“He wasn’t in anyone’s way,” Poll told me, “but for myself I like to have a very private set and it was a closed set from the beginning of the picture, and it was distracting to have photographs taken all the time.”
“Did you ask him to stay off then, or what was the actual conversation?” I asked Poll.
“I am really not interested in sitting on the griddle,” was all Poll answered.
On Thursday, February 8, Sarah saw David Whiting for the next to last time.
“He came into my room that evening and his face was ashen and white, and more sallow than I’ve ever seen it. And he put the script on the bed and he said, ‘I’ve just read it and it’s no good at all. I can’t write anything.’”
After that, nobody remembers seeing David Whiting outside his motel room.
On Friday morning David Whiting called the motel manager to complain about the reception on his TV. He was getting sound but no picture, he said. But when the motel manager came to the door of number 119 to see about getting David his picture back, he found the DO NOT DISTURB card hanging from the doorknob. He kept checking, the manager recalls, but the DO NOT DISTURB sign never came down.
There are indications that David Whiting was trying to get out of Gila Bend. Thursday night he placed a call to a woman in Washington, D.C. He talked to her for eighty-four minutes. They had been engaged once. He had continued to confide in her after he left her behind for Hollywood. That night he told her that “the particular situation there in Gila Bend was over for him,” she recalls. He didn’t sound overjoyed about things, but neither did he sound suicidal, she says. He did say he wanted to see her and talk to her “about this situation in Gila Bend and about him and me.” He talked about flying to Washington to see her.
Two nights later, Saturday night, about an hour before midnight David Whiting received a call from a friend in Beverly Hills. The friend wanted to know if David was going to attend the Directors’ Guild premiere of Lamb Sunday evening. “No,” David told the friend, “Sarah and I think it will be a bummer.”
Nevertheless, David told his friend, he was thinking of leaving Gila Bend for Hollywood sometime in the middle of the next week.
David’s voice sounded slurred that night, the friend recalls.
“It sounds like you’re into a couple of reds,” he told David.
“No,” David replied. “Mandrax.”
BURT REYNOLDS WANTED a massage. It was close to midnight when he returned from the Pink Palomino, picked up his phone, and asked the desk to ring the room of the Japanese masseuse.
Reynolds was staying in room 135. It was in the same single-story block of cubicles as Sarah’s room. The two rooms were no more than six or eight yards apart, almost back to back, in fact. However, as close as they were physically, it was still necessary to go all the way around the buildings to get from one to the other, and going around the building meant passing directly in front of David Whiting’s screened-in bedroom window.
The Japanese masseuse was staying in room 131. Her name was Letsgo (an Americanization of her Japanese first name, Retsuko) Roberts, and she had been summoned to the Travelodge on Friday afternoon to tend to Sarah, who had suffered a bruising fall from a horse. Letsgo and Sarah got along so well that she was plucked from her regular tour of duty at a place called The International Health Spa in Stockdale, Arizona, and installed in a room at the Travelodge.
About midnight on Saturday Letsgo received a phone call from Burt.
He asked her to come over to room 135 and work on him. When Letsgo walked into Burt’s room she found Sarah there, she told me. She had the feeling the two of them had been drinking.
“They were kind of—kind of, you know, not drunk—but kind of happy, you know, after drink,” Letsgo recalls.
Burt, attired in a white terry-cloth dressing gown, proceeded to lie on the bed, and Letsgo proceeded to give him a two-hour massage.
Meanwhile Sarah chatted with Burt. She apologized for leaving he party early with Lee J. Cobb. She told him about an old boyfriend of hers. He told her about an old girl friend of his. Sarah turned on the TV, watched a British film; she ate an apple and banana; she lay down next to Burt on the double bed and dozed off, according to Letsgo.
About two A.M. the masseuse offered to walk Sarah back to her room, but Burt told her he’d see that Sarah got back safely. The masseuse left.
An hour and fifteen minutes later Burt walked Sarah around the back of the building to her room.
Back in his own room, Burt had hardly slipped off his clothes and slipped into bed when the phone rang. It was the nanny. She was saying something about Sarah being beaten up, something about David Whiting. He heard a scream over the phone, Burt told Sergeant Hinderliter the following afternoon. He heard no scream over the phone, Burt testified at the inquest four weeks later.
Scream or no scream, Burt put his clothes back on and headed around the building to Sarah’s room. It was at this moment that the paths of Burt Reynolds and David Whiting may have crossed. David’s violent encounter with Sarah had just come to an end. He ran out of her room just about the time the nanny called Burt for help. If David Whiting was proceeding to his own room while Burt was on his way to Sarah’s, David and Burt might have met in the parking lot at the northwest corner of the building.
When Burt first told the story of the events of that night to Sergeant Hinderliter, he did not mention encountering David Whiting or anyone else on his way to Sarah’s room.
Ten days later in the “Rio Rico tapes” and then again on the witness stand at the inquest—much to the surprise of Sergeant Hinderliter—Burt testified that he did see “someone” as he was heading around that corner.
“It was to my left as I came around…. I saw someone going in the door, and the door slammed very hard behind him…. At the time I didn’t know whose room it was, nor could I identify him since I’m not very good at identifying backs, but it looked like a man, and the door slammed behind him. Later I found out, the next day, that that was David Whiting’s room.
And then, a few minutes later, leading the wounded Sarah back to his own room, something caught Burt’s eye. “As I rounded the corner to go to my room I saw the drapes open and close,” in the window of the same room whose door had slammed behind a man a few minutes ago. There was no light on in the room behind the drapes, he told the inquest, a detail which makes his observation of the moving drapes all the more acute, since the window of that room is well-screened from view by a staircase.
At this point, Sarah testified at the inquest, Burt told her, “If I was not as mature as I am now, I would lay him out.”
The following afternoon, after the body of David Whiting had been discovered, the masseuse heard this story from Sarah. Sarah and Burt were back in Burt’s room. “Mr. Reynolds wanted to go down and fight him, Mr. Whiting, but Sarah, she stopped him….” The masseuse told me. “She told Mr. Reynolds it would cause more trouble.”
Sarah testified that shortly after she arrived at Burt’s room she became worried about the well-being of the man who had beaten her. She told Burt she wanted to call up David Whiting “to see if he was all right.” It was not physical injury she was concerned about, it was injury to David’s feelings, she says. “Because whenever he has hit me he has always been so ashamed afterward, so remorseful….”
But Sarah did not make the call. Burt advised her to “deal with everything in the morning,” and she went to sleep. Had she in fact made that call she might have saved his life.
NOT MUCH IS known of the movements of David Whiting that night. Sarah did give David a call early in the evening to inform him that Burt had invited her to attend the birthday celebration at the Pink Palomino in Ajo. Sarah says she invited David to come along and that David refused. He was in his room at eleven P.M. calling Hollywood. It is reasonable to speculate that he stayed up waiting, as usual, for Sarah’s return. He may have spent these hours peering out from behind his sheltered observation post. In the absence of a
nyone crossing his line of sight, the picture outside his bedroom window consisted of the empty walkway past Sarah’s room and a blank brick wall, the narrow end of the one-story unit containing Sarah’s room.
At night the management of the Gila Bend Travelodge switches on an intense blue spotlight implanted among the dwarf yucca palms which line that blank stucco wall. The blue spot illuminates the sharp green spears of the yucca palms and casts confusingly colored shadows of their fanlike arrays upon the wall, an effect apparently intended to create an air of tropical mystery in the Travelodge parking lot.
If David Whiting had been watching at just the right moment, he might have seen Sarah cross the parking lot from the Travelodge Cocktail Lounge and head toward Burt Reynolds’s room.
Three things are known for sure. Sometime before three thirty A.M. David Whiting entered Sarah Miles’s bedroom. Sometime after she encountered him there, he returned to his own room, where he left bloodstains. And sometime before noon the next day, he returned to Sarah’s room and died.
He had a key to Sarah’s room. “I kept on saying, ‘David, are you taking my keys, because they’re not here anymore,’” Sarah told the inquest. “And he said, ‘I don’t need to take keys. You know me, I can pick a lock.’ He was very proud of the fact that he could pick locks.” Nevertheless a key to Sarah’s room, number 127, was the only item found on him after his death.
The only witness to the goings-on in room 127 was the nanny, Janie Evans. “I think you’ll find that the nanny is the key to this whole thing,” Sarah’s lawyer in the case, Benjamin Lazarow of Tucson, Arizona, told me, as he slipped a tape cassette—one of the “Rio Rico tapes”—into his Sony. “You listen to this cassette with the nanny on it. Listen to how scratchy and worn out it sounds. You know why? It’s because the detectives kept playing it over and over again. They were very interested in the nanny’s story.”
The first thing she saw in room 127 that night, says the nanny, on the tape, was Sarah lying on the floor with David Whiting on top of her bashing her head on the floor. “That’ll teach you!” David was yelling at Sarah, the nanny says. (Ten days before the “Rio Rico tapes,” on the afternoon following the death, the nanny had told Sergeant Hinderliter that Whiting had slapped Sarah, but that she didn’t know if she had actually seen it or not.)
The nanny ran over and tried to pull Whiting off Sarah, she said. She failed, and finally, responding to Sarah’s plea, picked up the phone and called Burt.
When Burt arrived, the nanny returned to her bed in room 126. Twenty minutes later she was dozing off when she heard noises in Sarah’s room. It sounded like someone opening and closing a drawer in there, she says. She called out, “Sarah?” but no one answered. This led her to assume that David Whiting had returned. “I was scared. I mean he had been violent. I didn’t want to see him so I didn’t say anything more.”
She went back to sleep, she says.
After he finished playing the “Rio Rico tapes,” Attorney Lazarow took out a tape he made on his own of an interview with the nanny. At the end of the interview, Lazarow suddenly asked her a peculiar question:
“Did you hit David Whiting over the head with anything?”
She did not, she replied. I wondered what had prompted Lazarow to ask the question in the first place.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lazarow replied. “Maybe I was just trying to shake her, see if there was something she was leaving out of her story. We were trying to figure out how he might have gotten that star-shaped wound, and we figured maybe it happened when the nanny was trying to pull Whiting off Sarah during the fight, but both she and Sarah said no.”
THE STAR-SHAPED wound on the back of David Whiting’s head has yet to be explained away.
An MGM lawyer attempted to explain it away by suggesting that in a fit of rage David Whiting simply smashed the back of his head against a wall. Others suggest that David Whiting was, literally, star struck that night, and that Burt Reynolds was the star. Reynolds has a reputation in Hollywood for an explosive temper and an itch to fight. Before the death, he regaled Gila Bend locals with tales of past punch-outs, adding that he had decided to leave that part of his life behind now that he had become a big star. A woman who knew Reynolds intimately for years told me that he used to blame it on his spleen. His spleen had been removed after a high-school football injury, and ever since then he’d been unable to control his violent temper because, he said, the spleen had something to do with controlling the rush of adrenaline. All of which explains why Reynolds became such an obvious target for suspicion; none of it is evidence.
Spleen or no spleen, if Reynolds had lost control of his temper and given Whiting a beating, it seems likely that the body would show more evidence of violence than it did.
According to Dr. Robert Wright, who performed autopsy number two on the body of David Whiting, the most violent interpretation that can be made from a reading of the marks left upon the body is this: someone grasped Whiting firmly by the shoulders, shook him, and either shoved him back against a wall causing him to hit his head, or threw him down causing him to strike his head on the ground.
State Police crime-lab people found no evidence on either the walls or the bathroom floors of rooms 119, 126, and 127 to suggest that a bloody bashing had taken place in any of those rooms. (The bedroom floors are carpeted.)
The parking lot outside is covered with asphalt. If it happened, it could have happened out there in the parking lot. But a hard rain swept through Gila Bend in the early morning hours of that Sunday. Any bloodstains that might have been left upon the parking-lot asphalt would have been washed away. The mystery of where and how, and by whose hands, if any, David Whiting received his star-shaped wound remains unsolved.
Does it matter? Dr. Wright thinks it matters. Dr. Wright is a forensic pathologist for the Coroner’s Office of the City and County of San Francisco, and a professor of forensic pathology at the University of California Medical Center. He was called upon by Mrs. Campbell, David’s mother, to perform an autopsy after she had the body shipped out of Arizona and installed in the refrigerator of a funeral home in Berkeley, just one day before the third and final session of the inquest.
“The force of the impact to the head,” Dr. Wright declared in his autopsy summary, “could well have caused a temporary loss of consciousness (a brain concussion), and may have caused him to behave in a stuporous fashion, and to be unmindful of his subsequent acts.”
He could have been knocked silly, in other words, and in that state of silliness taken two or three too many pills, killing himself unintentionally. It was a borderline overdose. David Whiting might have been unaware he was crossing the border.
Dr. Wright’s conclusion must, of course, be weighed against the milder conclusion of the original autopsy doctor who had not been selected by the boy’s mother. But his report does give some substance to something the mother said to me in the coffee shop of the Travelodge.
“The horrible part is, severe-intoxication doses of this drug can produce deep coma. And the horrible thing is if these people thought he was dead—the pulse would have been faint—they could have been drunk or high, suppose they didn’t know how to take a pulse—they could have sat around for hours, while his life ebbs away.”
The nanny woke up at seven thirty in the morning, she said. She was very cold. She walked through the connecting door into Sarah’s room and found the outside door wide open to the chill morning air. She shut the outside door and headed back for the inner door into her own room.
The nanny said she never saw a body in the course of this little expedition. When Sergeant Hinderliter came upon the body about twelve thirty he found the legs from the knees down sticking out beyond the end of the dining-room partition. Walking back from closing the outside door that morning, the nanny was walking straight toward the end of the dressing-room partition and, presumably, straight toward the protruding legs of David Whiting. There was light: the lights were still on in the room from the night b
efore. But she was drowsy, the nanny said, and she saw no body.
This means one of three things:
The body was not there.
The body was there and the nanny did not, in fact, see it.
The body was there, dead or alive, the nanny saw it and went back to sleep without reporting it. Or else she reported it to someone, and that someone waited four hours before reporting it to the police.
Which leads to another unresolved question: how long before she reported it did Sarah find the body?
“At one time she told me she went back to her room at eight o’clock in the morning,” Sergeant Hinderliter told me, recalling his interview with Sarah the day of the death. “And the next time she turned around and said it was ten o’clock. I didn’t question her on the time at that time because she was upset, and because at the time of my interview I was just working on a possible drug overdose.”
Eleven days later, in the “Rio Rico tapes,” and then again at the inquest, Sarah said it was around eleven fifteen when she returned to her room and found the body.
SARAH WAS ON the witness stand. The Deputy County Attorney had just led her gently through her account of the death, eliding over any discussion of her stay with Burt Reynolds.
Now came the moment many of those following the case closely had been waiting for. The Deputy County Attorney seemed to be approaching, gently of course, the subject of Sarah’s Sunday-afternoon statement to Sergeant Hinderliter. People wanted to know, for instance, whether Sarah had been slapped or beaten.
“Now, do you remember talking to the policeman that came the next morning?” the Deputy County Attorney asked her, meaning Sergeant Hinderliter, and afternoon, not morning.
“Well, I was terribly shook up the next morning. Do you mean the policeman?”
Yes, said the Deputy County Attorney, he meant the policeman.
The Corpse as Big as the Ritz Page 5