Without a Trace

Somewhere during his drive home, perhaps along a stretch of highway in the Mojave Desert known for bikers, methamphetamine labs, chop shops and mine shafts too numerous to count, screenwriter Gary Devore’s voice drifted over a cellular phone in the wee hours of June 28, 1997.

“Was that you trying to call me, sweetie?” Devore asked his wife, Wendy Oates-Devore, who was waiting for him at their beachfront home in Carpinteria.

“Who else would it be at 1 o’clock in the morning?” she asked. “Where are you?”

“I’m past Barstow,” he replied, giving no hint to his exact location. He was not tired, he told her, even though she knew he had been driving straight through from Santa Fe, N.M. If he got tired, he assured her, he would pull off the road and get some shut-eye. Don’t wait up.

“See you later,” he said.

And with that, Gary Devore vanished without a trace.

The call had come in at 1:15 a.m., his wife remembered, although no billing records have ever been found to pinpoint that call. Oates-Devore said he might not have been allowed to use his own phone.

It has been a year since Devore’s puzzling disappearance. In that time, family and friends have devised various scenarios as to what might have befallen the writer, whose credits included “The Dogs of War,” starring Christopher Walken, and “Running Scared,” with Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal.

Some believe he was carjacked and murdered, his 1997 Eddie Bauer Edition Ford Explorer driven to Mexico. Others believe he chose to drop from sight and get his bearings, and will one day return. Or, he has amnesia and can’t find his way back.

Perhaps most bizarre of all, some even entertain the belief that no less than the Central Intelligence Agency might have had a hand in his disappearance, giving him a new identity and sending him on the biggest adventure of his life.

For those left behind, it is easier to concoct scenarios than to deal with the dearth of evidence: a few phone records, a security camera’s image of Devore buying gasoline in Flagstaff, Ariz.; a credit card receipt at a gas station in Fenner, Calif.; a wife’s recollection of final conversations.

It’s like “The X-Files,” they say. Maybe aliens have abducted him. How else to explain why there is no body, no vehicle, no use of a credit card. Still missing are his laptop computer containing a final screenplay, $20,000 in camera equipment, running gear, sunglasses, a diet journal, two large boxes of horse riding equipment and a .44-caliber Colt revolver that he had taken with him for protection.

All anyone knows for sure is that his last phone call on record, placed at 12:38 a.m., came from inside a 25-mile radius near the desert communities of Mojave and Rosamond. He apparently took Highway 58 out of Barstow heading west, leading into Mojave. Logic has it that he would have taken Highway 14 south out of Mojave if he were heading home.

Yet despite an extensive air and ground search, despite help from private eyes, professional trackers, bloodhounds and psychics, and despite public appeals on “America’s Most Wanted” and numerous TV news programs, the mystery of Gary Devore has only deepened with the passing calendar.

“Nothing’s changed,” said Sgt. Mike Burridge, a spokesman for the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department. “I think if anything is unique about this case, it’s that after all the investigative time and all the media attention it received, there is nothing evidentiary-wise to point in any one direction--and that is unusual.”

But things have changed, if not in the case itself, then in the lives of those who were swallowed up in Devore’s disappearance and now yearn for answers.

“It makes me sick,” said Adrien Gordon of Santa Fe. “He’s been one of my closest friends since I was 15. . . . I talked to him once a week. I’m so tired of trying to figure it out.”

“Nobody wants to admit that someone might have died,” said David Thompson of Sacramento, his friend for over a quarter of a century.

“Setting aside the worst of options, there is a part of me that says he has done an Australian walkabout,” Thompson said. “It’s a custom among aborigines. They just disappear off into the bush. You don’t know why they’ve gone off or for how long.”

*

Writer-producer Julia Phillips, who authored the tell-all Hollywood book “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” knew Devore for more than 20 years.

“He was a wonderful human being,” Phillips recalled, the kind of person “you could unload any kind of poison to if you couldn’t reach your shrink or didn’t want to go there anymore.” Now, she feels her friend is dead. “One likes to hope he’s not, although if he showed up now, he’d end up dead because we’d probably kill him!”

He had gone to New Mexico on June 23, 1997, to work on a screenplay for an RKO remake of the 1949 Robert Mitchum robbery caper “The Big Steal.” The remake, which Devore was to direct, was to be set in Panama.

Producer Barry Rosenbush said Devore had already handed in 49 pages of a draft along with an overview of the story he envisioned, but the remainder of the script, contained in Devore’s laptop, is missing along with the computer.

“We have a treatment he wrote, a blueprint, of 25 pages,” Rosenbush said. “Then we have some 40-odd pages of a draft of the script. But with writers, they’ll write lots of different drafts. It’s hard to tell if that was a scratch to get it on paper or where he had gone from that.” In the year that has passed, the producer added, they have had to turn to another writer to develop the script.

Devore had gone to New Mexico to see if he could work through a severe case of writer’s block and had been staying at the ranch of his friend, actress Marsha Mason. Mason declined to be interviewed for this story.

On the night before he left Santa Fe for California, Devore arrived at dinner at the home of Adrien Gordon. His image still haunts her memory.

“When I opened the door and he was standing there, he was so happy to see me,” Gordon recalled. “He had the biggest smile. I always loved his face. He had a huge grin.”

At 5 feet, 11 inches and 185 pounds, Devore was ruggedly handsome with a salt-and-pepper beard. He was 55, but still women adored him. He had been married four times. His wives included Maria Cole, the widow of singer Nat King Cole; Sandie Newton, now a broadcast journalist in Texas; Claudia Christian, an actress who appeared on TV’s sci-fi series “Babylon 5”; and, at the time of his disappearance, Wendy Oates-Devore, a former model from Palm Beach, Fla.

“He was with probably every starlet in the world,” Gordon recalled. “Gary and I were lovers--though not during his marriages--and best of friends throughout our lives. Yet there was never any jealously. There was no ownership kind of thing.”

But Gordon said her friend was a complicated human being.

“Gary had a very secretive side to him,” she said. “I think he was many different people. I think he was very compartmentalized. Part of him was a redneck who liked to drink with cowboys and be with his horse. Part of him was a total womanizer. Gary also had a bad temper. . . . But he was always sweet and lovely with me. He had rough times and depression.”

In the year that has passed, he appears to her in dreams, a big, hunky, wonderful guy. “I feel so blessed I was able to see him that last night,” Gordon said, mentioning the photograph of the two of them dancing at her son’s bar mitzvah. “I have that,” she said. “Sometimes, it’s really painful to look at it.”

Many of his friends say Devore seemed happy and content in the weeks leading up to his disappearance. They noted that he was going to direct the remake of “The Big Steal,” a source of great pride and excitement for a screenwriter.

But Newton, his former wife, who stayed in touch with him over the years, said she had had lunch with him shortly before he went to New Mexico and detected that something was amiss.

“In all fairness, he sometimes represents himself as being OK--he’s a dramatist,” she said. “He may have said to other people, ‘I’m fabulous, I’m great,’ but he had a long history of doubting himself.”

Thompson agreed. “Depression would be a part of his makeup,” he said. “He used to get writer’s block and it would just kill him. He’d just feel this one tool, which was his big tool, was not in his grasp anymore and it wasn’t going to come back. . . . He would berate himself for having lost it.”

In one of his final conversations, he told his current wife, Oates-Devore, that he had “broken the back” of the screenplay he was working on, which she took to mean he had achieved a breakthrough.

Meanwhile, others point out that if Devore did choose to drop from sight, it came only months after his mother’s death from cancer. He had been very close to her, they noted, and would never have vanished had she still been alive. Perhaps this was an opportunity to disappear without worrying his mother, they said.

The passing year has been hard for his wife. Not only was she racked by anxiety and pain, but his disappearance taught her to look at life differently. “You can never be certain of anything,” she said.

For a brief time, she believed authorities suspected her in Devore’s disappearance. Santa Barbara sheriff’s detectives had asked her to take a lie-detector test, but she became ill and the test was never completed. But Burridge said that the test was routine and that she was never a suspect.

Oates-Devore, who met her husband while they were having their hair cut at Cristophe’s in Beverly Hills, has gone on television shows to discuss her husband’s disappearance, without success.

“The only tips we got were from people from the panhandle of Florida, the same people who see flying saucers land in their yards,” she said. “We got a call from one person who said, ‘He’s living next door and here’s his picture.’ He was a potbellied, bald-headed guy. What do they think?! I have less hope than I ever did.”

Oates-Devore also has had to grapple with the financial consequences of her husband’s disappearance. Under California law, a person cannot be declared dead for five years. In the meantime, she has gone to court seeking permission to pay his bills.

“You have to preserve his assets,” Oates-Devore said. “I may sign his name for things, but I don’t decide what bills are to be paid, the court does. It’s not like his wife becomes conservator and, therefore, can get her hands on everything.”

In recent months, Oates-Devore has tried to pick up the threads of her life. An actress who bears a resemblance to Cher, she recently auditioned on “Baywatch” and has been out on three movie-of-the-week auditions. “I’ve had callbacks,” she said. “It will happen.”

“This has been such a horrible personal experience,” she added. “It’s not just that I lost the one I loved, but the behavior of people.”

She recalled sitting inside a Starbucks one day when someone told her that Devore had been miserable in his marriage.

“Why this person chose to say that to me at this time, I don’t know,” Oates-Devore said. “You know what I said to him? ‘Maybe you’re right. I know I was really happy.’ ”

But while Devore’s disappearance has caused people to bond as well as pull away, they all remain mystified by what might have befallen him.

Some of Devore’s acquaintances even entertain the thought that there may have been a CIA connection behind his disappearance.

In the weeks before he vanished, Devore had been calling a longtime friend at the CIA in Langley, Va., asking him questions about the U.S. invasion of Panama, former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega and about Noriega’s involvement in drugs and money-laundering. Devore was basing his action-adventure screenplay on that invasion and wanted to know as much about it as possible for creative purposes.

“I remember talking to him about a lot of elements of Panama and Noriega’s regime and the drug money that Noriega was alleged to have had stashed in safes in his offices and that’s the money that, in [Devore’s] script, soldiers stumble across and steal,” said Chase Brandon, who works in public affairs at CIA headquarters.

“From that, we sort of drifted off and sort of talked about U.S. counter-narcotics programs in general,” Brandon added. “I may have mentioned a couple things about the agency’s role in providing increased U.S. intelligence efforts to provide support to U.S. law enforcement.”

A 26-year veteran operations officer who has “experiences all over Latin America” for the CIA, Brandon said Devore asked if he would like to become a consultant on the movie if it was ever made. “I was considering doing that,” Brandon said.

In a day-planner he left behind, Devore had written down Brandon’s name and phone number frequently in the final weeks before he disappeared. Included was an entry on May 6, 1997, that read:

“Undersecretary for int’l narcotics makers. Chase [the name is crossed out]. Crime and narcotics center. CNC. Largest center in CIA. Espionage agents work with local police, gov’t, etc. Do cover work on problems locals won’t handle. Airfields, burn labs, fuel storage.”

Brandon scoffed at suggestions that Devore was ever a CIA operative or that he may have dropped from sight to go on a mission for the agency.

“I will tell you with no uncertain terms, that is not the case,” Brandon said. “ . . . A lot of people would like to do this work and a lot of people in Hollywood say they do this work, in fact. But Gary was probably not either one of those.”

Brandon, a cousin of actor Tommy Lee Jones, met Devore more than 15 years ago when he and the screenwriter were best men at Jones’ wedding. One of Devore’s first successes was the 1981 film “Back Roads,” starring Jones.

“Gary was very happy,” Brandon said. “He had reached a point where he was about to direct a movie. He was excited about that. The guy had the world by the coattails.

“His disappearance and probable death is just a horrible, horrible thing to come to terms with,” Brandon said. “But I think, in my own sense of what logically happened to Gary, is that he was driving this new high-profile, flashy Ford Explorer with all the package options on it and that is a vehicle that law enforcement people will tell you is a highly sought-after car for carjackers. . . . My sense was Gary was one of those people who met a horrible, tragic quirk of fate. He was simply victimized by people who wanted that car.”

Some of Devore’s friends wrestle with whether to hold a memorial service.

“I’ll probably have a memorial every year on the anniversary of his disappearance,” Phillips said. “My father died three years ago. I talk to my father. . . . If a dead person is important to me, I carry them with me. I know it’s a very retro attitude.”

Others just try and find closure.

“I think about it every day,” said producer Rosenbush. “I wish I knew what happened to him. It’s like one of those emotional ghosts that I’ll carry with me forever.”