparently rifled through Gary's desktop machine. His technical skills were wanting to. The entire computer had crashed, and the hard drive was rendered unreadable.

Wendy immediately called government security specialist Frank Thorwald, who remembers trying to recover Gary's data. I was working with Wendy to try to get into the computer and it couldn't get into it. In this visit from CIA officer Chase Branden still bothers Thorwald today. And the things that have concerned me that I've never been able to come up with answers for, uh, regarded Chase Branden. He said he needed a moment because he was tearing up about Gary. And somebody, in my view, who has held those kinds of positions, does not tear up over something like that.

It's just not something that's going to happen. Why had a CIA officer shown up and used crocodile tears to gain entry to Gary's office, allegedly ransacked his computer, and steal his screenplay? Well, that screenplay that Gary was adapting, the producers wanted him to set in Panama, and that he bragged to people would blow the lid off the CIA. It turns out that Wendy's mysterious visitor from the agency, Chase Branden, had made his bones in the CIA as a clandestine officer in Panama. Gary wrote a script on Panama, and it did have classified information. It should never have written.

That's next time on loved one to overdose. But in Canada, we lose 20 people to overdose every single day. That's a crisis. At CAMH, we won't back down until there's no one left behind. Donate at CAMH.ca to help us treat addiction and build hope. Witnessed Fade to Black is a production of campsite media and Sony music entertainment. An association was stole away entertainment. The series was co-created, written and reported by Evan Wright and Megan Donnis. Megan Donnis is the senior producer and Shiba Joseph is the associate producer. The executive producers are Evan Wright, Jeff Singer, and me, Josh Dean.

Nile Casson is the consulting producer. Studio recording by Ewan Lightramuyn, Blake Rook, and Shiba Joseph. Sound Design mixing and original music by Mark McAddom and Erica Huang. Additional engineering by Blake Rook. Additional music by APM and BluDot sessions. Additional field recording by Devon Schwartz.

Fact checking by Amanda Feynman. Special thanks to our operations team, Doug Slaywin, Destiny Dingle, Ashley Warren, and Sabina Mara. The executive producers at Campside Media are Vanessa Gerdoreatus, Adam Hoff, Matt Chair, and me, Josh Neem. If you like the show, please take a minute to rate and review it, which really does help other people find it. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. text and social media messages, keep your edge with Thrive Small Business software and never miss a message again.

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