Screenwriter Vanishes in Scenario Fit for Film

His wife has one theory: He could have been carjacked and suffered a severe head injury, the 1997 Eddie Bauer Edition Ford Explorer he was driving smuggled into Mexico and chopped up.

A Hollywood colleague has another theory: Someone lying in wait may have signaled to cohorts who forced him to stop.

Even the psychic who took part in the search has a theory: He received a blow to the right side of his head from at least two people, maybe three. He was moved a considerable distance--she saw a canyon, lavender flowers, streams. He is not in the spirit world, the vibrations tell her. He is, rather, between two worlds, perhaps in a coma.

Unspoken is the possibility that Gary Devore simply decided to walk away from his life--or that he is party to an elaborate Hollywood hoax.

It has now been a month since screenwriter Devore vanished without a trace while driving from New Mexico through the Southern California desert--his last known whereabouts determined by a cellular phone call to his wife at their beachfront Carpinteria home in the wee hours of June 28. There have been no sightings of him or the Explorer. No use of his credit cards.

Police agencies throughout Southern California, along with Devore’s family and friends, have conducted air and ground searches, and the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department is coordinating an investigation that includes the FBI. Sheriff’s Sgt. Bill Byrne said that Devore’s name has been placed in a national crime computer and that detectives are backtracking his activities. And a flamboyant Hollywood-style publicity campaign has been mounted to keep interest in the case alive.

Devore’s mysterious disappearance has shaken his family and caused anguish among some in the Hollywood film community, where Devore, 55, has been a productive writer with credits ranging from the movie “The Dogs of War,” starring Christopher Walken, to the film “Running Scared,” with Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal.

“It’s extremely stressful for all of us,” said Barry Rosenbush, a producer on the movie Devore was writing at the time he disappeared. “Not a word. Not a trace. Nothing. There is no closure. It’s ‘Hello, honey, I’ll be home in a couple of hours,’ and he’s vanished. To all of us, it’s like this open, gaping, psychological wound.”

Said Gary Richman, a friend from junior high school days: “It was like he was sucked up somewhere.”

So they wait, holding out hope that authorities or a private citizen turns up a clue to Devore’s whereabouts. A $100,000 reward has been offered.

“I don’t go along with the idea that a person can disappear into thin air,” said his 82-year-old father, David Devore. “Other than Judge Crater, how many times does that happen?”

(Crater, a New York state jurist, vanished after catching a Manhattan cab on Aug. 6, 1930.)

Mike Webb, who works for Crutchfield Investigators in Beverly Hills, said it is impossible to pinpoint where Devore’s cellular phone call originated, but it probably was inside a 25-mile radius near the desert communities of Mojave and Rosamond.

“Based on his conversation with his wife and where his last phone call came from, he took Highway 58 out of Barstow west,” Webb said. “That leads into Mojave. We believe that logically he would have taken Highway 14 south out of Mojave, if he was heading home. From there, he has options.”

The search for Devore has been chronicled far and wide in the media, from local news outlets to such national TV shows as “Inside Edition” and “America’s Most Wanted.”

“We have incredible media coverage,” said Wendy Oates-Devore, the missing man’s wife. “Thank God we have had that available to us.”

Psychics, private eyes, trackers, bloodhounds, pilots and stuntmen have scoured Southern California’s High Desert looking for Devore.

To keep interest in the case high, a flashy publicity drive has been mounted by Devore’s Los Angeles media consultant, Michael Sands, who likens his effort to a military campaign, dubbing it “Operation Desert Devore.”

Sands is an actor-turned-public relations man who says he created the white chocolate chip cookie and once represented Mr. Blackwell, the designer known for his annual worst-dressed celebrity lists.

Sands said he sees the search as an “educational tool.”

“It’s like a combat manual for the public: how to find someone you are involved with, that you love, who is missing,” he said. “We established the ground troops. We had our own air strikes.”

Sands even said he has “plastic surgeons and brain surgeons ready to go” at a moment’s notice should Devore turn up injured.

When the consultant learned from Oates-Devore that her husband was missing, he immediately went to work coordinating interviews.

“On Sunday morning (June 29), I got calls from every TV station in town,” Sands said. “They came over one by one. It was like a Mr. Blackwell kind of thing.”

Sands freely gives out the phone numbers of Devore’s wife, childhood friends and Hollywood colleagues. “I never deal in ‘no comment,’ ” he said. “I like everyone to talk--win, lose or draw.”

Sands put out a provocative press release with the headline “WITHOUT A TRACE . . . MOVIE TITLE OR REALITY? IS ART IMITATING LIFE OR THE OTHER WAY AROUND?”

It questioned whether Devore’s disappearance might be linked to, among other things, “aftershocks around Barstow” or a lawsuit he has pending on appeal against the estate of singer Nat King Cole. (Devore was married nine years to Cole’s widow, Maria.)

Sands said he posed the questions simply to spur interest. “I like to be creative and get people to think, because this is an entertainment-related story,” he said.

Neither the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department, Devore’s wife, nor even Sands said they believe that the lawsuit had anything to do with the disappearance.

Sands said he brought up the suit only because Devore once told him, “Someday you might want to mention it.”

In a phone message left with a Times reporter, Sands playfully suggested that Devore’s disappearance could make for a good movie, and even posited a cast--Diana Ross as Maria Cole, Jodie Foster as Oates-Devore and Martin Short as Sands.

Oates-Devore vigorously defends the media consultant. “I don’t think he has overstepped anything,” she said.

In the weeks since Devore disappeared, his wife said, she has grown increasingly disenchanted with the law enforcement effort to find him. At one point in an interview with The Times, she described investigators as “morons” after learning, to her dismay, that they had a surveillance photo of her husband--taken in a Flagstaff, Ariz., convenience store the night he drove west--but had not told her about it. She said she learned of the photograph from a TV reporter.

On Wednesday, Oates-Devore voluntarily underwent a three-hour lie detector test at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department. Sgt. Byrne declined to discuss the results, but said that a polygraph was routine in such cases and that Oates-Devore is not a suspect.

Still, a distraught Oates-Devore believes otherwise. “I know they were looking at me,” she said. “I’m just thrilled [Devore] didn’t have a huge life insurance policy.”

A former model from Palm Beach, Fla., and New York City, Oates-Devore came to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s to pursue an acting career. She later enlisted as an administrator for a Los Angeles plastic surgeon, Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, appearing on more than 100 radio and TV shows to discuss the pros and cons of plastic surgery.

She met Devore four years ago, she said, while getting her hair cut next to him at Cristophe in Beverly Hills. “We were talking about our mothers,” Oates-Devore recalled.

They did not marry until January 1996, she said, “but we were inseparable from that time [when they met] on.” She would become Devore’s fourth wife.

People close to Devore say the man they know would never drop from sight without telling his family. They say he loved his wife, had no known enemies, did not take illegal drugs and was not depressed.

In fact, they noted, he was about to embark on an exciting new direction in his career, as director on an RKO Pictures remake of the 1949 robbery caper “The Big Steal,” which had starred Robert Mitchum. The remake was to be set at the Panama Canal.

Robert O’Connor, RKO’s president of production, said Devore was in the midst of writing his initial draft when he vanished.

Before he set out, his wife said, Devore had been staying for a few days at the Santa Fe, N.M., home of actress Marsha Mason, working on the script.

“She was kind enough to give him her home,” Oates-Devore said. “She had done that before because he was inspired there.”

On Friday, June 27, Devore had packed up the Explorer about 11 a.m. He went to lunch with Mason and her niece, returning to Mason’s around 2 p.m. He dropped the niece off at the Albuquerque airport and then headed to California, according to Oates-Devore. Mason declined to discuss the case.

Authorities originally said Devore was carrying a .38-caliber revolver for protection, but his wife later told The Times that she found the .38 and now believes he took along a .44-caliber Colt.

The 5 foot 11 inch, 185-pound Devore could look rugged and cowboyish with his boots, straw Stetson and salt-and-pepper beard. He had broken his right pinkie while playing high school football, and it is still a distinctive disfigurement.

He could have a short fuse, said producer David Foster, a close friend who worked with Devore on “Running Scared,” but stressed that “at his core, he was a pussycat.”

By all accounts, Devore knew the back roads, having been a truck driver years ago. Indeed, his screenwriting career took off with a 1981 film called “Back Roads,” which starred Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones. Devore named his company Back Roads Productions.

“I guess as a truck driver he saw a lot of things happen,” Foster said. “That’s how he became a writer. He saw a lot of weird things as a truck driver.”

Friends said they couldn’t imagine him ever telling his wife he would be home in three hours and then going off somewhere else.

The security camera in Flagstaff caught his image about 7 p.m. Friday as he bought some food.

At 10:20 p.m., Devore stopped for gas at the High Sierra Oasis station in Fenner, Calif., west of Needles, authorities said. The surveillance camera there was not operating.

Around 12:40 a.m. June 28, Oates-Devore said, she received a call from her husband saying he was tired but coming straight home. He said he had “broken the back of the script,” meaning that he had achieved a breakthrough. “I may come home and go straight into my office and write for a few hours,” she recalled him saying.

Oates-Devore also said her husband phoned her again about 1:15 a.m., but the cellular company has not yet provided a billing containing proof of such a call.

Byrne of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department said he has no knowledge of that call, but added: “There is no indication that the wife is not being truthful.”

Oates-Devore said she made her husband promise that he would pull over to the side of the road if he got tired. When he didn’t arrive by 9 a.m., she called the California Highway Patrol and, that night, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department.

“By that time,” she said, “he had been missing long enough for seven cars to be chopped up in Mexico.”

Devore’s father has a theory that his son went to Panama, where his latest screenplay was to be filmed. But producer Rosenbush dismissed that hypothesis.

“When you do that kind of trip, the consul general of Panama would take you everywhere you want to go,” Rosenbush said. Besides, he added, they had already been in touch with people there to make the film.

Meanwhile, Devore’s wife is keeping up her vigil. She has taken to the skies in a helicopter and fixed-wing plane over the broad expanse of desert, searching. Bloodhounds have been used. Fliers have been handed out as far away as Tijuana, where some stuntmen checked on whether the car had shown up.

“The posters are on all those major roads” in the desert, said Richman, Devore’s boyhood pal. “And up there, offering a $100,000 reward, that’s an awful lot of money.”

At one point, the family contacted a psychic, Karen Prisant of Long Beach, who took part in the search. Prisant said that she thinks Devore is still alive but that he may be in a coma. “I feel he fell into trouble on Highway 58,” she said. “I don’t feel he is in that area now. . . . I feel his vibration for a split second on [Highway] 14 and then it is gone.”

Special correspondent Judy Brennan contributed to this story.