Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (37 page)

They took Chris to jail and charged him with reckless driving and evading arrest. A detective with the Culver City Police Department contacted me by phone and wanted to know if Christopher DeHaas worked for me. It seemed fairly obvious that they were referring to Chris Radford, so I confirmed that he did. Shortly after that, Chris called me from the jail and told me the whole story. He explained that he couldn’t trust anyone with his real name as a result of his paranoia.

The reason he was being charged with evading arrest was that a female Culver City police officer had spotted him speeding and went after him. After the accident, he told her that he was evading a suspicious vehicle and in his panic he didn’t know that a police car had begun chasing him. Chris assured me that had he been aware of the police officer’s presence, he would have stopped, but the police officer claimed that he had to know she was in pursuit because her lights and siren were on and that his tailgate window was open, which wasn’t true.

I went to where the wagon was impounded and photographed the tailgate. One side of the window was still held up by the tape, while the other side had broken loose during the crash and was down inside the tailgate. A photo studio made me a life-size photo of the half-open and half-closed tailgate window. During his trial, Chris’s attorney questioned me at great length, particularly about the photo enlargement, which she considered an important piece of evidence. Almost every question she asked me was objected to by the prosecutor, which the judge almost always sustained. They were absolutely determined to shut me up, so my only option was to answer quickly, before any objection was made so the jury could at least hear my statements.

The testimony given by the female police officer was very damaging to Chris. She insisted that the rear window had already been down, even though the photo clearly showed that it was not down until the impact. When questioned about the police report, she admitted that she hadn’t written it. The defense attorney asked if it was her name on the police report and the officer said that it was, but her supervising officer had written the report and even signed her name. It was unimaginable that the judge allowed her testimony to continue after this admission.

I thought for sure the jury would find Chris not guilty, but after a short deliberation it did find him guilty and he was sentenced to three months in the county jail. Ironically, the trial may have been a death sentence for Chris, because some facts about his Howard Hughes investigation came out during his testimony and anyone could have passed along this information.

When Chris was released from jail, my friend Paul Nix agreed to let Chris move into a room in his house until other arrangements were worked out. During this time, Chris called me almost every night with updates on his research efforts, but then his calls abruptly stopped. Paul claimed to have no knowledge of his whereabouts and still had all of his belongings. Despite my efforts to locate him, he was nowhere to be found. It’s now been almost two decades since he last contacted me, so it appears that he’s dead. While his bizarre disappearance doesn’t prove his conspiratorial concerns, it certainly does make me wonder.

During the last decade of his life, Howard Hughes migrated from Las Vegas to the New England area, then to the Caribbean and finally to Acapulco, Mexico, where he occupied the entire top floor of a resort hotel that had all its windows blacked out or covered with aluminum foil. Among other motivations, Hughes was able to avoid state income tax by not being domiciled in any one state for more than the maximum number of days permitted by law. Near the end of his life, Hughes had very little contact with anyone.

Because there was so much speculation about whether Hughes was dead or alive, an influential journalist named James Bacon contacted the Acapulco police department and requested that they conduct an investigation. As the police prepared to raid the place, a Hughes staff member got wind of it and invited them inside. It is doubtful the staff was aware the police would bring a Mexican doctor along, who performed a physical examination of Hughes and insisted he be hospitalized immediately. However, Hughes’s keepers did not hospitalize him as the doctor had requested. As time passed, no one heard anything about his medical condition.

Finally, an EMS company was contacted in Florida to send an air ambulance to bring Hughes back to Texas. Chris had interviewed several people who witnessed the plane’s arrival, which had landed in Acapulco but sat waiting on the tarmac for about five or six hours. Chris believed that Hughes was then on the verge of death, but his people certainly
didn’t want the Mexican authorities stepping in to conduct an investigation. The people Chris had independently interviewed stated that they had observed Hughes being wheeled out on a stretcher, but none of them ever saw him move, implying that only his dead body was placed on the airplane. At the insistence of his keepers, the pilot called in just after they entered Brownsville, Texas, airspace and reported that Howard Hughes had just died, which means he had officially died in the United States.

His body was immediately taken to Methodist Hospital, owned by the Hughes Corporation. Normally, the local coroner’s office would have jurisdiction in any case of this kind, but the coroner was told that a team of forensic pathologists would conduct the autopsy and would prepare a full report with the cause of death. It had been reported that Hughes’s health had been compromised by kidney failure. In an effort to control residual pain from his plane crashes, Hughes took codeine, but suffered complications from its use.

Even more bizarre was that X-rays showed a number of broken hypodermic needles still in his arms. Hughes could have afforded the best health care in the world, but apparently whoever had been giving him injections was not very proficient. It is also possible that he was administering them himself as part of his self-imposed isolation.

The firm handling his estate ordered hundreds of certified copies of his death certificate for the many people who needed them to legally verify his death. In order for me to get a copy of the certificate, it should have been a simple matter of contacting the health department in Harris County, Texas, but this was not to be. Upon my request for this public record, the health department refused to issue it to me, informing me that Hughes’s DC had been red-flagged for twenty-five years, so no one could get a copy until 2001. That was contrary to everything I had come to know in my years in the business.

After contacting the mortuary in Texas that handled Hughes’s private burial, I told the manager that our magazine was planning a series of articles about famous people’s funerals. At first he was hesitant, but he remembered me from years before when I would drop off burial permits at Utter-McKinley’s main office, where he had been working at the time. When offered the option of writing the article himself, he agreed. He even confided in me that they had used a decoy hearse so the press would follow it instead of the unmarked vehicle that was actually used to transport his body for burial.

I followed up with him awhile after we ran the article and asked him to send me a copy of Hughes’s DC, which all mortuaries keep in their files. His demeanor completely changed. In our previous conversation he was quite friendly, but now he said, “Don’t ever call me again. I have nothing more to say to you.”

In 2001, when the twenty-five-year restriction had run out, I was finally able to get a copy of his DC.

Howard Hughes died in 1976, but his death certificate became public only in 2001.

A couple of years after Kathy’s death I had begun dating with no positive results. Then one afternoon while I was getting a DC signed, an older couple came in to the doctor’s office with a beautiful young woman. As they took their seats, I noticed they were speaking Russian. I took several glances at the young lady, but every time she saw me looking at her my eyes went back to the magazine on my lap. Finally, I didn’t look away, and to my surprise, neither did she.

Having been married for thirty years, I wasn’t accustomed to chance encounters, but I retrieved a business card from my wallet and wrote my home number on the back. As I got up to introduce myself, the nurse came out and took her back to see the doctor, accompanied by the elderly gentleman. His wife remained seated, so I figured the next best thing was to go over and talk to her. I asked her if they were Russian, and she said that they were Polish but were speaking Russian for Olga’s sake.

As we continued talking, I told her about my Russian wife and two sons. It turned out that they were not her parents but rather friends of her parents in Moscow, and that she was here on a visitor’s visa. The lady agreed to inform Olga about my dinner invitation. To my surprise, the lady called that night and said Olga had accepted my invitation, so we started seeing each other on a regular basis.

When Olga had first arrived in the U.S., she never planned to become a permanent resident. When it was learned that she spoke Russian and had a college degree in electrical engineering, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena employed her to tutor their engineers in the Russian language. An abundance of people in Southern California spoke Russian, but through her work supervising a power-generating plant in Russia, she was familiar with all the necessary scientific jargon, which the average Russian didn’t know. The people she was tutoring already spoke some Russian so she didn’t have to be fluent in English.

JPL knew that she was a foreign national, so they paid her off the books. Sometimes when I arrived, the lessons were just concluding, at which time a man would pay her cash. If JPL were to have hired a real Russian scientist familiar with all the scientific terminology, it would have been necessary for them to pay much more than the pocket change they were giving her.

After several months of dating, she told me her visa would be expiring soon and she would have to return to Russia. I asked her to marry me, but she declined because she said that she had a difficult disposition. I just kept discussing it with her and she finally agreed, but told me she didn’t want a traditional religious ceremony, so I asked my friend Zeke to officiate for us. He was the Lutheran minister that I had pulled the prank on about blessing the rubber dummy in the casket. His church was in Santa Monica, and he performed our ceremony with Ron acting as my best man for the second time. As we were leaving the church, the first thing Olga wanted to do was to be taken to Westwood Village to see Marilyn Monroe’s crypt, where there was a vase always filled with fresh flowers.

Olga was genuinely surprised about my knowledge of Russian customs and the language. One of my favorite Russian expressions translates to “Don’t draw devils on a blackboard.” That meant it was bad karma to dwell on negative thoughts. Olga had a short fuse and sometimes came
on strong, at which time I told her, “You should change your name to Katyusha,” which was the dreaded Russian multiple rocket launcher. Those feared weapons produced an other-worldly screeching sound as they launched their munitions in rapid succession during World War II. On another occasion, she called me from her cell phone and was complaining loudly about something. I told her to stop acting like Ivan Grozny, which is Russian for “Ivan the Terrible,” and she got a big laugh out of that.

Olga at Marilyn Monroe’s crypt in Westwood Village.

During my attempt to help Olga get her green card, it became obvious that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had its head up its you-know-what. We submitted our forms and a copy of our marriage license, as well as photos from our wedding and honeymoon in Hawaii, but we didn’t receive any correspondence in turn. Following numerous calls, it seemed the INS would not even let me speak to someone without an appointment, which I could only obtain through a written request. After I followed their instructions, they sent a letter to my house addressed to her maiden name, Olga Chernychova, which absolutely infuriated me. After all of the supporting documentation that was sent to them, they wouldn’t even address the letter in her married name.