CHP Pieces Together Writer’s Final Hours

Disoriented from a dozen hours on the road, screenwriter Gary Devore was driving the wrong direction on the Antelope Valley Freeway before he plunged to his death in the California Aqueduct last year, according to the results of a California Highway Patrol investigation released Friday.

Investigators theorize that Devore, who vanished without a trace more than a year before a tip from an armchair sleuth led detectives to his body, stopped to rest and then entered a freeway offramp instead of an onramp.

Devore was traveling north--away from the presumed destination of his Carpinteria home--in the southbound freeway lanes immediately before the crash, said Ed Gomez, chief of the CHP’s Southern Division.

In that stretch of freeway near Lancaster, he said, there is a paved median leading to an unfenced drop-off into the aqueduct.

“He wouldn’t even have known anything was wrong until all of a sudden he was airborne,” Gomez said.

Devore’s fatigue, Gomez said, was evident because he misdialed his home phone number on several occasions as the hours wore on during his trip home from Santa Fe, N.M.

Coroner’s investigators were unable to determine a specific cause of death because Devore’s body had been submerged more than a year and was badly decomposed, Gomez said.

“It’s just an accident as far as we can see,” he said. “There’s no indication of foul play.”

Gomez said Devore, 55, was probably driving about 70 mph at the time of the accident because his Ford Explorer cleared an embankment along the aqueduct and landed in the middle of the channel. Gomez said the front of the vehicle “disintegrated” and the roof caved in as the Explorer struck the water nose-first.

“Hitting the water at [70 mph] is like hitting a brick wall. That would knock him out,” the chief said. “We think he drowned.”

Gomez noted that Devore’s body was still secured by a seat belt when divers discovered it in July, suggesting that the writer did not try to escape the sinking vehicle.

Members of a CHP investigation team theorize that the crash occurred between 1:20 and 1:35 a.m. June 28, 1997.

That conclusion is based on the fact that Devore’s cell phone, which he had used often to call his wife, Wendy Oates-Devore, on the 900-mile trip, last registered as being on at 1:20 a.m., phone company records showed. Fifteen minutes later it did not register on the cell site nearest the crash’s location.

“Either he turned it off or he was underwater,” Gomez said. “We suspect he was underwater.”

An aqueduct worker found the hood to Devore’s Explorer the day after the crash, but since there was no sign of an accident and such roadside discoveries are common, little attention was paid, Gomez said.

Intensive ground and air searches in the days and weeks after the crash, newspaper accounts and the eventual airing of a segment on the TV program “America’s Most Wanted” yielded no clues.

The break in the case came July 8, when a tip from Douglas Crawford, an unemployed lawyer in San Diego, led authorities to the submerged Explorer, with Devore’s body still in it.

Crawford had read a newspaper article marking the first anniversary of the disappearance and said he was reminded of an Orange County woman who vanished and was later found to have crashed into the California Aqueduct.

He hypothesized that Devore suffered a similar fate and, using information from newspaper articles on the case, set out to retrace the writer’s route.

When Crawford came to where the Antelope Valley Freeway crosses the aqueduct, he crawled down the embankment and began to search the area. There, he said, he found debris from a white Explorer. He told authorities, and divers found Devore’s body a short time later.

After the discovery, Crawford said he feared he had become a suspect in the case. When homicide detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department sought to interview him, he declined and hired a criminal defense lawyer. Crawford found vindication in the CHP’s conclusions.

“I’ll be waiting by the phone for the cops to call me and thank me for doing all their work,” he said.