The Suicide Tape : A Fear of Aging? Hidden Money Troubles? What Dark Reasons Led a Handsome Couple in Their 40s to End It All?

Doug and Dana Ridenour appeared to have everything they wanted, all within the hermetic walls of their 20-year marriage. They appeared prosperous, confident and happy.

When they died July 29 in what seemed to be a double suicide, they appeared to have made their ultimate decision with mutual certainty. Before their deaths, the Ridenours filmed a videotape to document their shared enthusiasm over beating the Grim Reaper at his own game.

But underneath the smiling faces and impeccable attire--worn even while performing their bizarre suicide note--two troubled people concealed their vulnerabilities.

Despite tales of $50,000 in spare change that would fund a last fling, financial strife hounded the Anaheim couple: in 1985, they filed for bankruptcy; although they boasted of striking gold with their recent career change, their income stayed about the same; they admitted on the videotape that they owed $7,000 in back income taxes.

And in their videotape, Dana discussed a suicide that would happen “years and decades” later, Anaheim Police Sgt. Chet Barry said.

However, it was only 3 1/2 months after they made the tape that Dana’s husband put a shotgun to her head and pulled the trigger--apparently as she dozed on a couch.

When police arrived, Dana’s body was curled on the cushions, her gracefully crossed feet propped on the arm of the couch. A manicured hand dangled toward the floor. The television set still buzzed.

“You can bet that (Doug) didn’t know his wife would look like this,” Barry remarked as he scanned photographs of the scene. “Often suicide victims get all prettied up before they kill themselves; they don’t realize the trauma caused by a gun fired point-blank.”

Getting “all prettied up” would seem in character for a woman who never stepped outside the house in anything less formal than a business suit. Yet on her final night, Barry observed, Dana wore a plain cotton gown--white, sleeveless, knee-length, nondescript.

Barry believes that Doug shot the two pet poodles after killing his wife--then sat down on the twin couch adjacent to Dana’s deathbed, stuck the shotgun barrel into his mouth and fired the last round through his own head.

Police found Doug sitting straight up, the gun resting in his left hand. He was dressed in his signature outfit--crisply pressed jeans and a white shirt.

The audiovisual suicide note awaited Ronald Ridenour at his Santa Barbara home when he arrived from a birthday party the night of July 31. It had been mailed hours before the shootings.

Doug’s kid brother rushed to Anaheim with hopes of persuading the couple to rethink their scheme, only to discover a horrifying fait accompli .

Police investigators who viewed the video reported that Douglas and Dana Ridenour “cheerfully” and “calmly” expressed their desire to die before they grew old. But, Sgt. Barry now admits, that portrayal oversimplified matters.

What struck Barry most about the videotape, he said, was that Douglas and Dana seemed to be communicating on different planes.

While Doug considered himself “old” at age 48, his wife reacted with insult when he implied the same of her.

“I don’t want to see Dana get old,” he said on the video. Dana, 45, spunkily retorted, “I beg your pardon!”

Although they were on a leave of absence from work when they made the videotape, both were dressed for a day at the office--Doug in coat and tie. Their poodles licking their faces, they sat on the couch where Dana would die 3 1/2 months later.

Doug did most of the the talking, while his wife smiled and nodded supportively. He opened with a sentimental tribute to his 22-year romance with Dana.

Then he got to the crux of the message. “He said that he and his wife had always wanted to be in control of everything they did, and part of being in control is determining the point of your death,” Barry said. “They were in agreement that it was the right thing for both of them, and they didn’t want people to think that it had been more one person’s idea” than the other’s.

About midway through the 20-minute presentation, Barry said, the couple’s bright demeanor crumbled as Doug proclaimed: “This is about as old as I ever wanted to get.” Dana suddenly seemed to sense his immediacy.

Still, she continued smiling, although periodically she would turn her head from the camera and wipe away tears. Her voice developed a tremble.

Doug listed the “toys” that Ronald stood to inherit--VCRs, televisions and what not. “Enjoy,” Dana piped in.

“You know what’s sort of pathetic?” Barry observed. “I walked through that house. It was a nice house . . . but they didn’t have that much. They acted like they were leaving the brother all these treasures. Who needs another VCR?”

Whatever the degree that Dana Ridenour participated in her death, Barry plans to close the case after he receives the toxicology test results.

“It will always be classified as a murder, but there is no point in us investigating it further,” he said. “We’re virtually certain of who pulled the trigger, and the defendant is dead.”

Once investigators no longer deemed the videotape evidentiary material, police returned it to Doug’s brother. “He drove right down here to get it the day I called,” Barry said. “He was adamant that nobody (outside the investigation) see the tape.”

On the same day that Iraq’s invasion of of Kuwait first jolted the headlines, Doug and Dana Ridenour shared the front page with Saddam Hussein in newspapers throughout Southern California.

Before their deaths, hardly anyone really knew them, except Doug’s brother and father. Dana had no close relatives, and neither had close friends. Neighbors and co-workers remember them as pleasant but standoffish.

Then why the fascination with these unlikely celebrities?

Maybe because such an absolute surrender to our universal fear of aging--the sole rationale Doug and Dana offered--makes people uncomfortable.

“It takes more courage to live than to die, and that courage comes from pressing on to be with the ones you love,” said Judy Dillavou, who with her husband, Dean Dillavou, owns Lincoln Realty in Orange, where the Ridenours last worked. “What I don’t understand is, Doug and Dana liked being together so much--why wouldn’t they want to keep going on?”

During their half-year stint at Lincoln Realty, the Ridenours sold three Anaheim Hills homes for about $350,000 each, Dillavou said. They had met so much success that they decided to relax for a few weeks, they told their employers last April.

“That’s not an unusual thing to do in the real estate business, since the sales people are independent contractors,” Dean Dillavou explained. “Doug called and said they had come into some money and wanted to take a little time off. We were under the impression they had inherited money.”

Somehow, the Ridenours gave everyone the impression that they had a lot of money--even colleagues who knew their salaries. At the graphics firm where he had worked for 14 years before trying new ventures, Doug boasted about Dana’s high-paying secretarial position.

“His wife had a fantastic job,” former co-worker Al DeSpain recalled Doug saying. “He said it allowed him to do what he pleased (occupationally). He didn’t have a problem with the fact that his wife made more money than he did.”

Doug never let on that he and Dana filed for bankruptcy five years ago. They were $33,650 in the red--a debt accumulated mostly through credit card charges. Their property value totaled only $2,850, they claimed; the couple did not buy a home until 1988. Bankruptcy records show that Dana earned $31,200 in 1984 at the Orange County branch of Arthur Anderson & Co. accounting firm, where she had worked for 16 years. Doug brought in $15,600 as an illustrator at Fullerton-based Industrial Publications and Graphics Inc.

Last year, Doug quit the job he had held since 1975 and tried to start his own business, peddling large-scale earthquake-preparedness kits to schools and hospitals. When that failed, he persuaded Dana to go into real estate sales with him.

A few months before he killed himself, Doug dropped by his former employer and raved about his lucrative new career. “He told us that he had made more money in one month than he could make in one year working here,” said DeSpain, manager of Industrial Publications and Graphics. “He was thrilled.”

In their six months at her real estate company, Judy Dillavou estimated, the Ridenours garnered about $25,000--a respectable paycheck, certainly, but not much more than their joint income back when they filed for bankruptcy.

Yet over the previous five years, Doug and Dana indicated on their videotape, they had managed to stash away $50,000--which they would withdraw for a splurge when their suicide became imminent.

However, at the time of their deaths they had shown no signs of a spending spree. Neighbors said the Ridenours stayed close to home during their sabbatical from work.

Late in the videotape, police said, Doug volunteered that he and Dana owed $7,000 in taxes that they might not pay before dying. Their video was filmed April 19, four days after the Internal Revenue Service’s deadline.

Right up to the bitter end, it seems, the proud couple painted a rosier picture of their finances than reality bore out.

Said suicide expert Mark S. Goulston, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute: “In all my experience, I’ve never known a happy person to commit suicide.”

Dana Ridenour seemed almost as if she landed in Southern California 22 years ago without a past.

Her childhood remains hazy even to her in-laws, who could only say for sure that she was raised in the Dallas area by relatives other than her parents. “I didn’t learn too much about her life,” said Doug’s father, Floyd Ridenour.

What can be gleaned from public records is that Dana Sue was born Feb. 15, 1945, in Electra, Tex., to Glenn and Opal Houser. At the time of her birth, her father was stationed in Europe in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Apparently he never saw his daughter; he died in action on March 20, 1945.

On the videotape, according to police, Dana said she had no heirs. “Doug brought up her mother, but she quickly cut him off, like it was a taboo subject,” Sgt. Barry said.

Doug’s history is much more accessible. Born on July 2, 1942, to Floyd and Nancy Ridenour, Doug grew up in Piqua, Ohio, with a brother and sister.

“I was very proud of him, and I still am,” Floyd Ridenour, 69, said in a telephone interview from his home in Troy, Ohio. “He was a nice boy; I had no problems with him. He was popular in high school and college.”

He had a traditional upbringing. His parents took the kids to a Methodist church, played Santa Claus on Christmas and voted Democratic.

Doug inherited his mother’s good-natured disposition, Ridenour said, wryly adding: “Even though she was extremely beautiful, she was so nice that she didn’t intimidate anyone--except me.”

Nancy Ridenour also passed down to her son an intense dread of aging.

“She studied her face in the mirror every morning to see if she had a new wrinkle,” said Floyd Ridenour, a retired plumber. “I had no inkling that Doug had the same fear. He’d talked about it with Ronald, but never with me.”

When their marriage unraveled, Floyd and Nancy Ridenour waited until their children left home before splitting up. Doug, who had attended the University of Dayton and the Dayton Art Institute, was 23 and working as a graphics illustrator in Dallas.

“Naturally, our kids didn’t like the idea of us getting a divorce, but it didn’t upset them to the point where they took sides,” Floyd Ridenour said. His ex-wife soon thereafter remarried and moved to Los Angeles, where she got a job as a bookkeeper at the renowned Cocoanut Grove night club.

Meanwhile, Doug also decided to go west. He told his plan to Dana Sue Houser, a secretary at his office. She replied that she, coincidentally, was California-bound as well. “They looked each other up when they got out there,” Floyd Ridenour said.

The sweethearts moved in together in 1968. They married two years later at the high-volume Bride’s Choice Wedding Chapel in Los Angeles.

Doug’s mother died of heart failure in 1980. At 56, she was much too young for such a fate by most people’s standards. But by her son’s standards--those expressed on his videotape--she had passed the intolerable milestone of 50.

In the early ‘70s, Doug and Dana dropped anchor at a Santa Ana apartment complex--The Islander--a sprawling maze of bungalows lushly landscaped with tropical plants and waterfalls.

There the couple remained for 17 years, until they bought a house.

Ironically, for such an inseparable pair, they saw little of each other on weekdays. Throughout most of their marriage, Dana worked 8 to 5, while Doug clocked in at 9 p.m. and returned the next morning in time to have breakfast with his wife.

Other than during visits from Ronald or Floyd Ridenour, Doug and Dana socialized only with each other. Their entertainment consisted of dining out and watching television, Floyd said; they shunned travel.

An elaborate TV aerial that Doug installed still looms above their Santa Ana apartment. In the den of their Anaheim home, Sgt. Barry said, they had two televisions with head sets--presumably so they could listen to different channels in each other’s presense.

“They didn’t need friends,” Doug’s father said. “They weren’t at all odd; they just thought there were a lot of bad apples out there and they were happy being alone.”

Nor did they have much use for children. “They were very verbal with everyone in the office about the fact that they’d never wanted kids,” said real estate agent Judy Dillavou.

They focused their affection on their dogs. “Doug always loved animals,” Floyd Ridenour said. “He thought hunting was cruel. In his later years, he even thought fishing was cruel.”

Richard and Erna Lawson, a retired couple who have lived at The Islander for years, echoed the common perception that their former next-door neighbors were “reclusive.”

“We seldom saw her (Dana),” Erna Lawson said. “Whenever we did, she looked beautiful. She had an old-fashioned hairstyle--teased, locked into place. We never saw her in slacks or shorts; she wore a dress and high heels even on weekends.”

The Ridenours always owned two poodles, neighbors said. But the dogs were kept out of sight and out of sound; they rarely were taken for walks, and their vocal chords had been cut to prevent them from barking.

Although Doug and Dana “stayed to themselves,” they were cordial when greeted. “He was constantly polishing his car in the parking lot,” Richard Lawson said. “We would have conversations about the apartment complex. He thought that it went downhill once it was no longer adults-only. He seemed very nice.”

Al DeSpain, manager of Industrial Publications and Graphics, recalled that Doug could be annoyingly chipper. “It drove me up the wall,” he said. “Doug would get on my case for being pessimistic--and I would tell him that I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.”

In their 15-year-plus acquaintence, Doug scarcely aged at all, DeSpain said: “I’m a year younger than Doug was, and I watched myself grow older while he just stayed the same. He reminded me of Fabian.”

Within the span of about 18 months, Doug and Dana Ridenour’s regimented existence took a few wide turns.

They quit predictable jobs that required little social interaction and braved a highly aggressive profession.

They suddenly worked the same schedule--side by side, no less.

They bought a house, after saying for years that they didn’t want the responsibility of home ownership.

Doug and Dana did not take well to their new neighbors on South Dickel Street, nor their neighbors to them. “They would drive by and keep their eyes straight ahead so they wouldn’t have to see you and acknowledge you were there,” Sara Collins recalled.

One time Doug yelled at Ed and Angie Rossol’s 3-year-old daughter for trespassing on his front lawn. “It scared her--she cried,” Angie Rossol said.

The couple’s symbiotic marriage made for an ideal sales team, Judy Dillavou said: “You could tell they were in love by the way one would stare at the other while he or she was talking. They never defied each other; they always validated what the other one said. They worked together well, and not every husband and wife can do that.”

Their indivisibility amused Dean Dillavou. “The message on their answering machine said, ‘This is Doug, this is Dana. . . .’ When they called into the office, they would get on the speaker phone together,” he chuckled.

Though Dana was less outgoing than Doug, Judy Dillavou said, she held her own: “She talked less than he did, but she wasn’t shy. He had her on a pedestal.”

In retrospect, however, Dillavou recalled a conversation “that seems weirder now than it did at the time”:

“Doug said that he disconnected the oven so Dana wouldn’t have to cook, because he wanted to be with her every minute of the day. I asked her, ‘But don’t you miss baking?’ She just said, ‘No.’ ”

It was an odd concession for a woman who, in her father-in-law’s memory, “loved to cook.”

“Sometimes people can get in a delusional system together that is so airtight they don’t need anything or anyone else,” said UCLA psychiatrist Mark Goulston, who does “psychological autopsies” of suicide victims for their survivors. “It’s as if two people have become a single, autonomous person.”

The phenomenon, known as folie a deux-- double insanity--”can give the two people a grand feeling of superiority,” Goulston said. “But when they have to react with the rest of the world, the drop from feeling gigantic to feeling puny can be dramatic.”

Some weeks after the Ridenours filmed their joint farewell, Doug tacked a solo message onto the tape. He did not specify the date, but enough time had elapsed since April 19 for him to grow the beard he had when he died.

Doug’s rambling 15-minute epilogue to his brother left no doubt that the end was at hand, police said. He seemed distraught, nervous and sad.

“He got choked up when he was talking about the dogs,” Barry recalled. “He said something to the effect of, ‘We’re taking the dogs with us--they’d want it that way.’ ”

Again Doug praised Dana for her devotion, allowing that he had “some different qualities” about himself that most people would find difficult to accept. But in their 22-year relationship, he said, he and his wife had never had a major argument.

Then Doug gave detailed and often repetitive instructions to his brother about funeral arrangements. He and Dana already had paid a Santa Ana mortuary for cremation services, Doug said.

“He stressed that his brother’s first responsibility, once he got the videotape, was to call the mortuary and tell them to go pick up the bodies,” Barry said. “I guess that he naively assumed there wouldn’t be a police investigation or autopsies.”

In conclusion, Doug Ridenour assigned his brother one last responsibility: to safeguard his and Dana’s appearance:

“If anybody asks, tell them we were happy.”

Times staff writer Jim Gomez contributed to this story.