Remains Identified as Screenwriter’s

Using dental records, Los Angeles County coroner’s investigators on Friday identified the body of screenwriter Gary Devore, whose partially decomposed corpse was pulled from the California Aqueduct earlier this week after an amateur sleuth led detectives to the site.

Coroner’s Capt. Dean Gilmour said authorities have not determined exactly how Devore died, but that the autopsy did not show any obvious signs he had been shot, stabbed or beaten.

Investigators from the coroner’s office will join California Highway Patrol officers in re-creating the accident that may have caused Devore’s death.

Devore’s wife questioned Friday how Douglas Crawford, an unemployed lawyer from San Diego, aided only by newspaper articles, was able to solve a mystery that had baffled authorities since the screenwriter vanished on June 28, 1997.

“I would like to believe that a professional that either I paid privately or the professionals that we pay from our taxes certainly could have done anything an amateur could do--more quickly and better,” Devore’s wife, Wendy Oakes-Devore, said in an interview on NBC’s “The Today Show.”

“I would have to be led then to make the judgment that maybe [the authorities] didn’t look [in the California Aqueduct], which I just cannot believe since it’s the only obvious body of water an automobile could go into,” Oakes-Devore said.

A worker for the aqueduct system said Friday that a white hood, appearing to belong to a sports utility vehicle, was found about a year ago.

State Department of Water Resources worker Bonnie Brown spotted the hood shortly after Devore’s disappearance, but said she could not find any other signs of an accident.

Devore’s car was submerged in the aqueduct under 15 feet of algae-filled water.

“We looked around and could not find any tire tracks or skid marks,” Brown said. “We decided it was junk or debris” left from one of several freeway accidents that year.

Brown said the hood had been converted to a shelter by a group of homeless men living beneath the Antelope Valley Freeway bridge, near the section of aqueduct where Devore’s car and body were found Wednesday.

Crawford, 35, said he read a newspaper article marking the one-year anniversary of Devore’s disappearance and was reminded of a case involving a missing Orange county woman who was later found to have crashed into the California Aqueduct. He theorized Devore may have suffered a similar fate.

Taking facts about Devore’s route and last-known whereabouts from newspaper articles, Crawford retraced the screenwriter’s path. On July 3, when he came to the spot where the Antelope Valley Freeway crosses the California Aqueduct, he pulled over, got out and began searching the area. There, he said, he found debris matching the white Ford Explorer Devore was driving when he disappeared. Crawford reported his findings to authorities, prompting an underwater search on Wednesday in which Devore’s Explorer, his body still behind the wheel, was found by divers.

Devore, 55, who had screen credits for “The Dogs of War” and “Running Scared,” was returning to his Santa Barbara County home from a visit to Santa Fe, N.M., when he disappeared.

Despite ground and air searches, as well as features on “America’s Most Wanted” and other TV shows, there were few developments until Crawford took up the case.

Times staff writer Antonio Olivo contributed to this story.