A New Twist in Neighbors’ Nightmare

To the neighbors, it’s been the horror flick that won’t end. You think three hours is a long movie? How about 15 years?

Every time they thought the story had taken its final twist, it took another.

That’s why last week, when it again seemed certain that the saga must have run its course, Ray Goulette would have none of it.

“We don’t believe it’s over,” he says.

When asked why not, he says, “Because of the way she is.”

Goulette, 68, is talking balefully about his longtime next-door neighbor, 62-year-old Elena Zagustin.

In a story chronicled for years locally and occasionally on national TV, Zagustin is the Cal State Long Beach professor whose Huntington Harbour home has been declared a health and safety hazard.

Last week, when she was supposed to show up to begin serving a 30-day jail sentence, she disappeared.

That Zagustin vanished seemed an almost natural development. It came on the day when, in another moment bordering on the macabre, her home’s new owners allowed neighbors to tour the trash- and insect-ridden house.

Goulette took the tour but says it was only because the new owners invited him, ostensibly to serve as a potential witness on how the place looked before cleanup.

And by late Friday, the house had been cleaned inside and out.

From an upstairs room in his house, Goulette has been able to look out the window for the last 24 years and see Zagustin’s house and yard. Not in 15 years had he seen it like he did Friday.

“All the trash and rubbish is out of the house and the backyard,” he says. “Scraped right down to the dirt.”

I ask Goulette why he thinks neighbors wanted to tour the filthy house.

“I think largely because they’ve seen it on the news,” he says. “They’ve lived next door to it. They don’t really believe it. This was the proof of the pudding.”

Zagustin has been Goulette’s neighbor for 24 years. About 15 years ago, the litter and reports of unsanitary conditions began to surface. Since then, the neighborhood battle has been ongoing.

Along the way, Goulette says, Zagustin unsuccessfully sued him four times, including once for the wrongful death of her father.

Over the years, she has had a number of lawyers and also represented herself. She has sued a lot of others, too, prompting a judge to once tell her: “You can’t sue everyone and disqualify the world.”

But if the story appears to have the elements of farce, it’s never been funny. Neighbors have had to convince people that they aren’t simply going after a pack rat.

Last year, a jury agreed. But earlier this year, a judge gave Zagustin a reprieve from jail. That lasted until June, when she again began accumulating debris.

I ask Goulette if he pities his longtime nemesis.

“Of course,” he says. “Here’s a woman who was brilliant. She had several advanced degrees, speaks four or five languages fluently, had three or four million dollars in assets that I knew of, tenure from Long Beach.

“Today, she has nothing. She’s a fugitive, she’s running. How do you go from all that to nothing?”

The answer lies within Zagustin, but other than denying the various charges over the years and counter-charging her neighbors, she hasn’t revealed it.

If nothing else, Goulette hopes the “lookie-loos,” who always showed up whenever Zagustin made the news, will quit coming around.

“We’ve had a lot of people chide us about mistreating this poor lady, because she’s all alone, old and poor,” Goulette says.

“She’s all alone because she wants to be that way. She certainly isn’t poor. She just sort of wandered off into her own world. She just left the world behind her.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.