Shots Fired at Biofem Exec in ‘70s

The biomedical researcher at the center of an investigation into the recent plot to kill his business partner was himself the victim of an attempted murder when he worked at UCLA some 20 years ago, the detective who worked the case said Friday.

Dr. Larry C. Ford avoided serious injury because three cassette tapes tucked into his breast pocket stopped a bullet fired by an assailant who lay in wait for him in a campus parking lot, the detective said.

The assailant fired four more bullets that missed Ford, then a resident gynecologist at the university, before fleeing into the night, said Arthur Longo, a retired detective with the UCLA Police Department.

There were few clues to the shooting, and campus police were never able to determine a motive or identify a possible suspect. Longo said Ford frustrated police by offering little cooperation.

Police, however, did conclude that whoever shot Ford had targeted him.

“It wasn’t a robbery, that’s for sure. There was somebody who wanted to kill him,” Longo said of the attack, which took place in the late 1970s. “The guy upstairs was really looking out for him. . . . Otherwise, he would have been a dead duck.”

Ford’s life has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks as police investigate the attempted murder of his longtime business associate, James Patrick Riley. A masked gunman wounded Riley in the face as the pharmaceutical company executive arrived at the Irvine Spectrum office of Biofem Inc. on Feb. 28.

Three days later, Ford fatally shot himself after police searched his home in connection with the failed assassination. Authorities have charged a Los Angeles businessman with driving a van in which the unidentified gunman fled.

The case has taken increasingly bizarre turns, culminating in the evacuation of more than 200 of Ford’s neighbors a week ago as investigators unearthed illegal weapons from the doctor’s backyard along with jars of unidentified substances.

At UCLA, Ford was well-known as a brilliant though sometimes outspoken student and then resident gynecologist, Longo said.

The doctor had a young family at the time, and the shooting so terrified him and his wife, Diane, that they kept the incident quiet from their children until only a few weeks ago, said family attorney and friend Bill Bollard.

“It was terribly frightening,” Bollard said. “From what she heard from Larry, Diane thought that it was a random incident.”

But police didn’t think so. It was around 11 p.m. when Ford left the UCLA School of Medicine’s facility and headed toward a campus parking lot, Longo said.

He arrived at his car, and the first shot sounded just as he sneezed, Bollard said. As the doctor’s head jerked, the bullet flew past, he added.

Ford turned around. A second shot rang out, and a bullet struck him in his breast pocket. The assailant fired three more times from a .22-caliber pistol. Two bullets struck Ford’s parked car. Another one was never found.

Ford was left alone in the parking lot suffering only a bruise to his chest from where the bullet had thumped the cassettes, Longo said.

Bollard said that detectives pursued a couple of theories without success, including the possibility that a disgruntled patient or a friend of a disgruntled patient might have been responsible.

Longo said that detectives also wondered whether a colleague, either jealous of Ford’s abilities or upset about his sometimes harsh critiques of others, wanted to kill him.

Ford told detectives not to worry about the shooting, that it “was no big deal,” Longo said.

“He really didn’t cooperate as much as we’d have liked him to,” Longo recalled. “That’s why I think that we didn’t get anywhere. . . . It was like pulling teeth.”

deal,” Longo said.