The Binge Crimes: Lady Mafia - Fade to Black | 6. Never Ending Story

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

How did the disappearance of Gary Devore take such a conspiratorial turn on the internet? And where did these alternative theories originate? Discover how memory and trauma color the truth behind the story and disappearance. 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

I'm Indra Varma, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Daphne Park, the spy who killed a prime minister. As the Belgian Congo gains its independence, Officer Park sets out to build a spy network. Together, they're about to go to new extremes to keep Congo free of communists. Follow The Spy Who now wherever you listen to podcasts. Campsite Media. The Bench.

This was Gary's. He was a real cowboy. I mean, he was a true cowboy. And, you know, I never met Gary, but I swear to God, I know him. That's psychic Karen Persant. She's sitting with producers Megan Donis and Evan Wright on a warm spring day in Los Angeles. Karen holds a silver ring with a huge turquoise stone, very Western-looking. It used to be Gary's, and she's rolling it in her fingers as she speaks.

And Wendy gave you that ring? She wanted me to hold it today. Well, it was in my pocket when I came, but for some reason I took it out. Karen is one of America's most TV-famous psychics. She's actually a paranormal expert or a forensic psychic. The ones you see on TV working crime cases. From CNN to MTV to America's Most Wanted. She's done them all.

Suddenly I had a complete visual of who had committed this crime. I see a knife. She's also one of the many psychics who entered Wendy's life after Gary disappeared. All the true crime shows sent psychics to Wendy. But unlike the others, Karen stayed entered Wendy's life after Gary disappeared. All the true crime shows sent psychics to Wendy. But unlike the others, Karen stayed in Wendy's life. And from the moment she arrived at the house for the interview, Karen's been describing feeling the presence of Gary DeVore through his ring.

Even though Gary's been ruled dead by the L.A. coroner's office for over 25 years. Evan Wright, our lead reporter and writer, wanted to know more about how this Gary DeVore presence works. I'm just curious, like, do you feel anything from that? Does it work that way? Is it a fair question to ask you funny because as you're talking, yeah, it's getting very hot. And, I mean, that's cool. It's like he's talking through his ring.

Karen takes a moment to spell things out. To me, it's just a ring. It's Gary's ring. But my information is much more, I don't know if you want to say ethereal. I don't know if that's the right word. But, you know, the crown chakra is the highest chakra. That, and I think underneath it, is pituitary. So I'm already connected.

It's sort of like I'm out of my body with this vibration, but I'm still in my body. She explains that, like a medium, she can talk directly to the dead. But if someone is still alive, she can't hear them the same way. The best she's going to get from the living are vibrational energy feelings,

like what she's feeling in the ring. Here's how her relationship with Wendy began. That first week, Gary disappeared in June 1998. And one Wednesday night, I got a phone call from a mutual friend, Christina Crow, who was also an actress. And she asked me if I would help Wendy, if Wendy could call me. And I couldn't get to Carpinteria until Friday. And I met Wendy, and I guess the rest is history. Karen was moved by the tragedy of Gary's disappearance and also very quickly sensed some extremely good news for Wendy. I remember feeling that he wasn't in the spirit world. And I usually

see somebody if they're in the spirit world. Meaning that Gary didn't seem to be dead. But with this, Karen also had a vision of sorts, one that was pretty alarming. I was shown a vision of what happened to him. And I knew right away that he was abducted and that he was hurt. And I actually feel he was beaten up. And I have no doubt he was given a shot that would subdue him. And that eventually they would let him wake up.

But it's like they controlled him by giving him shots. Karen wasn't just offering hope. She entered Wendy's life with an alternate version of events. A theory for what happened to Gary that helped drive Wendy to where she still is today. From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, you're listening to Witnessed Fade to Black, Episode 6, Neverending Story. I'm Josh Dean. In the year after Gary vanished, Wendy spent as much time as she could going on TV, saying her husband's name, so people wouldn't forget about him, so they would keep searching.

And after the body was found, Wendy was part of another rush of media attention, even as she started to question the facts being handed to her by the authorities. And then, as her doubts intensified, Wendy started to use the media for another purpose, to fight back. If they would let me, I was on the news every day. My responsibility was to foster the coverage on this case, to keep it alive, to make sure that if nothing else, it got out there farther and farther and broader. At first, the networks loved having more of the Gary DeVore story to report. But eventually, there were new obsessions to move on to. By the late 90s, Gary had basically vanished from the media,

just as he had out there in the desert. And the people around Wendy fell away too, her circle shrinking more and more. As Wendy's friend Rebecca Holden describes it, it's like when you lose a loved one, if there is the death, everybody's around initially. And then everybody goes about their lives. And she was alone. You know, everybody goes about their own things, taking care of their families and so on. And that's when it gets empty. Remember how Wendy was attending her daughter Brittany's law school graduation

when a male with a deep voice, whom she believes must have been Gary, called the registrar's office? That happened after the media and many of the new people in Wendy's life who descended upon her to help had already gone away. Had it been earlier, Wendy's hyperactive publicist friend Michael Sands probably could have gotten her onto one of the big morning shows to talk about it. But Wendy was now mostly alone with her story, except for PI Don Crutchfield and psychic Karen Persant. In those days, and maybe this is still true, psychics often showed up in the lives of people who'd lost someone,

especially in famous cases which made the news. Some of the big shows, like America's Most Wanted, had psychics on retainer. And Karen was just one of the many psychics who rolled into Montecito when Gary disappeared. This was, after all, Southern California. In fact, when Gary's best friend David Deben was hiring airplanes and trackers with hound dogs to search for Gary, he also consulted with a psychic. I went to a seer, a woman in the desert. My wife and I went. This is what happened. Our friend disappeared. Can you find out anything from what you can do? Because we had looked all over for him. She said, I see him in water. I see him underwater. And Bernard and I looked at each other.

How could she see him underwater? The guy disappeared in the desert. Well, that was the acroduct that he drove into, running away from who he was running away from. The psychic was right. She was right. But that's the frustrating problem with supernatural phenomena. Often the messages people claim to be giving us from the other side are so symbolic or cryptic,

how do you even begin to interpret them? Karen explained to us that she's the kind of psychic who can only talk to the spirits of the dead. And she claims to know that Gary's not dead, even today, because she can't talk to him. Her communication with him is only vibrational. But she also said there are some spirits she talks to who do know things about Gary. That day at Wendy's, Megan and Evan started talking to her about her relationship with the spirit of someone who had passed. Someone who has been telling her what happened to Gary.

How he was abducted after leaving the Denny's. And so you began to learn from the spirit things that had happened to him. Yes, but I think there were stages. This was the first stage, but I began to wonder if I was chasing clone. And as Karen tells it, she has a source inside America's intelligence community with whom she regularly consults about Gary and other scientific matters. And with the person I knew in intelligence, I said to him, could I possibly be chasing his clone? Because there was feeling he

was close by and yet feeling he was far away. And he just looked at me and I said, do we clone people? And he smiled and he said, I was waiting for you to ask me. Yes. Oftentimes, as we've reported out this story, it can feel like we're falling through a variety of trap doors, just because there are so few answers and so many possibilities. And as much as we might believe in the possibility of unexplained phenomena

or secret government programs that border on sci-fi, we've made a practice of returning to the core question of what, realistically, people think happened to Gary DeVore. I feel he's still alive. I feel for probably at least a couple of years, he was kind of incapacitated. You know, one would think, why would he just not die?

Why would they just not kill him? Because he was a spy. And by they, Karen means? I absolutely think it's the Department of Intelligence. The Intelligence Department. I have no doubt. As in, I think, the CIA? One of the things that I've learned is that you never want to be an operative or an agent

because your life becomes the government's, and they become the mistress in your family, you know. Wendy has never paid Karen, and Karen's never capitalized on the story through a book or a movie. And since 1998, she pretty much dropped out of the media, at least when it comes to talking about Gary DeVore. And yet, for some 27 years, she's kept in touch with Wendy, often on a weekly basis.

She truly feels for Wendy. You know, this was really a soulmate relationship, where they were so connected. Personally, soulmate relationships are very hard, you know. But this relationship that Gary has with Wendy or Wendy has with Gary, his imprint has never left her. He is still stamped on her heart. And of course, she's been trying

to start a new life. And there's no questioning Karen's devotion to Wendy. She brings it up a lot. But then, it's off to the races, and the plot runs deep. If you see the movie Conspiracy Theory, you'll see If you haven't seen it, this is a movie where Mel Gibson starts off crazy as fuck

and then gets even crazier when he realizes he's not actually crazy at all and that everyone in the world really is out to get him. Karen says to understand what's happening with Gary now... Watch it. Because I do feel that there were probably years that Gary's mind was altered. Almost like Matt Damon. What is the movie, Born Identity? And she says she also knows where Gary's mind altering happened. And I also remember telling Wendy that I felt that Gary had been taken to Edwards Air Force Base and locked up in a room that was just cement.

And I said, he's near dogs. I hear dogs barking. I snuck on that military base. I asked Spirit to help me get on it illegally. And when I got my car, I didn't have any stickers. The guy was on the phone. He just waved me in. I was on that base looking for clues of Gary's disappearance. I found the bunker that Gary had been put in, and right across from him, you could almost touch it. Obviously, there is no way to confirm this. It seems very unlikely that a psychic or any civilian could just drive onto a secure U.S. military base

and poke around. But she swears it's true. Karen also claims that once, while staying at a retreat in Escondido, California... There was a knock on DeVore is alive or there will be an accident. It turns out, going back to the very beginning, there was concern among Wendy's friends that she was surrounded by people and theories of Gary's disappearance who were not always doing her a service, maybe giving her false hope. Like Pat Moreno, a former Marine and Vietnam vet, later LAPD officer, and then private detective. He was hired by Marsha Mason, the actress in Santa Fe who Gary had been staying with before his disappearance. Moreno wasn't impressed by many of the people who entered Wendy's orbit. There wasn't a whole lot of information, but there was a whole lot of very kind of out

of the box sort of speculation that he had been basically swept up from Earth from some kind of a spaceship. And that was from more than one person. And then when I came back to California to Carpentry to visit Wendy, there was a bunch of people there. A lot of people from Hollywood, but not any real stars, just people in the writing field and what have you. The point Moreno's making, I think, is that writers, the people in Hollywood who create elaborate,

often fantastical stories for a living, may not be the best help in a real-world disappearance. Let's be clear. There are major head-spinning anomalies in this story. But even Gene Batman, Wendy's former roommate, who saw Chase Brandon of the CIA in Gary's office rifling through his computer, even she grew worried about where Wendy's mind was willing to go. I thought at some point she was so sure that the government had him killed

that I thought, this is not right. You're really going off the deep end here with the government. When we asked Jean why... I just remembered something. When Gary was driving back, he stopped at some Air Force base along the way. Is that stuff familiar to you? We broke it to Jean that this is one of the many additions Karen Persant, the psychic, introduced to the narrative. Oh, I don't agree with that. Yeah.

Are you still seeing this psychic? Jean believes that Karen Persant had a negative effect on Wendy, and Karen herself felt these suspicions. There was another person. He has since passed away, and one day he just laid into me that how could I give her false hope? As Karen tells the story now, she gets the last laugh. When I heard he'd passed away from a heart attack, I thought, well,

you're not going to find him. I guess you're going to be surprised. You know, I have looked into the spirit world. I have asked, is Gary there? And it's always no. Wendy's daughter, Brittany, who herself deeply questioned the account provided by authorities, nevertheless felt, like Detective Moreno, that Hollywood is a tricky place to pursue a conspiracy theory. By virtue of the fact that everyone involved was in the entertainment industry, it got crazy. A lot of it went a little bit out of control. All of a sudden, people were coming up with the most fanciful things. And for those of us that were in the middle of it, it was like, if they could just stop

from it, because they're doing more harm than good. You know, everyone from psychics to fairly incompetent police officers and weird CIA guys. By the time she graduated from law school and her mother began telling the story of the mysterious phone call, Brittany stepped back from the whole thing. It just was,

it was one of these very bizarre happenings that I think because of the entertainment industry element got a little weirder. From the award-winning creators of the hit podcast Father Wants Us Dead comes the stunning new true crime series In the Shadow of Princeton. In 1989, a prominent woman was found stabbed to death in her Princeton home. With no clear motive, it's a chilling mystery that vexed investigators for years.

Was the culprit a young outsider the police said was a serial attacker? Or someone in her family? Or even well-heeled students at the renowned Princeton University? He had a ski mask in his possession and a knife. She was familiar enough with them and trusted them enough that she turned her back on, and that was her mistake. One investigator sees a conspiracy. Is he way off base, or does privilege help you get away with murder?

In the Shadow of Princeton is available wherever you get your podcasts, or you can binge it ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we are looking at the life of the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. It's fair to say he's a complex and controversial character. Almost 150 years since his birth, how does his legacy hold up today? Follow Legacy now wherever you get your podcasts.

Or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. This is a composition by Chad Deal, performed by Chad Deal. His name may not ring a bell, but you know the subject of his song. It's called Wendy's Rainbow. In 1999, about the time Brittany was graduating from law school, Wendy left the Montecito Beach House. She packed Gary's screenplays and books and clothes into plastic bins and moved to the Valley in LA. Wendy may have moved, but she hadn't moved on. Everything was still ready for the time when Gary might stroll right back into her life.

I couldn't go forward, so going backward was really good for me. And by backward, she means this. In August 2001, Wendy was on a trip in Hawaii, walking on the beach, when she saw Chad Deal emerging from the surf. Chad is considered by fans to be one of the first iconic romance book cover models. He did hundreds of these book covers. But that August 2001 day on the beach, Wendy recognized the rippling muscles and chiseled Adonis-like jaw because Chad Deal was also her ex-boyfriend. The song we heard at the beginning of this act, for Chad, it's not just a love song.

It's a love of his life song. Chad and Wendy met for the first time when they were in their 20s. He was house-sitting for a friend in Miami Beach when, as he says, I hear the doorbell ring and I'd just gotten out of the shower. And I had a towel wrapped around me, you know, and I go to the door. Who's there? I hear the doorbell ring and I just gotten out of the shower and I had a towel wrapped around me, you know, and I go to the door. Who's there? I open the door and it's Wendy and her daughter, her two and a half year old daughter standing there. And I was like shell shocked. He was shell shocked because it was like love at first sight kind of thing. You always have

these fantasies. Like in my dreams, I would see this, it was a dark-haired woman, long hair, and I never really saw the face, but I could see that vision, and it was just like more in a dream than anything else. What he means is, from the moment he laid eyes on her, Wendy was the one. For Wendy, it was apparent that Chad had what it took to model and be her boyfriend. So she took him with her to Chicago. Then they planned to move to New York together to get Chad started on his career. But when Wendy got that call to go to L.A. and be on The Rich Little Show on NBC, she left Chad, just as he was becoming the leading hunk on the covers of romance novels,

bodice rippers, as they're called in the trade, which was ironic because Wendy had ripped his heart out. Despite pining for Wendy, Chad married, had three kids, and raised them. But as soon as they met that day on the beach... We were together when we were 27 years old, okay? I hadn't seen him in 26 years. When I ran into Chad again, he was right away, I'm never letting you out of my sight again. It was the biggest mistake I ever made. I'm back. I'll do anything. To Wendy, who hadn't really looked at a man

since Gary had left her hanging on the phone, she stared at Chad. She was thunderstruck. And she couldn't believe what he was saying. I said, you don't even know who I am. You don't know what I have been through. You don't know what's going on in my life. I knew Chad, if it wasn't for surfing or karate, he didn't know what was going on in the world. She means that literally. Chad had been leading a weird Zen master life where he hadn't seen TV, except maybe in airports, for 25 years. He had no idea that Wendy had made it big

in LA as a Cher lookalike, or that she'd married a famous screenwriter who disappeared in a possible CIA-related conspiracy. And I said, you have no idea what's been going on. And I am in the middle of something I cannot get rid of and don't have any intention of getting rid of. Wendy didn't just mean she wasn't letting go of questioning the authorities, of searching for Gary. She told Chad that as far as she's concerned, she was still with Gary. And if he shows back up, there are three of us. And you have to be aware of it.

And with that, Wendy moved to Hawaii, where she and Chad tried to rekindle their relationship. And while Wendy found some temporary solace on a Hawaiian island, Gary's story faded from the media. But in 2012, Gary's story resurfaced when his third wife, Claudia Christian, published her biography, Babylon Confidential. In it, she discusses what she thinks happened to Gary. Here's a voice actor reading from Claudia's book. First, it was unlikely that this was an accident. It was strange that Gary was found in the aqueduct at all, considering that I had already looked. After his disappearance, I enlisted the help of a friend who was an ex-marine.

He assembled a team of divers, and they went down into the aqueduct with infrared equipment and swept the area around Barstow from top to bottom. There was no sign of a car or a body. And to make this point, Claudia waves a familiar red flag. A year later, in the same area, the car and the body miraculously appeared. This is a commonly held belief that, through a mixture of media and an apparent Hollywood game of telephone, has taken on fact status over the years. That the location where Gary and his Ford Explorer were pulled from the aqueduct

had been thoroughly searched that day after he disappeared. Therefore, when he and the truck were found there a year later, it must have been a plant. The idea of the original search is in Wendy's story and in many other accounts from the time, and it figures today in internet narratives. It in many other accounts from the time, and it figures today in internet narratives. It's so ubiquitous, in fact, that it's easy to miss that people give slightly different accounts of that legendary first search. In Claudia's book, it's divers who

went into the aqueduct with infrared equipment. But in the accounts of others we spoke with, that infrared equipment wasn't taken underwater by divers. It was flown above the aqueduct in helicopters. As journalists looking at this narrative, stepping back from Wendy's point of view and from all the media accounts that refer to the search, including Claudia's book, this seems like a good starting point to re-examine this one. There's an old dictum in journalism, follow the money. There should also be one called follow the narrative. Historically, when you look back to re-examine reporting, the closer that reporting is to the event in question, the more firsthand it seems. Theory being that information warps over

time. So in sourcing a story, it's generally more ironclad to use mainstream media accounts closer to events than further away. But at the same time, these fresh early accounts are often the most confused and the least examined by anybody else. And what happens is that these early facts often get baked into a story. As we stepped back from Wendy's narrative to re-examine it, we started with that initial search. So we reached out to Claudia to ask her directly about her account. She didn't want to be recorded, but she agreed to tell us her recollection of events. And right away, Claudia discussed hiring U.S. military experts to search that aqueduct in a helicopter. So the story she tells now is not the one she tells in her book, which stated that divers went into the aqueduct with a scanner. Next, we went to Damon Reiser.

He was Claudia's assistant at her house the day Wendy called, and part of the effort to hire a helicopter to search for Gary. But here's where it gets interesting. Damon says the military guys were ready with the infrared scanner, and they'd found a helicopter with a pilot who said he could fly, but... It's going to cost this much money. There was a whole group of us there,

and we said, it's going to cost this much money. Nobody had the money. Because? There were fires going on in Southern California at the time. It was like, we can make this much money going and helping with the state, or you can pay us the same amount of money to go find your friend. It wasn't like hundreds of thousands of dollars, okay? But nobody had it, including Wendy.

So, they never officially decided not to get the helicopter. They just never found the money to call back and hire one. Somehow, this critical piece of information never got back to Wendy or even to Claudia. Actually, when we spoke to Claudia, before we knew any of this about the helicopter not flying, she told us something else we hadn't heard. That weekend of the Holyfield-Tyson fight, when all this was happening, she was in the midst of a crisis with a loved one. Her memories of that day are weighted by what she was going through. And then, just months later, she lost her longtime friend and lover, Dodi Fayed. Grief and trauma are very real and tricky

beasts. They do have the power to mess with memory and color beliefs. And when we asked Wendy again about this discrepancy with Navy SEAL divers, it was like her grief had mingled with Claudia's. And so the three authority bodies that searched the aqueduct were? The, um, it was searched by the Navy SEAL rescue divers. And that was through Claudia Christian,

and was she the one who ordered those? I'm not sure which ones Claudia ordered anymore, but Claudia was helpful. She has always been extremely kind, and I know she really cared for and loved Gary, and it was horrible for her, too. And with all of this, the wrong assumption just kept getting reinforced. We'll return to this.

We'll revisit the crash site and our sources with this new information in hand. But for now, let's stick with the narrative itself. How did the wrong fact get baked into it and then become even more central as Gary DeVore's disappearance blew up as a conspiracy theory? It's almost as if there were other forces at work. Because there were. You hear there's no such thing as the perfect murder. Well, that's not true.

Because I had a lot of perfect murders. In episode seven of Denise Didn't Come Home, I finally talked to this guy. Nobody knew what happened to her. Even the police, they didn't have no idea. I'm the only one that knew exactly what happened. The man who says he murdered Denise Velasca. And I find out what really happened that terrible night. The only two people that know what happened that night is Denise and him.

He is the one that has answers, believable or not. Now, one of the top series on Apple Podcasts, Denise Didn't Come Home. In another week, you can listen to all the episodes, wherever you get your podcasts. This call is from an inmate at a New Jersey state prison. Hey, I have some pretty important questions for you. I can't wait.

You know about the suppressed transmission, of course. No? Ah, well. The space program is just one giant big cover-up. We've been on the moon since... That's from Richard Linklater's classic 1991 film Slacker. In a scene where a 90s-era conspiracy theorist riffs on ideas that

you could probably find in some form on the internet today. But Slacker dramatically illustrates one huge difference between your grandfather's conspiracy nut and a modern-day one. Back in the early 90s you couldn't just look up misinformation on your phone. Slacker is about the days when to pursue a conspiracy theory it took a lot of time and shoe leather. Visits to the library, hanging out in public spaces to find other recruits, for intense face-to-face conversations about aliens or the Trilateral Commission or whatever. Imagine how hard it would be to follow a conspiracy theory without the internet.

What happened to Wendy's story, to Gary's story really, was the rise of the internet? What happened to Wendy's story, to Gary's story really, was the rise of the internet. This is what Damon Reiser thinks about a lot. Damon had an up-close look at how the internet was changing things and ultimately how it impacted Gary's story. So I think the easiest way to comprehend this is to think of Gary's story as the genesis moment of social media.

That you've got the right conspiracy at the right time, at the right generational period, with the right technology just coming around, where it hooks. Damon sees Gary's story, its rebirth online into a lurid conspiracy, as a harbinger of what was to come culturally. As conspiracy theories have become a staple of our news cycle, and even discourse inside our government. And all of a sudden, you've got what we now see on a daily basis for other things, politically, socially, that in a weird way, that was almost the beginning of it. That was the point where you took something that was a pretty basic and simple idea that had enough weirdness to it,

that had enough questions to it, that it had enough questions to it that it stuck. As I said in the first episode, I really do remember this story when it happened, being fascinated by it even. And then it just dropped out of my mind, and I didn't think about it for a quarter century. So I missed how the story had mutated and only fell back into it when the story just arrived in my inbox one day, about two years ago. My name is Jeff Singer. I'm a true crime podcast producer and TV producer. I came across the Gary DeVore's story when I got an email from an Irish screenwriter named Niall Casson.

So Jeff Singer actually worked at E! Network in the early 2000s and also at production companies as a script reader. More recently, he produced Deep Cover, a podcast about the U.S. invasion of Panama, which is why Niall, the screenwriter, reached out to him. Niall told me, well, I've got a story about a man named Gary DeVore, a screenwriter, who was writing a screenplay about why we went into Panama. Very different. Soon, Nile was telling Jeff... About other theories about why the U.S. invaded Panama involving the CIA.

These all came from that partial treatment of Gary's. The story he was pursuing in his adaptation of The Big Steal that... Noriega was a participant in the war on drugs, not a hero of it. He had millions and millions of dollars in Panamanian banks, and so we went in to go and get that. So that interested me greatly. in Panamanian banks. And so we went in to go and get that. So that interested me greatly. I literally stayed up all night delving into the rabbit hole

that is the Gary DeVore mystery. Jeff had remembered the DeVore story a bit. He'd been reading screenplays for production companies back then. But like many people at the time, without the World Wide Web, it fell out of his brain. Until years later. I was not familiar with the conspiratorial elements of his disappearance, his death or faked death. And so I was just fascinated

by what I was discovering from my binge down the rabbit hole. The internet had brought back the Gary DeVore story with a new intensity. Seemingly everyone who argues about the case online believes the aqueduct was searched, and the mysterious appearance of the SUV in it is a key premise of most conspiracy theories. But for Wendy, this is all deeper than the deepest conspiracy theory. It's about her marriage.

And caught between psychic Karen Persant's updates and the conspiracy theory echo chamber of the internet, Wendy has come to believe with absolute conviction that Gary was recruited by the CIA and that his Hollywood career was a cover. I remember when we all didn't know where Gary had gone on his location recce's. For clarification, location recce's are when screenwriters and producers

go check out potential locations to film. It turned out they weren't location recces. It was a very good cover for him. Hollywood makes a very good cover. To be clear, we're not saying that Gary did not meet foul play through either criminal elements or possibly his relationship with Chase Brandon or the CIA. There are anomalies in this narrative that we will return to. But it's also clear that a major element of the apparent mystery may not even be true. In the days following Gary's disappearance,

the water of the aqueduct doesn't appear to have been searched at all, not by divers, not by Navy SEALs in a helicopter. But the Internet doesn't know this truth. And it's part of what's holding Wendy captive. There's one more very important factor in all of this. One more source of fuel for the conspiracy fire. A bizarre British film called The Writer With No Hands, which came out in 2014.

Why are you dressed up as a clown? The reason I asked you to come back here today is that I want to destroy my credibility in this film, on this project, and about anything to do with Gary DeVore. Watching the film now, it appears to be almost a joke. Deliberately absurdist. It seems impossible that anyone would take it seriously. And yet, people do. You'll find it called a documentary online, one that many DeFore conspiracists claim has raised important questions.

It's the work of a guy named Matthew Alford, a British author and academic with a doctorate in film studies. He made the film with his ex-girlfriend's little brother, an aspiring director. Maybe this doesn't sound like an auspicious beginning, but according to Alford, it truly began as a most noble endeavor. I was writing an article for the Guardian newspaper about the role of the CIA in Hollywood. Alford was a serious academic at the time. He had no clue who Gary DeVore was. I was scouting around to see if I could find something to flesh out that story. I thought, you know, is there something sort of weird or interesting or creepy?

There was almost nothing written about the Gary DeVore story. Someone had put on a conspiracy website just a couple of paragraphs about it. And so he wrote about it in his Guardian story. It wasn't just about pursuing a conspiracy because it was interesting and compelling and weird and fun and emotive. But that certainly was part of it too. But it was also that, you know, the system had, the journalistic system had failed and indeed the academic system had failed, had dropped the ball on that case.

Here's the thing about Alford. His film on Gary DeVore, which helps supercharge all the internet conspiracy theories, it does look batshit crazy, judged purely on what you see. But it was never meant to be taken seriously as a piece of journalism. It was more like satire and performance art that just went off the rails. What prompted Alford to write The Guardian piece in 2006, though,

was a topic he does take seriously, a thesis he's still pursuing to this day. The CIA had had an office in Hollywood that they'd set up in the mid-1990s, and not that much had been written about that. He means the office that Chase Brand had started for the CIA the year before Gary disappeared. Chase was a friend of Gary's, and there was obviously a connection there. I think Gary did have these connections with the intelligence services and that would have really helped, I think, with all of his work. Again, on this sort of this nexus between Hollywood and the national security environments. And so I think Chase was important with that.

And yeah, helping Gary to be part of that, or at least to understand that kind of system. To Alford, the idea that Chase or the CIA could have had something to do with Gary's disappearance was beyond the point. The scandal he was focused on was the fact that the CIA opened a propaganda office in Hollywood in the first place. It turns out that the mystery surrounding Gary DeVore may have been the perfect cover for the real covert operation

that Chase Brandon and the CIA were running in Hollywood. Next time on Fade to Black. There are definitely more CIA movies because of the direct influence of the CIA. And our whole culture is permeated by that, by that top-down effect of these organizations, which are very self-interested organisations as well as very violent ones. Welcome to Origins with me, Kush Jumbo. The show where the biggest names in entertainment tell me the stories that made them who they are today. Origins is a conversation about my guests' early inspirations and growing up. Guests this season include Dame Annaour, Poppy Delevingne, Pete Capaldi and Golda Rushavelle, aka Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton. I only kind of discovered my sexuality when I went to drama school. Join me every week to hear where it all began. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Origins with Kush Jumbo.

Witnessed Fade to Black is a production of Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment in association with Stowaway Entertainment. The series was co-created, written, and reported by Evan Wright and Megan Donis. Megan Donis is the senior producer and Sheba Joseph is the associate producer. The executive producers are Evan Wright,

Jeff Singer, and me, Josh Dean. Niall Cassin is the consulting producer. Studio recording by Ewan Lytram-Ewan, Blake Rook, and Sheba Joseph. Sound design, mixing, and original music by Mark McAdam and Erica Huang. Additional engineering by Blake Rook. Additional music by APM and Blue Dot Sessions.

Additional field recording by Devin Schwartz. Fact-checking by Amanda Feynman. Special thanks to the voice actors in this episode, Megan Donis and Erica Huang, and our operations team, Doug Slaywin, Destiny Dingle, Ashley Warren, and Sabina Mara. The executive producers at Campside Media are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Adam Hoff, Matt Scher, and me, Josh Dean. 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.