Corpse on the Couch Becomes Talk of Avalon

In the island town of Avalon, where everyone knows everyone, no one could really say they knew poor Richard Malotte.

Oh, they knew his face. A postal clerk would exchange pleasantries with the old gentleman when he picked up his morning mail; the mayor would jog at dawn and pass him tottering along the road.

But after 20 years, people said, he still seemed a stranger. Every village has its hermit, and Richard Malotte was Avalon’s--until last week, when what is believed to be his corpse became the talk of the town.

The short version of the story is that Herbie Sadd, the caretaker at the Las Casitas apartments, where the 73-year-old Malotte lived, came around last Thursday to check on the place. Malotte, it seemed, hadn’t been seen all summer and was two months behind on the rent.

The brown adobe bungalows on the grounds of what had once been a baseball camp are among the farthest-flung addresses in this two-square-mile town. Moreover, Malotte, a retiree, didn’t get out much. That no one had seen him wasn’t so odd.

Nonetheless, Sadd--who lives at Las Casitas, too--was a bit concerned. When no one answered the door, he used his screwdriver to pry it open and crept into the 60-year-old room, picking his way through a curtain of cobwebs and over a carpet of rodent dung.

There, in a scene locals would later compare to “Tales From the Crypt,” Sadd discovered the skeletal remains of a man, sitting on a couch in front of a television while two stove burners flamed full blast.

“I go up to the couch and see a pair of shoes and a pair of pants. It looked like someone had just thrown the stuff down,” the caretaker said. “I was three inches from the body and didn’t see it. [Then] I go and look up the pants, up the shirt and bingo! There’s the head with the eye sockets. It was just like out of Indiana Jones.”

It’s a chilling account, one that Sadd still can’t believe actually involved him. But it doesn’t begin to do justice to the shiver that this lonesome death has sent down the collective spine of this Catalina Island tourist town.

That a member of their community, reclusive though he might have been, could be dead for as long as three months without anyone noticing--well, that kind of thing might happen “over town” in soulless Los Angeles, but it is unimaginable in Avalon.

“We really look out for our own. It’s really unusual that this would happen,” said Mayor Ralph Morrow Jr., who has lived on the island of 3,400 residents for 23 years. Outsiders may know Avalon for its quaint bed-and-breakfasts and glass-bottomed boats; to locals, it is the sort of place where the hospital keeps a list of the elderly residents and calls daily to check on each one.

“There’s always somebody thinking about you here,” agreed Seymour Cohen, a retiree who lives just a few hundred yards from Malotte’s house. Sweeping leaves in front of his bungalow, Cohen mused that he could only hope not to pass from the world so tragically unnoticed.

It is slim comfort that, in retrospect, there were valid reasons why no one worried sooner about Malotte. Yes, the mail piled up in his post office box, but it wasn’t that plentiful, and it’s not uncommon for retired islanders to visit the mainland and be gone for months.

True, rotting corpses begin to smell within days, but Malotte’s bungalow was at the far end of the complex, and the few passersby who noticed a stench figured it was a dead cat in the vacant lot nearby.

Ordinarily, the gas company or the electric company would disconnect service after months of unpaid bills, but Malotte’s utilities were included in the rent, the caretaker said; he had no account of his own.

“He really lived off the beaten path,” said one local, shaking his head.

But if Malotte kept a low profile in life, his stature in what appears to be his new, posthumous period has been just the opposite. In the days since the morbid discovery, spooky rumors have ricocheted all around town.

Sandra Lopez’s 10-year-old came home the other day, quivering with the news that “they found a dead man and he was melted into the couch,” the mother said. Lopez’s brother-in-law Tom Campbell heard that a week before the body was found, plumbers had gone under the bungalow to fix a leak, and suspected nothing, even though the body was but a floorboard away.

Deepening the mystery is the fact that the coroner’s office has so far been unable to say for certain whether the body is Malotte’s. Officials said the hands were so decomposed that they could not lift a fingerprint, and the face was unrecognizable. There were no distinctive tattoos or scars.

Malotte, they said, never visited the local dentist, the local doctor or the island’s small hospital, so there are no dental records available to confirm the identity.

His apartment was littered with reams of small handwritten notes, the most recent one dated three months ago, authorities said, but none that would lead them to his next of kin.

Capt. Dean Gilmour of the coroner’s investigative division said that even though locals knew the apartment to be Malotte’s and have not seen the man alive in months, the corpse on his couch must officially remain John Doe No. 112 until more conclusive identification is obtained.

“We run into people every day who have, say, lived under assumed names for years--moved from back East out to California to start a new life. His friends may have known him by one name, but he could be Jesse James from Missouri for all we know,” Gilmour said.

“Maybe you could put out a plea for any information regarding the I.D. of this man,” the captain added. “Because we have no information, and we’ve searched all over the country.”

That so little is known about their longtime--and possibly deceased--neighbor is not surprising to those acquainted with Malotte. For one thing, in the years during which he held a job, he worked the graveyard shift, so no one saw him during the day.

For years, locals said, Malotte worked at the Hotel Atwater as the night auditor and security guard. Everardo Barriga, now the front desk clerk, said he would get off at midnight just as Malotte was coming on duty. Barriga described him as a good enforcer of hotel rules, but otherwise “a man who pretty much lived on his own.”

Six or seven years ago, Malotte retired, said Ron Doutt, executive vice president of the Santa Catalina Island Co., which owns the Hotel Atwater and the Pavilion Lodge. Shy at his workplace, the night watchman became downright reclusive in his retirement, locals said.

“He was kind of a hermit,” said 37-year-old Hale Atchison, a Santa Catalina Island Co. maintenance worker who was tending to the grounds Tuesday around Las Casitas bungalows. “I saw him maybe twice in the last four years.”

A few times, Atchison said, he worked on Malotte’s bungalow and couldn’t help noticing how much he smoked and how he kept his cigarette stubs gathered in coffee cups.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Jerry Kaono, who investigated briefly after the body was found, confirmed that the bungalow was “piled with cigarette butts and ashes.” Kaono said that locals described Malotte as a heart attack waiting to happen, and there was no indication of foul play.

Still, said Peggy Meier, a real estate agent, “It’s very spooky.”

Rumor has it that the bungalow’s owner plans to tear the place down. It’s giving people the creeps.