Remains Are 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 remains were pulled from the California Aqueduct this week after an amateur sleuth led detectives to the spot.

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

The writer’s wife questioned Friday how Douglas Crawford, an unemployed lawyer from San Diego, aided only by newspaper accounts, could solve a mystery that had baffled authorities since Devore vanished 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,” Wendy Oakes-Devore said on NBC’s “Today” show.

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

State Department of Water Resources worker Bonnie Brown said Friday that a white hood, apparently from a sport utility vehicle, was discovered about a year ago. Devore’s body was found in his white Ford Explorer, submerged in 15 feet of algae-filled water.

Brown saw the hood shortly after Devore’s disappearance, she said, but did not see any other signs of an accident.

“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.