Screenplay by Hunt, Phillips, Buckley & Chance
The coroner went on to declare the cause and manner of DeVore's death to be "unknown", but police eventually reached the tentative conclusion that the screenwriter's death was an accident: he had fallen asleep at the wheel, they said, before careening off the highway and into the water, where he drowned. But loose ends remain: DeVore's laptop computer containing his unfinished script was missing from his vehicle, as was the gun he customarily carried on long trips; after his disappearance, a CIA representative allegedly showed up at DeVore's house to request access to his computer; Hollywood private investigator Don Crutchfield noted that previous drafts of DeVore's script were inexplicably wiped from said computer during the same timeframe; police claimed that DeVore's vehicle careened off the highway, yet DeVore's widow was troubled by the absence of visible damage to the guardrail at the scene of the alleged accident; and how come no one noticed an SUV sitting in the water beneath a busy highway for a whole year? Perhaps the whole incident is too like a conspiracy movie to be a real conspiracy - but many remain troubled by De Vore's death.
Screenwriters wife seeks answers in his mysterious death
http://articles.cnn.com/1998-07-15/enter...PM:SHOWBIZ
A Chance Encounter or "horrible, tragic quirk of fate"
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/John...y/CBD.html
"Indecent Exposure"
The raw material for a true-life CIA classic already exists in the life and untimely death of Hollywood scriptwriter Gary Devore (The Dogs of War, Raw Deal). In the early morning hours of June 28, 1997, Devore drove his SUV off the highway near Palmdale, California, plunged into the California Aqueduct and drowned, Chappaquiddick-style. It wasn't a blowout. He didn't nod off at the wheel. Shortly before the fatal plunge, Devore bragged to his wife by cell phone that he was wide awake, riding on "adrenaline" because he was hard at work on the final draft of Solo, a film script about the military occupation of Panama, and was headed for their beach home in Santa Barbara to complete it. The body would not be found for over a year.
In the meantime, his disappearance summoned up a multitude of conspiracy theories, including CIA assassination. Wendy Devore, his wife, still considers this the most likely explanation and ignores the snickers of the press. Her husband wrote spy thrillers for the screen and had intelligence contacts. Police found a surveillance wire hidden in a bedroom drawer. Devore disappeared in the Antelope Valley, on the outskirts of Palmdale, a CIA enclave. And shortly after the writer went missing, the Agency's Chase Brandon popped up at the house to request private access to the scriptwriter's office and computer -- as though the spook had good reason to believe that Devore, then officially a missing person, was dead. (Ivor Davis and Sally Ogle Davis, "Disappearing Act: A Big Comeback...A Big Mystery," E-Online,
http://www.eonline.com/Features/Specials/Screenwriter/Three/index3.html)
In July, 1998 Devore's Explorer was hauled from the aqueduct. The driver's window was down. "He must have been unconscious when he hit the water," she told reporters. "Otherwise, if the window was open, why couldn't he get out?" From the start, police have refused, despite Wendy's pleas, to investigate the case properly.
The Los Angeles Times reported on June 29, 1998 that Devore made frequent calls over a period of several weeks before vanishing to "a longtime friend," Chase Brandon, "at the CIA in Langley, Va., to ask him about the U.S. invasion of Panama, former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega and about Noriega's involvement in drugs and money-laundering." Brandon: "I remember talking to him about a lot of elements of Panama and Noriega's regime and the drug money that Noriega was alleged to have had stashed in safes in his offices and that's the money that, in his script [Solo], soldiers stumble across and steal. From that, we sort of drifted off and sort of talked about U.S. counter-narcotics programs in general. I may have mentioned a couple things about the agency's role in providing increased U.S. intelligence efforts to provide support to U.S. law enforcement."
On May 6, 1997, Devore made a note in his day-planner: "Undersecretary for int'l narcotics makers. Chase [name crossed out]. Crime and Narcotics Center. CNC. Largest center in CIA. Espionage agents work with local police, gov't, etc. Do cover work on problems locals won't handle. Airfields, burn labs, fuel storage."
Chase Brandon snickers at conspiracy theories, but offered the Times one of his own: "Gary was one of those people who met a horrible, tragic quirk of fate. He was simply victimized by people who wanted that car." (Robert W. Welkos, "Without a Trace," Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1998.) A conspiracy to steal a moving automobile on an open highway. Case closed. Then again, as filmmaker Barbara Trent (The Panama Deception) pointed out to The Colorado Daily last year, a CIA spokesman is "paid a lot of money to lie. I mean, how many times do we have to learn that lesson?" (Terje Langeland, "Filmmaker to speak on media deception," Colorado Daily, January 27, 2000,
http://www.empowermentproject.org/codaily.htm) Gary Devore's death remains a mystery.