Legend of the Cobra Car Takes a Twist Into Legal Quagmire

About the only fact the friends and relatives of Donna O’Hara can agree upon is that she’s dead. And that a dented blue Cobra Daytona Coupe race car the Sears employee had hidden away for nearly three decades is worth a lot more than it looks.

Somewhere around $4 million, in fact.

But that’s where the agreements end. And the squabbling begins.

In the five months since O’Hara, 56, burned herself to death on a Fullerton horse trail, her friends and relatives have become embroiled in a lawsuit over rival claims to the rare 1964 race car once owned by reclusive music producer Phil Spector.

The dispute includes allegations of a stolen document and lies told, of duplicity and a secret sale in February that sent the car to a private collection in Philadelphia--a distressing development for a nationwide circle of car buffs and high-end collectors, enthralled by the discovery of a machine long believed lost.

“The car’s been missing for 30 years,” said Lynn Park, a Cobra collector from La Canada, who once tried to find the car, known to collectors as the CSX2287. “A lot of people have tried and it was still missing. When it surfaced, it was quite something.”

The story of the missing Cobra, and of the legal fight that has erupted in the wake of O’Hara’s suicide, has more twists and turns than a Grand Prix race course, its arcane details hard to follow and at times hard to believe.

Even for the judge.

“I am going to challenge all of you and ask if you are not making this up,” Orange County Superior Court Judge James P. Gray told an array of lawyers who filed into his courtroom March 6 for a hearing on an injunction over the sale of the car. “This smells from many standpoints.”

Few of those involved in the case will talk, leaving the debate to their lawyers, who along with court records tell a tale that alternates between misguided naivete and willful skulduggery.

And it all begins, innocently enough, with Carroll Shelby, a larger-than-life Texan now living in Bel Air, who built the CSX2287 as the first of six racing coupes that won him a world racing title in 1965.

Shelby himself once tried to buy the car back from O’Hara, but had no better luck than any of the others in persuading her to part with it, let alone admit she had it.

“It’s a very strange, strange thing,” said Shelby, known as much for his brashness as for his cars. “That woman was kooky.”

Shelby, a race-car driver in the ‘50s, began building his Cobras in 1962 through his Shelby American company in Los Angeles. But the original cigar-shaped coupes didn’t have the speed to beat Enzo Ferrari’s Italian speedsters on the international racing circuit.

In 1964, Peter Brock, a Shelby designer, tinkered with the original Cobra design to make it more aerodynamic, closing the roof and dropping the rounded back in favor of a camm, or concave, design, among other alterations.

The new version, the CSX2287, was built at Shelby’s shop near Los Angeles International Airport and ran 20 mph faster than its predecessor--enough of a gain to challenge the fastest cars of the day.

Over the next two racing seasons, the CSX2287 and five subsequent Daytona Coupes won their class in a series of races, including the grueling 12 hours of the Sebring race in Florida. And they brought Shelby American the FIA World Championship--the first American team to win it.

Shelby retired the cars after the 1965 season, and after the CSX2287 set two dozen speed records at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. Shelby hoped the cars’ fame would make them valuable to race buffs, and in December 1965, he sold the CSX2287 for $4,500 to Jim Russell, founder of the Russkits company, which made toy slot-racing cars.

There was little interest, though, in the others.

“They sat around for a couple of years,” Shelby recalled. “We took engines and wheels and transmissions out of them, and they were just laying around. Finally, people started buying them. Some of them went for less than $4,000.”

Russell kept the CSX2287 about a year before selling it to Spector. The sale price is unknown, but Russell had advertised the car for $12,500, said Ned Scudder, historian for the Shelby American Automobile Club, a group of aficionados.

The car was trouble for those who expected to run it on the streets of Los Angeles. Built for high-speed sprints, the cab became uncomfortably warm as the car engine heated up, among other problems.

“It wasn’t a street car; it was a race car,” Shelby said.

Still, Spector drove it on the streets. Scudder said the legend is that Spector racked up so many speeding tickets, his lawyer advised him to get rid of the car before he lost his license.

Park, the collector, said Spector simply grew disenchanted with the CSX2287, which at the time was little more than a novelty.

“It overheats and does all these things wrong,” Park said. “So he took it to a shop to get it fixed and they told him it was going to cost an outrageous amount of money to fix and they offered to scrap it for 800 bucks.”

Attempts to reach Spector for comment were unsuccessful. But lawyers involved in the case said that Spector’s bodyguard, George Brand, offered the music producer $1,000 for the car. It’s unclear how or when Brand passed the car on, but his daughter--Donna O’Hara--wound up with it in the early ‘70s.

Brand now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and is in an Orange County nursing home, said Milford W. Dahl Jr., a family lawyer. Dorothy Brand of San Diego, the bodyguard’s ex-wife, wouldn’t discuss the car or its history.

According to court papers, O’Hara let a childhood friend, Kurt Goss, drive the car occasionally in the early ‘70s, but then took it off the road and put it in storage, where it fell out of public view.

O’Hara was divorced in 1982 and her ex-husband declined comment this week on why she hid the car away. But its elusiveness added to the car’s mystique for collectors. The story of the “lost Cobra” became legend, spawning streams of rumors about its fate. The car had been destroyed. Shelby, himself, had it hidden somewhere.

One of the rumors turned out to be the truth: that the car was sitting unrestored in a Southern California storage facility.

“The other (five) coupes had been accounted for,” said Park, the collector. “This one car, it could never be confirmed where it was. A lady [O’Hara] owned it but she would never confirm its existence. You would go and talk to her and she’d say she’s not interested in talking.”

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In recent years, at least two collectors approached O’Hara.

“She was offered about a half-million,” said Robert Lavoie, a lawyer representing Goss, the childhood friend. “I don’t know why she wouldn’t sell. She told some people she was just going to hold onto it and someday it will be her retirement.”

Exactly who had the right to sell the car lies at the heart of the legal dispute. Goss alleges that on Oct. 17, O’Hara called and asked to meet at her La Habra apartment. She then told him that she wanted to give him the car and three other, less valuable vehicles.

“Donna also indicated that in the unlikely event that anything should happen to her, she wanted me to look after her personal effects,” Goss said in a court statement. He also said O’Hara filled out a state Department of Motor Vehicles form transferring the cars to him, but never filed it.

Yet O’Hara’s cousin, Charles Jones, said in court documents that the DMV form was found by relatives after the death, that the space for listing the recipient of the cars was blank, and that Goss took the form without permission.

Five days after Goss met with O’Hara, the “unlikely event” occurred.

The exact details are sketchy, as are the reasons, but in the dawn hours of Oct. 22, O’Hara huddled in a recessed area beneath a bridge over a Fullerton horse trail, doused herself from a bottle of gasoline, lit a match and descended into agony for the 15 hours or so it took her to die.

Contentious to the end, her first words to a Fullerton police officer who rushed to help her were, “Shut up.” She wouldn’t tell police or hospital officials her name, and it was more than a month before O’Hara’s body was identified. That came only after friends finally reported her missing to La Habra police.

Goss said in his court statement that after he learned of O’Hara’s death, he met with some of O’Hara’s relatives, including her mother, Dorothy Brand. A few days later, he paid the back rent for the Anaheim storage garage where O’Hara had kept the car. But Goss said the manager of the facility told him he could not remove the car without documents proving ownership.

Meanwhile, Martin Eyears, a Montecito rare-car dealer, contacted O’Hara’s boss, hoping to get in touch with O’Hara to revive an earlier offer he had made for the car, according to Eyears’ lawyer, Paul Rafferty.

The boss told Eyears that O’Hara had died and agreed to pass along that he was interested in the car to O’Hara’s mother. Brand called Eyears and on Dec. 16 they struck a deal for $3 million, according to court records. Eyears said that Brand assured him she and her ex-husband were O’Hara’s sole heirs and that she had the right to sell him the car.

Attorney Dahl said this week that since O’Hara died without a will, her parents, as her closest relatives, are the heirs. Among the legal issues to be decided is whether Brand should have submitted O’Hara’s estate to probate--in which the court appoints an overseer for disposing of assets--before the car was sold.

Dahl simultaneously argues that probate was not required in this case, despite the value of the car, and that Brand sold the car out of naivete.

“I think she’s a very unsophisticated and naive lady, who doesn’t have a lot of money” and is unaccustomed to the intricacies of probate and courts, Dahl said.

After striking her deal with Eyears, Brand went on vacation. When she returned, she obtained power of attorney for her ex-husband, filing papers in a San Diego court on Jan. 30, Dahl said. A week later, Eyears paid Brand $3 million and took the car. Eyears, in turn, agreed to sell the car to Steve Volk, president of the nonprofit Shelby American Collection museum in Boulder, Colo., for $3.75 million, then backed out of the deal a few days later, Volk said in court records.

“We have been tracking this particular Cobra coupe for 15 years and were actively bidding on the car when Dorothy surprised all parties with a secret sale,” Volk, who is out of the country, said in an e-mail. “We are still a buyer for the car and are hoping that the sale will be reversed and that the vehicle will be sold to the highest bidder. We . . . are seeking this particular car because of its original condition. We believe it has significant historical value and should be displayed, as is, to the public.”

Eyears eventually sold the car to an East Coast collector for an undisclosed amount. Lawyers identified the new owner as Dr. Frederick Simeone, a Philadelphia neurosurgeon. Simeone did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Goss, meanwhile, said he learned the car had slipped away when another potential buyer told him a rumor was floating among collectors that the car had been taken out of storage and was for sale.

Goss checked the garage and found the car gone.

And now $1 million of the money is gone too. Brand gave $150,000 to three charities and the rest to family members, Dahl said.

On March 6, Gray ordered the remaining $2 million placed in a special interest-bearing account until the convoluted ownership issue can be worked out. A hearing is set for April 17.