Inside his own head, Jeffrey Alan Lash was a secret government operative under constant surveillance by the US CIA, the US FBI or both.
He spent lavishly to build up an arsenal of 1,200 firearms, nearly 6 tonnes of ammunition and bomb-making materials, which he piled high in every room of the small condominium he shared with his fiancee in a well-heeled hillside enclave high above the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles.
He had 12 cars, including one reported to be bulletproof and worth about US$100,000.
When he and his fiancee went to dinner at a local Italian restaurant, they traveled in separate cars and always paid in cash.
Any time Lash saw a camera, he would get upset. He told people his name was Bob Smith. Then he died, and things got truly strange.
Police in Los Angeles have spent several days figuring out why Lash’s body ended up in a car outside his house and was left to decompose for almost two weeks. They found it on Saturday last week — not because of a tip-off from neighbors, who appear to have been oblivious throughout, but because a lawyer representing his fiancee gave them a call.
They also deployed a bomb squad and chemical experts in hazmat suits to go through his vast arsenal of weapons and explosives — all of it apparently acquired legally and left untouched.
Some chemicals were too unstable to transport, so the police blew them up. The tentative conclusion is that Lash was a rich eccentric so caught up in his make-believe world of spying that he had his fiancee, Catherine Nebron-Gorin, convinced it was real.
When he was diagnosed with cancer a year ago, he reportedly told her it was the result of chemical weapons exposure on an old mission.
On July 3, the couple and a friend were shopping at a supermarket when Lash became unwell and died in the outdoor parking lot.
Nebron-Gorin later told a friend she had specific instructions from Lash on what to do if he died. Do not call the authorities, leave him in a car, get out of town and let his minders take care of the body. So she did that.
The friend, a doctor who did not want to be named, told the Palisadian Post newspaper he spent 90 minutes trying to revive Lash in the passenger seat of a sports utility vehicle outside Lash’s house on the night he died as Nebron-Gorin was “wailing and grieving.”
Nebron-Gorin left for Oregon and when she returned she was stunned to see Lash’s body where she had previously left it. She called a high-profile criminal defense lawyer, Harland Braun, whose previous clients have included Dennis Rodman, Roseanne Barr, Gary Busey and Robert Blake, the actor eventually acquitted of murdering his wife in circumstances almost as bizarre as the Lash case.
Braun told the police about the body and warned them the house was stuffed with weapons. And the police immediately evacuated the neighborhood.
Braun said he doubted the story about working for the government was true.
“Whether he really was working undercover for some government agency or not,” Braun told the Palisadian Post, “he was convinced he was and he had my client convinced.”
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