2 Troubled Lives Ended in Leap; Enigma Remains

Marigail Richardson is back in Houston, buried there after she and her husband ended their troubled lives two weeks ago today by dropping from a Hollywood Freeway overpass into the blur of afternoon rush-hour traffic.

Whatever their reason, they took it with them.

Nobody they left behind really understands what it was.

Nor, for a time, did anyone know quite who they were or where they came from. A great deal remains unknown about Marigail’s husband, Peter Richardson. On Monday, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office still had been unable to find his next of kin and had not yet released his body.

The impressions of those who knew the couple vary according to when they knew the 35-year-old epileptic woman and her 40-year-old Vietnam veteran husband.

Marigail Richardson’s mother, Mary Cone, said in Houston that she had not seen her daughter in five years. She remembered her as “a sweet, lovable girl. . . . People all the time were telling me what a precious girl she was. She was like a china doll. She was beautiful.”

Those who knew the troubled couple in their last days found them increasingly perturbed.

“They were getting upset more and more. . . . They said they just couldn’t take it anymore,” said David Greubel, 47, who had befriended them at Santo Nino Estate, a faded old Pasadena mansion that has become a privately operated board and care home.

On Aug. 17, the night before they died, the Richardsons locked themselves in their room at Santo Nino, propped a chair against the knob, crumpled papers in a wastebasket and set fire to them, then went out through the window and slammed it shut behind them.

An attendant had to break the glass with a fire extinguisher to get in and put out the fire, which had damaged little more than the carpet.

The Richardsons, said the facility’s owner, Cherry Corbarrubias, were found a short time later, casually drinking beer in a recreation room.

Unable to get either a county psychological evaluation team or Pasadena police to take the Richardsons away, Corbarrubias said, she followed instructions from a county care licensing official the next morning and gave them three days to move out.

That was on Aug. 18, the day they died.

Before they left Santo Nino, Greubel said, Marigail Richardson told him they were “going to go to the next freeway bridge and jump.”

‘Sorry for Them’

Said Greubel: “I feel very sorry for them. They were my best friends.” Marigail had promised him her new coffee maker if anything ever happened to her.

A lot had happened to the quiet, withdrawn couple, long before they arrived at the Los Angeles Street bridge that spans the busy Hollywood Freeway in the Los Angeles Civic Center area.

Marigail became an epileptic when she was 18 and was in and out of mental institutions several times, her mother said.

Official records show that Peter Richardson was a jobless Vietnam veteran who had asked for assistance from the Veterans Administration and the office of U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) for post traumatic stress.

“They had been trying to help one another,” said Cone, who had never met Richardson. “They were giving each other moral support.”

Just before they died, a passing pedestrian, Raymond Oppenheim, 37, said he saw the woman straddling the guard rail while she and her husband talked to each other in an agitated manner. “I thought they were acting crazy to get put in the hospital so they could get something to eat,” Oppenheim said.

When he heard the shriek of brakes and looked back, the couple had vanished.

Post Office Box

A California Highway Patrol officer said Marigail Richardson did not appear to have been struck by any of the cars shooting beneath the bridge on the eastbound freeway. Nevertheless, she died a short time later at County-USC Medical Center. Peter Richardson was struck by the car of a vacationing couple.

For several days after their deaths, the coroner’s office could not learn where the Richardsons came from or who their relatives were. Although there were identification cards on the bodies, the only address investigators found immediately was a Chula Vista post office box. It yielded nothing.

Unable to notify next of kin, the coroner could not release their names. The search finally led to Santo Nino Estate, where Marigail Richardson’s file contained the telephone number of her parents in Houston.

As for her husband, available records show that he was born in Shanghai, the son of Louis P. Richardson and Aimee Forbes Richardson. The father, whom Peter Richardson had listed in his Army record as deceased, apparently was a military man stationed there at the end of World War II.

The younger Richardson enlisted in the Army in Los Angeles in 1967 and was discharged nine years later. His first wife, Maria Gomez, reportedly lives in Spain with their two children, Louis Peter Gomez Richardson, 16, and Maria, 13.

Each Was Divorced

Mary Cone said she understands that Richardson and Maria Gomez were divorced in 1981, three years before Marigail met him in Colorado and married him there.

Marigail also had a first marriage, to Richard Ivy, who was drafted into the Army a few months after their wedding. It, too, ended in divorce.

After Marigail and Peter Richardson married and spent some time in Colorado, they apparently went from place to place seeking some sort of stable life, according to her mother. They moved to Philadelphia, where he seemed to be looking for a job. They lived for a while in Chula Vista near San Diego, and in Fresno.

For about nine months--until April of this year--they had a room at a motel in Manhattan Beach where, the manager’s daughter said, Richardson did not seem to treat his wife very well.

“He would leave her in the room all day long,” she recalled. “He was receiving (Social Security insurance) checks. He would take all the money and not give her any.”

Nor, she said, did he always pay the rent. When he got two weeks behind, “I finally had to ask them to leave.”

After the couple stayed briefly at a motel in El Monte, Marigail arrived alone at Santo Nino. She had been referred there by Harbor General Hospital, where, her mother believes, she was receiving medication for epilepsy.

Joined by Husband

After three days, Santo Nino director Mocelle Devaughn said, Marigail asked if her husband could live with her and was told he could.

Richardson continued to go to Manhattan Beach regularly--presumably by bus--to pick up his Social Security checks, Devaughn said. But he never wanted to pay more than about half of the rent. Other than that, they gave the facility no trouble until the night of the fire in their room.

Greubel remembered them as friends.

He displayed a note written in a neat, woman’s hand: “Welcome to the House of Champions! You win! The Richardsons, Pete and Marigail.”

Times staff writer Don Shannon in Washington contributed to this story.