Friends to the End

The old Dodge van with two surfboards on top chugged up steep and winding Corral Canyon Road in Malibu.

It came to a stop where the road dead-ends about five miles above the Pacific Ocean. The land here, a girlfriend had recently told Ian, was once considered sacred ground by the Chumash.

For Ian and his pal Simon, at the wheel of the old van, it was a place to die.

The men’s bodies were found a few hours later, Simon’s in the back of the van, Ian’s slumped in a plastic chair outside. Each man’s body had a revolver at its side and single bullet hole in the head.

They had sat just a few feet apart, facing one another and probably talking for hours, drinking Budweiser and listening to rock ‘n’ roll before doing what they had been thinking of for months.

Music still blared from the van’s speakers when Robert Snapper, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detective, arrived about 9 p.m. May 5.

Snapper, who usually gets straight to the business of assessing a death scene, just stared at this one.

“I’ve been working homicide for 16 years and I’ve never heard of a double suicide like this,” Snapper said in a recent interview.

The detective noted that people who make a pact to kill themselves, and carry it out, are almost always lovers, and there was no sign that the two dead men were anything more than friends.

“It’s just really unique,” Snapper said. “They had to just sit there and go, ‘One. Two. Three . . . ‘ Boom!”

Two small wooden crosses planted on an aloe-covered slope leading down to Surfrider Beach bore only first names: “Simon” and “Ian.”

That’s how most in the beach crowd knew them. Sometime last summer they started showing up almost every day. They parked the yellow van on Pacific Coast Highway right in front of the steps leading down to the beach. They’d carry their longboards into the water and ride waves for hours.

Both men were tanned, handsome and charming. Simon, 50, had a mop of sun-bleached hair and a body still hard from a decade of martial arts. Ian, 36, with a goatee and a toothy smile, was in good shape too, from work as a mason.

“People were just drawn to them,” one friend said.

When they weren’t hanging out at the beach, Simon and Ian were usually at Diedrich coffeehouse or nearby Becker surf shop, both in a strip mall less than a mile away.

Walker Ragsdale, who works at Becker, said the two would come in regularly to ogle the gleaming boards hanging from the walls or just to say hello.

“They were always upbeat, in a good mood,” he said. “Even though they lived out of their van, it seemed like they had a pretty good thing going.”

But like most of their casual acquaintances, Ragsdale didn’t know where Simon and Ian had come from. He didn’t know why they were living out of a van. He didn’t even know their last names.

Simon’s was Kennedy.

Twenty years ago, his life was karate. He held a black belt and became an instructor known for leading grueling practice sessions.

Another passion was art.

Simon’s award-winning paintings and sculptures decorated the homes of sports stars and celebrities, said Damon Duval, his apprentice in Simon’s Santa Monica Studio for most of the 1980s.

Duval said Simon’s artworks sold for as much as $8,000 from San Francisco to Santa Monica.

He sold paintings to then-baseball star Dave Winfield, actor Ralph “Karate Kid” Macchio and others. He also mugged for the camera at art shows with actors Linda Hamilton and Walter Matthau.

Duval said Simon worked in the abstract. Over the years he moved from the use of dull drab tones to vivid colors.

Several friends said the main inspiration for Simon’s work was the wife of an entertainment executive with whom he claimed to have had a decade-long affair.

The woman, whose identity is being withheld to preserve her privacy, denied that she had a romantic relationship with Simon.

“There was a strong, great friendship,” she said. “Nothing else.”

Whether the crumbled romance was real or imagined, Simon told friends it crushed him. He withdrew from life, boarded up his home on Mills Street in Santa Monica and took to hanging out at the city pier.

It was there he met Ian Hickman.

Ian was also trying to forget a woman, friends said. His longtime girlfriend, the mother of his 12-year-old daughter, had left him for a wealthy man. So Ian quit his masonry job, left his home on England’s Isle of Wight and headed for Los Angeles.

Friends of both men said it didn’t take long before Simon and Ian realized they shared a painful bond. They bought a 1975 Dodge van--yellow with a brownish stripe around the middle--and headed for Malibu. Simon drove because Ian didn’t know how.

Last Sept. 17 they showed up at the Malibu Community Labor Exchange Center, a private nonprofit agency in the parking lot of City Hall that matches prospective workers with odd jobs. Registration forms they were required to fill out to get work asked for their current addresses. Both men wrote: “Staying in own van.”

Oscar Mondragon, who runs the job center, said the pair quickly made an impression. “Hard workers, both of them,” Mondragon said. “People would always call and say, ‘My God, these guys did a great job.’ ”

Mondragon said the two seemed inseparable. “If there was a job for one of them, they would always go together--even if they drew half a wage,” he said. “They were a team.”

It wasn’t until he’d gotten to know the two men, Mondragon said, that they told him of the failed relationships they were suffering and of how they were planning to cope with the pain.

“They came to Malibu to get away from the world--I mean literally speaking,” Mondragon said. “They told me frankly that they came here to kill themselves. They had a pact.”

When she’s not teaching sign language at a local elementary school, Vicki Krupansky is a surfing instructor at Surfrider Beach.

One day last summer, when the ocean was too flat for surfing, Krupansky found the nerve to approach the two guys she’d often see riding their longboards or just hanging out by their yellow van--guys that for some reason Krupansky felt drawn to.

She asked Simon and Ian if they wanted to join her for a leisurely paddle out around Malibu Pier. “We formed this kind of automatic friendship,” she said.

Soon after, Ian began helping her with the surfing school, and the two began to date. They would surf together, go skateboarding and have long talks. She’d take him hiking on the trails she’d been told wound through the sacred lands of the Chumash. “He made me feel so loved,” Krupansky said. “I never felt so unconditionally loved.”

Besides being handsome and charming, Ian had another attribute that was attractive to the single mother of 10-year-old twin girls. “Kids were just drawn to him. He was just like this magnet,” she said.

But Krupansky, 36, said her hopes for a long-term relationship with Ian began to fade. She said she understood his pain over the broken relationship with his longtime girlfriend. Even though Ian had confided to her that he was thinking of killing himself, she said she didn’t think he would do it.

She was more troubled, she said, by the deepening bond between Ian and Simon, a bond that at times seemed without limits. “Sometimes when Simon and Ian would get out of the water after surfing, Simon would say, ‘That’s it. I’m killing myself today. Not just me, but you,’ ” Krupansky said. “And Ian was very loyal to Simon . . . he relied totally on Simon.”

Krupansky said she gave Ian and Simon self-help books and encouraged them to seek professional help. For a short while, she said, it seemed as though things were getting better.

But then the pair suffered a series of setbacks, beginning this spring.

Simon hurt his knee in a surfing accident. This left him unable to surf, and effectively left both of them out of work: Ian didn’t know how to drive and Simon refused to drive to a job and then let Ian work alone.

Next there was a fracas with some younger surfers over a couple of missing wetsuits. Krupansky and others said the younger surfers falsely accused Simon and Ian of stealing them and threatened to kill them and burn their van if they didn’t leave the beach.

Finally, Krupansky said, she told Ian she thought they should take a break in their relationship.

“I wanted him to get it together more,” she said.

The woman hadn’t seen Simon in at least three years. She knew he’d been spreading rumors that they’d been lovers. She said he even tried to sell his story to the tabloids, but the papers didn’t bite.

Still, she was happy to see him when he and Ian arrived on her doorstep in Santa Barbara in April.

“I knew he was suffering . . . to be saying the things he was saying,” she said, beginning to cry.

The woman, who grew up with Simon in Silver Lake, said she believes he battled depression over the years and that he concocted the affair and breakup to give him a reason to kill himself.

“I think he had to justify what he was doing to himself,” she said.

She said that Simon’s behavior could be infuriating, but his charm and big heart made it impossible to stay mad.

She said she offered to seek professional help for Simon and Ian, and to give them money and buy them a new van when she saw them in April.

“But what I was saying was stuff they just did not want to hear,” she said.

“They were tired. They were beaten down. They said some people were just not meant for this life,” she said. “I just didn’t think they would do it.”

Vicki Krupansky woke up in the middle of the night and saw light coming from the kitchen. She found Ian sitting at the table, writing a letter to his parents.

He had just returned from the short trip to Santa Barbara. Ian told Vicki it had been a big step for Simon, who had not been able to so much as utter the woman’s name since their relationship ended.

Despite her kindness, and offer to help, Ian told Krupansky that Simon grew even more depressed at seeing her and not being able to be with her.

He now seemed inconsolable.

Sitting in the kitchen, Ian asked Krupansky for some money he had earlier asked her to hold. He wanted to send it to his daughter in England, he told her.

The next morning, Ian told Krupansky he had to go meet Simon in Santa Monica, that the two had decided to go to Hawaii.

“This is the last time I’ll see you,” he said.

Krupansky protested, saying that she’d love to come for a visit in the islands.

Ian paused, unsure how to respond. Then he looked her in the eyes.

“We’re not going to Hawaii,” he confided. “We ordered the guns. They come in tomorrow.”

Krupansky said she thought about calling 911, but what would she tell the operator? A man was planning to kill himself--where and when she didn’t know.

“I knew in my heart there was nothing I could do,” she said.

In the end, there was no note explaining why.

The closest thing was a telephone message left for a friend from the beach. The friend, who asked not to be named, said both Simon and Ian spoke into his pager’s answering machine, leaving a slightly slurred message he wouldn’t hear until it was too late.

“It’s time for us to go now,” one of the voices said. “Have a nice life.”