May 19, 2021 • 49 mins
In some ways, Jeffrey Alan Lash's story begins after his death, when his body was found decomposing in a parked SUV on Palisades Drive -- but as investigators looked further into the case, they learned increasingly bizarre and troubling things. Was Lash a gunrunner? A criminal on the lam? An operative for a top-secret government agency? An alien hybrid? Tune in to learn more about this mysterious case in part one of this two-part episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer set the Shadow, Nicholas Johnson. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Today we're sort of talking about
spies according to some people, one in particular, and whenever
(00:49):
we examine the world of spies, we have to realize
that the life of a spy is so offten glamorized
in the world of fiction, like either the phrase spy
or sespecially secret agent. A lot of people immediately think
of James Bond, who we have already I think, uh
very clearly established, is a terrible example of how to
(01:10):
be a spy. He's day drunk, uses his real name,
says it at every opportunity. His ops set is terrible.
Real spies are nowhere near as glamorous as James Bond.
You know, they run the gamut in appearance, socio economic
level motivation. Some are in it for money, some are
being blackmailed, you know, the Russian technique of compromat, and
(01:34):
some really believe in a particular ideology. Some people really,
you know, if the spy masters are doing their job right.
Some operatives aren't even sure who they're working for. And
this leads us through the strange, strange twisting tale of
a man named Jeffrey Alan lash and full to spos. Really,
(01:54):
I really thought you were going to say Ben Bolan, okay,
uh own to be Matt. This is this We wanted
to say, heads up, this may end up being a
two part episode because there is a lot to this
story and they're gonna be some surprising things the story
as well. We're we're not going to approach this in
(02:17):
a linear way either. There's a bit of a pastiche approach.
So our story really begins with Jeffrey's death. Here are
the facts. In the summer of the police were called
to a residence in the Pacific Palisades Um, a particularly
(02:39):
posh neighborhood in Los Angeles. Residents in that area were
concerned because they've noticed a seemingly abandoned suv that was
parked in the same exact spot for two weeks, and
then the police received a call. Like we said, there
were some concerned citizens that saw this abandoned car um
(02:59):
and that led to a search where authorities found a
corpse inside the suv and began setting out to piece
together you know what could have happened to lead to
this man being in this in this suv in this
very fancy neighborhood. Oh and it's a twisted story. It
is a very weird way that they even got to
(03:20):
that suv in the first place. This is just to
put this out there. In the same neighborhood, you've got
like real Hollywood elite. We're talking your Reese Witherspoons and
what was it According to the Hollywood Reporter that there's
one other person mentioned, J. J. Abrams, who is not,
so far as we know, related to this case buy
(03:43):
anything other than geography. So part of our mission here
at the front is to clear the name of Reese
and j J. You're welcome, welcome, They're big fans of
the show. So yeah, this is not a neighborhood where
this sort of stuff ever happens. And as we'll find,
the neighbors grow increasingly obsessed with the story. Astute listeners,
(04:09):
you'll note that we're talking about a body being in
a sealed car, wrapped in blankets for two weeks during
the height of summer, so the decay is extensive here.
The corpse is no longer one that you could easily identify,
probably by just looking at um where the face used
(04:29):
to be. They eventually do identify this man. Uh. He
is a man known to neighbors in the area as
Bob Smith. That is not his real name. His real
name is Jeffrey Allen Lash. And he turns out he
is living at a townhouse or was living in a
townhouse just up the street. So the investigator's head to
(04:52):
the condo, and in the condo they find um. You
know how, for anybody who's a fan video games, sometimes
you'll be playing a game and you'll burst into like
a secret room and you'll find this cash of all
this cool stuff, you know, med kids or health potions,
depending on the genre, cool weapons, spells, stuff like that.
(05:15):
That's what they find in this In this still missile,
they find so many guns, more than twelve hundred, Like yeah,
not trash guns either, like high end pistols, shotguns, rifles.
All in all, lawyers later estimate, and their estimation does
become important here. Lawyers later estimate there's about five million
(05:39):
dollars worth of guns. And you may think, well, maybe
this person is just a gun collector, right, maybe they
go to these guns shows and and sell guns or
something like that. It's just the guns, right, Oh no, no, no, no,
there was also ammo. Yeah, exactly, around six and a
half tons and a little more than two hundred thousand
(06:02):
dollars in cash. Two thirty thousand dollars in cash, not
to mention like some serious you know, uh like doomsday
kind of weaponry, right, like bows and arrows and knives.
And then you had models of bears and lions that
were used as shooting targets. You know, you always get
(06:24):
in these situations, right, It's important to be prepared. Quick
note about that two thirty grand Those were an older bills,
which is an interesting detail. Uh so these weren't like,
you know, bills printed in the twenty tens or something.
They were from the eighties, from the nineteen eighties. So
we've been sitting on them for a while, And is
(06:46):
that maybe indicated Well, I see what you're saying. But
it's also like it could mean they were from various
sources and could have been like drug money or some
sort of illegal income stream. Well, we don't have to
get into it yet, but for my money, that was
the dash that Jeffrey Allen Lash had since the eighties.
That's my this is my belief, the Lash dash. Yes,
(07:09):
the last dash. Uh not not facial hair in this
in this case, but yeah, he was more of a
beard guy. He had a he had kind of a
light salt and pepper beard at the time of his demise.
So the police are freaking out. They also find a
bunch of explosives. And imagine, if you are one of
(07:30):
the well healed residents of this neighborhood, you might have
noticed the weird car. But as we'll see, you are
already very familiar with weird cars. If you live in
this neighborhood and and you you walk out one day
and it looks like one of those scenes from ET
where the government agents shut down the house, their police everywhere.
(07:52):
Some of them are weirdly enough, wearing overalls. There's also
a bomb squad. Actually had to evacuate quite a few
of the residents, right, Yeah, they had to take. This
was has matt Level territory, and they were going through
this huge arsenal weapons and explosives, and they have to
do it really carefully because it's not uncommon for people
(08:14):
who have collections like this to also have some safeguards.
You know, maybe not lethal stuff, but you never know
until you're until you're in the thick of it. And
the one thing that baffled them about this is this
massive amount of guns. This guy's lying to neighbors about
his names. But all the guns are clean, and we'll
(08:35):
have to reiterate this again, but this is important. All
the guns are clean, none of them are dirty. They
all have serial numbers. They were purchased legally over time.
But some of these chemicals, these explosives are just too
unstable to transport. So the police shrug and they're like, uh,
we have to explode these. We have to have a party.
(08:58):
And there's so they're literally folks who were not being hyperbolic.
They're literally so many firearms. There's so much stuff in
here that it took the police days to move everything,
and they were moving at truckloads at a time, and
everybody at this point, neighbors, police, reporters, with a good
(09:21):
bloodhound knows for weird stories. Everybody is wondering what the
hell is going on? What happens here exactly? Just a
quick note before we move on, there are a bunch
of pictures that you can see of everything we're describing.
Describing here, there there was I think at least one
reporter who lived right in the area or a photographer
for a news outlet who lived in the area who
(09:42):
was snapping shots of all of this while it's going down.
And there's one shot, at least according to freelancer who
wrote for Playboy, there's a picture of that cash we mentioned,
the older bills laid out on a table in a garage.
There were so many guns and other things that they
we're dealing with at the actual house. They had to
go to a neighbor's house and garage to do the
(10:05):
money counting in a bunch of other sorting of materials
was just like the effort to catalog all this stuff
probably would have been massive. Yeah. So yeah, But but
like you said, Ben, what the hell happened? What happened?
What happened? Yeah, police are trying to piece together how
this dead man ended up in an abandoned vehicle wrapped
(10:27):
in blankets. It's not something you do after you die
for yourself. And they were trying to figure out why
he had so many weapons, how he got them. This
is this is a real bummer for some of the
cops because they have to go back and essentially do
a background check on each and every firearm. So that's
(10:49):
somebody's horrible job for the next However, log it's not
just one night. And neighbors are you know, neighbors are
flocking around while they can and they're saying, uh, they're
talking to the police about about this guy, and they're like, oh, yeah,
that's Bob Skinny, Bob Bob Smith. He's interesting. He's got
(11:13):
an intense dude. He's really into guns. Uh. And he
said he worked for you guys, well for the FBI
or the CIA, and I'm not sure. Say the neighbors
and the police are thinking, okay, well that's something because
if they work for the FBI, we will be able
(11:35):
to tell, right, We'll be able to find, we'll be
able to verify that. And then we pulled some just
some statements from neighbors because you can tell that there
like now, this is the number one mystery in the neighborhood,
because again, this doesn't happen in an area like this.
(11:56):
One neighbor said, he'll say crazy things to people, like
he does night missions swimming to Catalina, and he would
he would come and he would tell us that he
was going to show us his self defense moves, which
has such big like Mac energy from Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
I don't know, Ben, I'm just it's got a little
(12:17):
bit of Ben bowl and energy too. I know you
love a good night walk, so a night mession seems
right up your alley. But I'm not teaching people martial
arts swimming. You've taught me some good power moves in
the past, like the elbow grab. You know, I thought
wants the same as martial arts. Thanks, but yeah, it's
the key is it's arrest. It's just it's it's such
(12:37):
a weird thing to do. Graze exactly exactly. So then
we have a new new character in this scene. These
are all just the facts, by the way, This is
why this might end up being a two partner. So
shortly after the investigation hits the press, there's a guy
(12:59):
named Harland Braun. He's an attorney. He's representing a woman
named Katherine Nebron or Katherine Nebron Goren. This attorney comes
forward and he says, look, I'm representing Nebron Goren. She
is Jeffrey Allen Lash's fiance, and I contacted the police
(13:19):
on her behalf to tell tell everyone where to find
the body. And I also wanted to alert them to
the massive amount of weaponry at this residence because he
was concerned. Now, Braun is an interesting character. He is
a veteran criminal defense attorney for people in the audience
(13:40):
who care about celebrities. You might recognize him from his
work with Dennis Rodman, Roseanne bar Gary Busey, and perhaps
was infamously Robert Blake. So he's he's heard a lot
of war stories, you know what I mean. He is
in the true crime world. But even for broad this
(14:01):
story Catherine is telling them is down right bizarre. You
know what I think? Maybe we should hold that info,
that bombshell for a quick word for our sponsor. They'll
be right back. Good call, Let's build a tension a
little bit. All right, we're back. Here's the scoop. Here's
(14:23):
what you're hearing. If you're one of the police officers,
who's stuck on this case. So Lash told his fiance
that he was an undercover operative for a top secret
government agency and that as a result of his work,
he and she and everyone they interacted with were under
(14:44):
surveillance constantly by the same agency that he was working for.
So this mystifies the lawyer Broad And this is, by
the way, not the whole story yet, because we're still
in the realm of the facts. This mystifies Broad And
he says, you know, the problem here is that the
truth may be unbelievable. She meaning Katherine, will talk to
(15:06):
l A p d. But would anybody believe it? Does
she really believe it? Did he really believe it? These
are the questions, folks, These are the questions. It was
going one way or another. It was gonna be a
long night at the police station. It was gonna be
a series of long nights at the police station. They
had to answer several questions. Who was Jeffrey Alllett Lash,
(15:29):
Who did he actually work for? How did he die?
Here's where it gets crazy. So, according to this fiance,
Nebron Goren, Lash and his friend were shopping at a
farmer's market on will Shore Boulevard in Santa Monica on
the fourth of July, when Lash started to feel some
(15:50):
kind of nasty symptoms. He was feeling hot and sick
um in the parking lot um and as Braun told
the l A Times, the group tried to cool Lash
out with some ice, but he passed away. Yeah, I
believe there was. It was dry ice as well, like
that they were trying to use, like they were trying
to very quickly cool him down. They were called a
(16:11):
doctor on the scene. To a REKA practitioner, this is unusual, right,
we're thinking the report's very I found one one report
I think we we all read where this They said
this occurred on July three instead of fourth, but it
was it was around this time. It was like the
first week of July, and you're wondering, well, I've been
(16:34):
in situations where one of my friends isn't feeling well
or they're injured or something. I know what to do.
I would call paramedics, or if you live in the US,
where most people try to avoid an ambulance ride, you
would drive them to the hospital. But due to their
(16:55):
belief that Lash is a spy and more than a spy, uh,
they held off. He had given his close associates explicit
instructions on day to day life, like with Nebron Gore,
and he was kind of running her life. And he
was doing this with a couple of different people, and
(17:16):
he would say, you know, very cryptic things like don't ever,
he didn't want a paper trail of any sorts. You
didn't want to be involved with the authorities. He had
earlier before his death damaged four cards in an accident
and was adamant that no one contact insurance companies, no
one report anything. And the next day he came back
(17:39):
and he paid the owners of all four of those
damaged vehicles in cash baller. But but they they knew,
and they were to a degree they were afraid of Lash.
That's very important, so they did not haul the paramedics.
They called this doctor who was a friend. And then
he later told the Low paper that he spent ninety
(18:01):
minutes trying to revive Lash in the passenger seat of
this SUV while nebron Gore in his outside in parking
lot freaking out. Yea, he confirmed who that friend was.
The stuff I was reading, nobody had identified the friend
who was a doctor. Apparently, they called the mother of
(18:22):
an employee of Nebron Goren who we will meet shortly. Okay, okay,
got you. And it's true. The fiancee UM supposedly was
you know, in shock and grieving and you know, openly
weeping UM and didn't know what to do with the body,
but assumed, based on what she did know that the agency,
(18:44):
whatever a named agency this might be UM was watching
at all times UH and would potentially come for him,
come for the body, knowing that he had died. And
she later told a friend that um Lash had actually
left very specific instructions on what to do, and the
first rule of what to do when this guy died
(19:07):
was don't call the authorities and leave him in the
car wrapped in blankets and get the hell out of
town and let his UH handlers or minders take care
of the body. Which I don't know, like this seems
unusual in general for any kind of spiker. What I mean, like,
if you if you're just like living a civilian life
or maybe you're under cover, I guess, like, is there
(19:30):
really instructions on what to do with your body if
you die of natural causes? I would say, uh, no,
not necessarily. What I would say is in this specific case,
with this specific individual, there may have been a reason
why Jeffrey either believed that an authority would want his body,
(19:50):
or he had convinced somebody that an authority might want
his body for a very specific reason that I don't
want to spoil right now, or maybe he had convinced
himself of this. It seems they're like they're i'd be
a little bit this guy might have been a little
little kookie. Yeah, it's it's quite possible that we're looking
at a Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's court moments. That's
(20:11):
the Mark Twain book, where a cartoonish stereotype of a
Yankee based on Mark Twain's opinions at the time. Somehow
time travels back to Camelot and there's this, without spoiling
too much of it because it's brilliantly written, there's this
moment where this Yankee guy is in King Arthur's court
(20:31):
and he meets Merlin and he has this realization where
he says, uh, he says, holy, this guy thinks he's
a real magician, even though he obviously it is not.
So there's like, yeah, there may be some self delusion
going on there, and that's a really good point that
also comes into play in a big way or it
(20:51):
leaves us some big questions. But to answer that original question, um, no, yes,
depending on sircumstances, there will be processes for handling or
disposing a body if the disposing of a body of
things go south. But the issue here is that unless
somebody is somehow in on an operation or an initiative,
(21:17):
you probably if you're a spy, you probably wouldn't tell them, right,
You wouldn't tell them anything because you don't want to
be my spooky government friend. You want to be you know,
your local neighborhood. Yeah. So it does sound weird though
the way you recount it, because it sounds really specific.
(21:39):
And she does this. Whatever he has told her, she
has digested it, she believes it. So she leaves his body,
dips off to Oregon with an employee of hers who
is an assistant, and they're gone for about a week
and a half, two weeks, letting things blow over. They
(22:03):
come back and they're they're over, you know, they're at
the Palisades, and they say, and then Katherine is thinking,
holy smokes, this vehicle is still here. It's in the
same spot. How long is it gonna take his you know,
people or whatever they are to pick him up. Let's
(22:24):
let's leave it. Let's leave it right there, because now
we have to start asking ourselves. Hold on, rewind, who
is Jeffrey Allen Lash? Most immediately, how did he actually die?
He just got hot, He got hot to death. And
why on earth do they use dry eye to try
and cool him down? That's an odd flex as well. Well,
(22:46):
I mean it was just the cooling effect is I
don't think you would use regular ice, so you can
actually put it directly in contact with the skin. Dry
ice burns if you put it on your skin. That's
why they needed the blankets. No, come on, excuse me.
So okay, So there was more going on with lashes
(23:10):
body and his health than was immediately known. So according
to Los Angeles Police Deputy Chief Kirk Albany's uh, he said,
detectives didn't believe, at least after they examined the body,
even though it was in a state of decay, they
didn't believe that he had died from foul play of
any kind, at least initially. That's what they believed, That's
(23:30):
what they observed. Um This Deputy chief also said that
the man was suffering from end stage cancer. So there's
a reason why, you know, just being hot could have
been a problem. There's a reason why maybe his body
was overheating. He was. He was going through it for real,
and doesn't appear to have been undergoing chemotherapy or some
(23:54):
of the other treatments, uh, you know, because chemotherapy would
have noticeable visual effects on the body. Yeah, he was.
They were going a different route according to much of
the reporting. What we would learn later, he was eating
a very specific diet, taking some supplements and some other things.
You know. I actually had a piano teacher um when
I was younger, who had UH this type of cancer,
(24:16):
and she did the same thing. She ate lots of
UH foods that were high in certain nutrients, and she
ate a lot of carrots, and it actually was I
remember her remarking on it, and I noticed she was
eating so many carrots and her skin actually took on
this kind of orange ish hue. But she did that
completely in place of more traditional I guess, you know,
(24:36):
Western remedies. Yeah. I mean, that's a true that's a
true story. That's a real thing that can happen if
you eat enough carrots, your your skin will start to show.
Jeffrey Alan Lash seemed to be more of a raw
meat juices guy at this point. But but you're You're right,
you know, And it's it's an understandable, frightening thing. In
(24:58):
the grips of illnesses that are you know, going to
be considered terminal for any number of reasons, people will
naturally and logically reach out to any any pot, reach
out for any possible glimmer of hope, any treatment, especially
as mortality for the moment of death approaches side note unrelated.
(25:22):
When I see terminal conditions here in the US, I
think we also have to acknowledge that there are curable
conditions that are terminal for the vast majority of people
because they are too expensive right to fix. Yeah, which
is something the future historians will not look back on
(25:44):
with a very high opinion of society. That's not a
political thing. That's just true. You can you can, uh,
And I'm going somewhere with this. It's not just the soapbox.
You can die of completely curable things because you do
not have enough money or a credit line to survive.
(26:04):
There's very there's very much a price put on the
average American life. But this should not have applied to
Jeffrey Allen Lash. He lived in a very wealthy neighborhood.
He had tons of rich man's toys. Right, we haven't
even gotten into his weird cars yet, and he just
had hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting around. The guy
(26:26):
could have gone to treatment centers. So he made a
personal choice. Maybe it's for privacy, or maybe you know, um,
maybe he did in the course of his own research,
like your piano teacher. Maybe he became convinced that there
was a hidden cure, right, or there was something less
(26:49):
damaging to the body than chemotherapy that he could have done. Anyway,
one of the big don't think he had insurance, been
no paper trail, that's true. Yeah, he would have been
paying shout of pocket because he always paid with cash,
so it would have been that magic Johnson style injection
from South Park An maybe, yeah, right, I remember that one. Well. Also,
(27:12):
this is another I know I'm taking us on tangents, sorry,
but this is another thing. Maybe not everybody realizes about
the some of the very well to do people, probably
people a few atmosphere levels of wealth above Lash as
far as we know, after a certain threshold of income
(27:33):
and wealth, you don't go to the doctor. You have
a doctor on retainer for twenty four hours day, seven
days a week. They just come when you call, They
will show up at your house. You pay them a
lot of money. Also write whatever prescription you want. It's
pretty great healthcare. But going back to Albany's and the
(27:56):
question of how he died, you know, was his foul
play was as homicide? He says something really interesting. He
publicly says, we are also certain that lash did not
work for any government security agency, and so for his name,
at least there's there's no record of it. Yeah, right,
(28:19):
different thing. That's smart. That's a really good point. But
then there's still so many questions. You know, where do
you get this money? Where do you come from? When
I have so many names? Why I have so many guns?
You know what I mean? Why did they all appear
to be legal? And when did he get the guns?
That's yeah, when and how? And gentlemanber the name of
(28:40):
Jeffrey Dwyer, who's the president of one of many Pacific
Palisades homeowners associations. He was the president of the fourth Chapter,
said that there were no signs to be seen of
hoarding guns or ammunition during a twenty eleven repair and
inspection in this town house where where lived, and the
(29:01):
neighbors didn't necessarily know Lash's real name. They thought that
he was called Bob Smith, which sounds like the most
lazy pseudonym imaginable. Um, But this guy seems like he
had a weird kind of dark streak in terms of
his sense of humor and the way he you know,
gave out just enough weird information to his neighbors to
(29:21):
seem mysterious and dangerous, like you said, Ben, Uh. And
according to Dwyer, the homeowner group never had a reason
to question whether Bob Smith was his real name because
Nebron Goren owned the townhouse, so he was just like
living there, you know, as her guest. Essentially, Yeah, it
was very very smart to Uh. It's very it's a
(29:42):
very effective way of obscuring ownership or keeping yourself off
of government records, and and from a social engineering aspect,
it's brilliant because it all depends on like what people
think is polite and diplomatic and conversation, and so when
(30:02):
you're looking at the social dynamic between neighbors, even if
you want, even if you're on the homeowners association, Uh,
you're not. You're probably not gonna ever say to your neighbor,
So what's going on in your relationship? Man? It's your
your girlfriend actually owns the house. Is that that's something
(30:23):
you want to talk to me about? You would never
say that, that's like, that's so ruble and it would
never even need to come up, you know what I mean?
But if if they if they basically acted as a
unit as a couple, even if you know, and the
thing is, you can be someone's fiancee for like ever, right,
But that's still is enough that the cover story totally
checks out, even if there were some details that were
(30:45):
super sketchy, like the dude's twelve cars. Uh that that
that that he kept around? How do you even keep
twelve cars in a town house? Doesn't know? There'll be
enough parking for that because you have to have a
separate garage. But one of them appeared to be bullet
proof and worth around a hundred grand, and then another
one was like a specialty custom job that appeared to
(31:07):
be designed to go ben You questioned whether maybe it
was an underwater car, but at the very least, it
was a highly waterproof vehicle, right. Yeah, So so it
was described that way, and it has been described that
way in a lot of different places. And just just
a note here, there are these are storage units where
like storage garages, essensibly essentially where these vehicles were stored
(31:30):
in many places, and they are also well we won't
talk about it now, there are apparently a lot of
storage units associated with Jeffrey Allen lash and and uh,
to the point about, yeah, I didn't mean to be
starky when I was talking about the underwater vehicle, because okay,
here's why. So reading about this underwater vehicle, I'm thinking, oh,
(31:54):
this is so cool. We maybe we are getting into
some James Bond territory. Even if this guy a little deluded. Uh,
it's funny. I read some statements by that lawyer we
mentioned earlier. Broad and Broad is of all the things
he's skeptical about, he's weirdly skeptical about that car. It's
(32:16):
like they you know, they say it's an underwater car,
and that's that's amazing, but it's it's not like a
submarine or something. I think maybe you could drive through
a river like that that's how we talked. This is
the car. You know, it's not mince words here. I
mean most cars are pretty much waterproof, but I mean, well,
(32:36):
I mean, just in general, you can drive through a
torrential Downpourt and you're not going to have leak edge
in your car. But the undercarriage is the part that
you don't want to get wet, so that would be
a part that probably have to be specially designed to
be sealed. I think it's exactly. I think it's an
amphibious car, so it's probably more meant to just float
or help you forward a stream, a creek or river,
(32:57):
or maybe you just have a It's pretty cool. It's
pretty cool, and it's very James Bond esque, uh, I mean,
and the bulletproof car, dude. And the fact that what
he and his uh fiance would would always go to
dinner separately, in separate vehicles and I'll always pay cash.
That was something that was noted of them. And somehow
they got away without using license plates. Yes, that's why
(33:20):
I wanted to talk about. Yeah, that's amazing, isn't it
that they got away for so long without getting pulled over?
So exactly, so, according to that freelancer who wrote for Playboy.
They had a scheme essentially where they would trade in
vehicles after a certain amount of time, so they always
had dealer plates. So, you know, you get that, you
(33:43):
get a new car, used car, whatever it is, you
got a dealer plate for a certain amount of time
before you have to get actual plates. Get pulled over
the day after my birthday for having an expired tag.
How do you get away with that for so long?
It just seems like cheating fate. You know, well, if
it looks like a new car, then the authorities would
have no reason to even think about checking your plate.
(34:04):
I mean, yeah, that's that is true. But when you're
in the Palisades, remember right, so the police are going
to be a little bit more deferential as long as
you look like you belong. But then is probably based on, honestly,
how nice your car is, I imagine, But but but
you're right, it is a different world. I also tend
(34:27):
to get pulled over for a lot of that stuff.
I was going through something a number of years ago
where I was just really lazy. I kept forgetting to
put that little sticker you get in Georgia on the plate,
and I was so lazy that I had it in
my glove box and I got pulled over, uh twice,
(34:48):
But in both times the police were we're sort of annoyed.
They were like it, just put it. It's a sticker,
and just put it on your like before you drive away.
The second time the guy was like, just before you
drive away, just put this on, like I have other
stuff to do. Um. So I can understand how those
(35:09):
little things could be a hassle, but they were. The
point is they were putting time and energy and assiduous
thought into not ever having to interact with the DMV.
They were buying these cars cash as well. We should
mention so that there was not a payment plan. There's
no loan business that comes in. Everything that this guy
(35:29):
is doing is completely meant to prevent him from being documented.
And did we do we mention that he freaked out
around cameras like a vampire with mirrors. Yeah, just ducking
all the time, doing the the old cough into the
arm move. Uh that's we don't know if that if
that's the paparazzi shuffle. So that's called I thought he
(35:50):
covered his coat space and did like warn r Poku.
It's very we're painting. It is a very mature person.
Actually sounds like a lot of fun at this point,
I know, Gosh really said I never got to meet
this guy. Uh well, hey, what speaking of meeting him,
Let's take another break here word from our sponsor, and
(36:12):
when we come back, we'll get into more of the
biographical details of what we know about Jeffrey Allen lash
or Bob Smith. And we have returned, so we know
a little bit about his background. Now we know he
grew up in a middle class lifestyle in modest family
(36:38):
home in near near the l A Airport. For a while,
he wanted to be a microbiologist like his father, and
his mother was a piano teacher. But then um around
the time he dropped out of college, according to his stepmother,
Shirley Anderson, he cut himself off from his family. He
became super sketch and very secretive about what he was doing,
(37:03):
and his stepmother and his father had no reliable way
of contacting him. He would just sort of drift in
every so often in person, you know what I mean,
never calling on the phone, just in person, and then
he was gone again. He would show up like two
days before Thanksgiving, but never on Thanksgiving, which is kind
(37:25):
of brilliant if you think about it. I hate that.
Nothing worse than someone showing up early to a holiday. Yeah,
so we have it. We have a quote from his stepmother.
She says he was just a loner as far as
we were concerned. He just became weird because he changed
all of a sudden. He just became weird. That's about right.
(37:46):
I can't talk to you on the phone anymore. Mother,
I've become weird. Become weird, I've changed. Okay, Well, let
us know if you need a sweetheart, absolutely not. But
I'll see three days before Thanksgiving, I'll come with a
fresh pumpkins, specially baked pumpkin pie. I just love that.
(38:07):
I love you. Know. What do you think just between
like the five of us was hanging on the show today,
do you think we could get away with using I've
become weird, I've become strange as an excuse conversation. I
can't milk COVID forever. I'm so sorry, guys, I can't.
I have to stop this right here. I've become weird. Yeah, right, Like, Hey, hey,
(38:29):
do you wanna you wanna go get some wings with us? Later? Uh,
later after work been I'm sorry, I can't make it.
I've I've become strange. Stop you right there. But you know,
there is a interesting connection, you know, with the family
here to this perhaps metamorphosis. When Lash's father was dying,
(38:50):
Anderson said that she was unable to reach Lash, who
never came to the funeral, not even three days early,
which would have been weird, um, Anderson said, which you know,
in character for him. Anderson said that she was unaware
of any like, you know, independent wealth that he might
have accrued that would allow Lash to purchase these millions
(39:11):
of dollars and weapons. Uh. And just reminder that's that's
the stepmother, and that whatever this secret job might have been,
if it even existed, he definitely had money. And do
do we know much about his fiancee because I'm sorry
to think about that name just makes me think wealth.
I don't know why a hyphen it name always makes
(39:33):
me think wealth. We do because before she was his
fiance she was married too. She was married to a dentist,
I believe, and when Lash moved in with her that
she and the dentist were still living together. That's why
her name was Nebro and gored and eventually he drove
(39:58):
to a part she was. She had She was a
business owner, Katherine never and Gordon was, and she did
pretty well for herself. She owned several different properties throughout
the area. Business was booming. She was to some success story,
which I think is objectively true, and then to a
(40:21):
certain type of person, she was a ripe target. But
the point about the family is really interesting because it's
kind of a badger in the bag, right, an elephant
in the room. When your story is about very eccentric
people who have who seemed to have a lot of
stuff and get away with a lot of things, one
of the first questions you have to ask yourself is
(40:42):
their family money at play? Right? Like when you read
stories about who was that guy? Was he a DuPont Air?
You know, I'm talking about who's into wrestling? Oh the
fox Catcher guy? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it wasn't he
from family? Yeah, I remember, I just remember recreations of
(41:02):
the house from the movie reenactment of those events. But
it was lovely. Well, that's that's the thing. I mean,
it's it's true, like you have to ask yourself, is
their family money at play? Because and the father did
their DIY. So there was a question for a time
of whether there was an inheritance in the mix. Anderson,
(41:25):
the stepmother, says that there was not. And this is
of great interest to the investigators because she also says,
I don't know where you got the money from, and
that's what they're that's what they're looking for, right, because
there should be some sort of way to account for
these massive amounts of cash, you know, even if it's
(41:47):
even if it's something illicit, right, if it's like for
a while, there was a suspicion that maybe he was
of a former drug dealer, maybe at kingpin level, who
who just got out of the game, and that that
would explain why the cash was so old, his what
do we call what do we call it lash slash uh,
(42:10):
But this didn't seem to be the case, so no
one still, no one knows where the money was from.
I would say that that scenario also would make a
lot of sense for why he absolutely didn't want to
be tracked. And yeah, yeah, I think we could say
it here on this show. We don't think he was
narco um, We don't think that he was well, he
(42:34):
definitely wasn't currently a drug dealer, but he may have
been involved in the past. We just there are just
a lot of missing spots in his biography. But police
know that he had to. Like at this point, before
they've gotten um evaluation of just the firearms from the lawyers. Uh.
(42:56):
Police initially look at all this stuff and they say, Okay,
this is at least half a million dollars depending on
how you bought it, you know what I mean, off
the grid. This is before they were able to spend
the time tracing everything. And then later sources come back
and they say, actually, this is more like five million
dollars just for the guns. The condo itself. Um, we
(43:21):
know the value of it from well at the time
of this investigation. So we know the value of the
condo from the last time it was sold, which was
where it was worth almost five hundred thousand dollars. Because
of the location it's in, that price has surely spiked.
(43:41):
I wonder how many millions that actually would be. That's crazy.
Thank you tracked two thousand eight whatever the crash happened,
and then you just add you know, add seven. You know,
I've been on Zillo a lot. Give me an address.
I'll tell you how much. It was the cost right now,
such as Zillo Guy Zillo, It'll make you feel really
(44:03):
bad about your current situation. There's some I saw some
page I can't remember what it was online, but was
called Zillo Gone Wild. Yeah, and it's just um what's
it's just weird houses on Zillo houses. Your mother would
be ashamed of how since you can't take home to
(44:26):
meet your parents. So this is you know, we have
some levity, but there are some dark things coming up.
Whatever the official story is or whatever story he was pushing,
it is clear that Lash may have been sick for
some time. He was sixty years old at the time
of his death, and shortly before passing away, he had
(44:49):
told Katherine nebrind Goren that he was suffering from terminal cancer.
He did add that this was a result of exposure
to mysterious dangerous chemicals in the course of his career
as a spy or an operative, and he had been
acting so very sketchy for so very long. He was
(45:12):
always careful to cantileze people, to never tell them exactly
what he did for a living, but to drop mysterious
hints it uh and just just in conversation, right, and
It's weird because the way that he talks to people
about this, or the way they recount conversations with him,
it sounds like he is trying to bait people into
(45:35):
asking him more so that he can say, you know,
I can't say anymore, you know what I mean? He
just wants he wants to be that U dos Eck's
most interesting man. This doesn't work out for him, as
you know. That's why we started with the death. But
this is part one of our examination in the story.
(45:57):
We know it sounds a little crazy right now where
we at. We've got an unsolved death, and we've got
questions that seem to mount as the investigation continues. Can
we answer any of these questions? Well, we'll we'll give
it a shot in part two of this episode. In
the meantime, we want to know what you think. Have
(46:17):
you ever heard of Jeffrey Allen lash Do you have
other stories of mysterious deaths that you would like to
share with your fellow conspiracy realists? If so, let us know.
We try to be easy to find online. That's right.
You can find us a Conspiracy Stuff on Twitter and Facebook,
Conspiracy Stuff show on Instagram. Um, why don't you do
(46:38):
us a solid tode and pop on over to Apple
Podcasts and leave a review, five star review if you please.
We appreciate it, and it helps people discover the show.
Uh and helps to kind of bump up in those
those Apple rankings. Yes, and also, uh, just to add
this in before we get out of here and we
tell you about a couple other contact methods. I keep
(46:59):
thinking about this concept that he wasn't a part or
at least it was confirmed that he wasn't a part
of any kind of drug running scheme or like an
overlord or any an overlord, a drug lord of any kind.
Um It. It keeps sticking in my mind just how
clean his life was, even with all of those guns,
(47:21):
even with all the cash and all the weird cars
and all the stuff, How clean his life was, um
and it it feels like to me, that's almost a
reaction to being in a life where you know none
of your money is legitimate. You can't spend any of
your cash, you can't do anything with it. So you
(47:43):
find a way to clean it. You find a way
to live a life that is um where you could
actually use your wealth for whatever you wanted. And if
somebody looked at you. You wouldn't get in trouble anyway. Well,
I'm sorry, we don't have to talk about this now.
Ah was to stay stay tuned, folks. Uh, And that's
(48:04):
a that's a great that. I'm really glad that you're
pointing that out, because after a certain threshold, being too
clean can be almost as bad as having some believable priors.
So we're going to we're gonna hold for that. We
want to hear what you think about situations like this. Also,
if you want to learn more about people who have
(48:27):
ditched their identities or committed pseudo side faking one's death,
then do check out. There's an excellent book Playing Dead.
We can talk a little bit more about how people
try to transform their personalities, how to some dues and don'ts.
Maybe we'll throw some of those in. But we want
(48:47):
to hear from you. Give us give us call one
eight three three st d W y t K. Tell
us which we shoot for it. Tell us about times
you had a different identity, maybe maybe for a few hours,
maybe for you days. Uh, you know, let us know
if we can use your name and or a cool
nickname on the air. You've got three minutes, they belong
to you. If you have a story that is longer
(49:10):
than three minutes, I assume that faking your death or
living under a different identity would be more than a
three minute story. Feel free to write it out in
full and send it to us as a good old
fashioned email where we are conspiracy at i heart radio
dot com. Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is
(49:47):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer set the Shadow, Nicholas Johnson. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Today we're sort of talking about
spies according to some people, one in particular, and whenever
(00:49):
we examine the world of spies, we have to realize
that the life of a spy is so offten glamorized
in the world of fiction, like either the phrase spy
or sespecially secret agent. A lot of people immediately think
of James Bond, who we have already I think, uh
very clearly established, is a terrible example of how to
(01:10):
be a spy. He's day drunk, uses his real name,
says it at every opportunity. His ops set is terrible.
Real spies are nowhere near as glamorous as James Bond.
You know, they run the gamut in appearance, socio economic
level motivation. Some are in it for money, some are
being blackmailed, you know, the Russian technique of compromat, and
(01:34):
some really believe in a particular ideology. Some people really,
you know, if the spy masters are doing their job right.
Some operatives aren't even sure who they're working for. And
this leads us through the strange, strange twisting tale of
a man named Jeffrey Alan lash and full to spos. Really,
(01:54):
I really thought you were going to say Ben Bolan, okay,
uh own to be Matt. This is this We wanted
to say, heads up, this may end up being a
two part episode because there is a lot to this
story and they're gonna be some surprising things the story
as well. We're we're not going to approach this in
(02:17):
a linear way either. There's a bit of a pastiche approach.
So our story really begins with Jeffrey's death. Here are
the facts. In the summer of the police were called
to a residence in the Pacific Palisades Um, a particularly
(02:39):
posh neighborhood in Los Angeles. Residents in that area were
concerned because they've noticed a seemingly abandoned suv that was
parked in the same exact spot for two weeks, and
then the police received a call. Like we said, there
were some concerned citizens that saw this abandoned car um
(02:59):
and that led to a search where authorities found a
corpse inside the suv and began setting out to piece
together you know what could have happened to lead to
this man being in this in this suv in this
very fancy neighborhood. Oh and it's a twisted story. It
is a very weird way that they even got to
(03:20):
that suv in the first place. This is just to
put this out there. In the same neighborhood, you've got
like real Hollywood elite. We're talking your Reese Witherspoons and
what was it According to the Hollywood Reporter that there's
one other person mentioned, J. J. Abrams, who is not,
so far as we know, related to this case buy
(03:43):
anything other than geography. So part of our mission here
at the front is to clear the name of Reese
and j J. You're welcome, welcome, They're big fans of
the show. So yeah, this is not a neighborhood where
this sort of stuff ever happens. And as we'll find,
the neighbors grow increasingly obsessed with the story. Astute listeners,
(04:09):
you'll note that we're talking about a body being in
a sealed car, wrapped in blankets for two weeks during
the height of summer, so the decay is extensive here.
The corpse is no longer one that you could easily identify,
probably by just looking at um where the face used
(04:29):
to be. They eventually do identify this man. Uh. He
is a man known to neighbors in the area as
Bob Smith. That is not his real name. His real
name is Jeffrey Allen Lash. And he turns out he
is living at a townhouse or was living in a
townhouse just up the street. So the investigator's head to
(04:52):
the condo, and in the condo they find um. You
know how, for anybody who's a fan video games, sometimes
you'll be playing a game and you'll burst into like
a secret room and you'll find this cash of all
this cool stuff, you know, med kids or health potions,
depending on the genre, cool weapons, spells, stuff like that.
(05:15):
That's what they find in this In this still missile,
they find so many guns, more than twelve hundred, Like yeah,
not trash guns either, like high end pistols, shotguns, rifles.
All in all, lawyers later estimate, and their estimation does
become important here. Lawyers later estimate there's about five million
(05:39):
dollars worth of guns. And you may think, well, maybe
this person is just a gun collector, right, maybe they
go to these guns shows and and sell guns or
something like that. It's just the guns, right, Oh no, no, no, no,
there was also ammo. Yeah, exactly, around six and a
half tons and a little more than two hundred thousand
(06:02):
dollars in cash. Two thirty thousand dollars in cash, not
to mention like some serious you know, uh like doomsday
kind of weaponry, right, like bows and arrows and knives.
And then you had models of bears and lions that
were used as shooting targets. You know, you always get
(06:24):
in these situations, right, It's important to be prepared. Quick
note about that two thirty grand Those were an older bills,
which is an interesting detail. Uh so these weren't like,
you know, bills printed in the twenty tens or something.
They were from the eighties, from the nineteen eighties. So
we've been sitting on them for a while, And is
(06:46):
that maybe indicated Well, I see what you're saying. But
it's also like it could mean they were from various
sources and could have been like drug money or some
sort of illegal income stream. Well, we don't have to
get into it yet, but for my money, that was
the dash that Jeffrey Allen Lash had since the eighties.
That's my this is my belief, the Lash dash. Yes,
(07:09):
the last dash. Uh not not facial hair in this
in this case, but yeah, he was more of a
beard guy. He had a he had kind of a
light salt and pepper beard at the time of his demise.
So the police are freaking out. They also find a
bunch of explosives. And imagine, if you are one of
(07:30):
the well healed residents of this neighborhood, you might have
noticed the weird car. But as we'll see, you are
already very familiar with weird cars. If you live in
this neighborhood and and you you walk out one day
and it looks like one of those scenes from ET
where the government agents shut down the house, their police everywhere.
(07:52):
Some of them are weirdly enough, wearing overalls. There's also
a bomb squad. Actually had to evacuate quite a few
of the residents, right, Yeah, they had to take. This
was has matt Level territory, and they were going through
this huge arsenal weapons and explosives, and they have to
do it really carefully because it's not uncommon for people
(08:14):
who have collections like this to also have some safeguards.
You know, maybe not lethal stuff, but you never know
until you're until you're in the thick of it. And
the one thing that baffled them about this is this
massive amount of guns. This guy's lying to neighbors about
his names. But all the guns are clean, and we'll
(08:35):
have to reiterate this again, but this is important. All
the guns are clean, none of them are dirty. They
all have serial numbers. They were purchased legally over time.
But some of these chemicals, these explosives are just too
unstable to transport. So the police shrug and they're like, uh,
we have to explode these. We have to have a party.
(08:58):
And there's so they're literally folks who were not being hyperbolic.
They're literally so many firearms. There's so much stuff in
here that it took the police days to move everything,
and they were moving at truckloads at a time, and
everybody at this point, neighbors, police, reporters, with a good
(09:21):
bloodhound knows for weird stories. Everybody is wondering what the
hell is going on? What happens here exactly? Just a
quick note before we move on, there are a bunch
of pictures that you can see of everything we're describing.
Describing here, there there was I think at least one
reporter who lived right in the area or a photographer
for a news outlet who lived in the area who
(09:42):
was snapping shots of all of this while it's going down.
And there's one shot, at least according to freelancer who
wrote for Playboy, there's a picture of that cash we mentioned,
the older bills laid out on a table in a garage.
There were so many guns and other things that they
we're dealing with at the actual house. They had to
go to a neighbor's house and garage to do the
(10:05):
money counting in a bunch of other sorting of materials
was just like the effort to catalog all this stuff
probably would have been massive. Yeah. So yeah, But but
like you said, Ben, what the hell happened? What happened?
What happened? Yeah, police are trying to piece together how
this dead man ended up in an abandoned vehicle wrapped
(10:27):
in blankets. It's not something you do after you die
for yourself. And they were trying to figure out why
he had so many weapons, how he got them. This
is this is a real bummer for some of the
cops because they have to go back and essentially do
a background check on each and every firearm. So that's
(10:49):
somebody's horrible job for the next However, log it's not
just one night. And neighbors are you know, neighbors are
flocking around while they can and they're saying, uh, they're
talking to the police about about this guy, and they're like, oh, yeah,
that's Bob Skinny, Bob Bob Smith. He's interesting. He's got
(11:13):
an intense dude. He's really into guns. Uh. And he
said he worked for you guys, well for the FBI
or the CIA, and I'm not sure. Say the neighbors
and the police are thinking, okay, well that's something because
if they work for the FBI, we will be able
(11:35):
to tell, right, We'll be able to find, we'll be
able to verify that. And then we pulled some just
some statements from neighbors because you can tell that there
like now, this is the number one mystery in the neighborhood,
because again, this doesn't happen in an area like this.
(11:56):
One neighbor said, he'll say crazy things to people, like
he does night missions swimming to Catalina, and he would
he would come and he would tell us that he
was going to show us his self defense moves, which
has such big like Mac energy from Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
I don't know, Ben, I'm just it's got a little
(12:17):
bit of Ben bowl and energy too. I know you
love a good night walk, so a night mession seems
right up your alley. But I'm not teaching people martial
arts swimming. You've taught me some good power moves in
the past, like the elbow grab. You know, I thought
wants the same as martial arts. Thanks, but yeah, it's
the key is it's arrest. It's just it's it's such
(12:37):
a weird thing to do. Graze exactly exactly. So then
we have a new new character in this scene. These
are all just the facts, by the way, This is
why this might end up being a two partner. So
shortly after the investigation hits the press, there's a guy
(12:59):
named Harland Braun. He's an attorney. He's representing a woman
named Katherine Nebron or Katherine Nebron Goren. This attorney comes
forward and he says, look, I'm representing Nebron Goren. She
is Jeffrey Allen Lash's fiance, and I contacted the police
(13:19):
on her behalf to tell tell everyone where to find
the body. And I also wanted to alert them to
the massive amount of weaponry at this residence because he
was concerned. Now, Braun is an interesting character. He is
a veteran criminal defense attorney for people in the audience
(13:40):
who care about celebrities. You might recognize him from his
work with Dennis Rodman, Roseanne bar Gary Busey, and perhaps
was infamously Robert Blake. So he's he's heard a lot
of war stories, you know what I mean. He is
in the true crime world. But even for broad this
(14:01):
story Catherine is telling them is down right bizarre. You
know what I think? Maybe we should hold that info,
that bombshell for a quick word for our sponsor. They'll
be right back. Good call, Let's build a tension a
little bit. All right, we're back. Here's the scoop. Here's
(14:23):
what you're hearing. If you're one of the police officers,
who's stuck on this case. So Lash told his fiance
that he was an undercover operative for a top secret
government agency and that as a result of his work,
he and she and everyone they interacted with were under
(14:44):
surveillance constantly by the same agency that he was working for.
So this mystifies the lawyer Broad And this is, by
the way, not the whole story yet, because we're still
in the realm of the facts. This mystifies Broad And
he says, you know, the problem here is that the
truth may be unbelievable. She meaning Katherine, will talk to
(15:06):
l A p d. But would anybody believe it? Does
she really believe it? Did he really believe it? These
are the questions, folks, These are the questions. It was
going one way or another. It was gonna be a
long night at the police station. It was gonna be
a series of long nights at the police station. They
had to answer several questions. Who was Jeffrey Alllett Lash,
(15:29):
Who did he actually work for? How did he die?
Here's where it gets crazy. So, according to this fiance,
Nebron Goren, Lash and his friend were shopping at a
farmer's market on will Shore Boulevard in Santa Monica on
the fourth of July, when Lash started to feel some
(15:50):
kind of nasty symptoms. He was feeling hot and sick
um in the parking lot um and as Braun told
the l A Times, the group tried to cool Lash
out with some ice, but he passed away. Yeah, I
believe there was. It was dry ice as well, like
that they were trying to use, like they were trying
to very quickly cool him down. They were called a
(16:11):
doctor on the scene. To a REKA practitioner, this is unusual, right,
we're thinking the report's very I found one one report
I think we we all read where this They said
this occurred on July three instead of fourth, but it
was it was around this time. It was like the
first week of July, and you're wondering, well, I've been
(16:34):
in situations where one of my friends isn't feeling well
or they're injured or something. I know what to do.
I would call paramedics, or if you live in the US,
where most people try to avoid an ambulance ride, you
would drive them to the hospital. But due to their
(16:55):
belief that Lash is a spy and more than a spy, uh,
they held off. He had given his close associates explicit
instructions on day to day life, like with Nebron Gore,
and he was kind of running her life. And he
was doing this with a couple of different people, and
(17:16):
he would say, you know, very cryptic things like don't ever,
he didn't want a paper trail of any sorts. You
didn't want to be involved with the authorities. He had
earlier before his death damaged four cards in an accident
and was adamant that no one contact insurance companies, no
one report anything. And the next day he came back
(17:39):
and he paid the owners of all four of those
damaged vehicles in cash baller. But but they they knew,
and they were to a degree they were afraid of Lash.
That's very important, so they did not haul the paramedics.
They called this doctor who was a friend. And then
he later told the Low paper that he spent ninety
(18:01):
minutes trying to revive Lash in the passenger seat of
this SUV while nebron Gore in his outside in parking
lot freaking out. Yea, he confirmed who that friend was.
The stuff I was reading, nobody had identified the friend
who was a doctor. Apparently, they called the mother of
(18:22):
an employee of Nebron Goren who we will meet shortly. Okay, okay,
got you. And it's true. The fiancee UM supposedly was
you know, in shock and grieving and you know, openly
weeping UM and didn't know what to do with the body,
but assumed, based on what she did know that the agency,
(18:44):
whatever a named agency this might be UM was watching
at all times UH and would potentially come for him,
come for the body, knowing that he had died. And
she later told a friend that um Lash had actually
left very specific instructions on what to do, and the
first rule of what to do when this guy died
(19:07):
was don't call the authorities and leave him in the
car wrapped in blankets and get the hell out of
town and let his UH handlers or minders take care
of the body. Which I don't know, like this seems
unusual in general for any kind of spiker. What I mean, like,
if you if you're just like living a civilian life
or maybe you're under cover, I guess, like, is there
(19:30):
really instructions on what to do with your body if
you die of natural causes? I would say, uh, no,
not necessarily. What I would say is in this specific case,
with this specific individual, there may have been a reason
why Jeffrey either believed that an authority would want his body,
(19:50):
or he had convinced somebody that an authority might want
his body for a very specific reason that I don't
want to spoil right now, or maybe he had convinced
himself of this. It seems they're like they're i'd be
a little bit this guy might have been a little
little kookie. Yeah, it's it's quite possible that we're looking
at a Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's court moments. That's
(20:11):
the Mark Twain book, where a cartoonish stereotype of a
Yankee based on Mark Twain's opinions at the time. Somehow
time travels back to Camelot and there's this, without spoiling
too much of it because it's brilliantly written, there's this
moment where this Yankee guy is in King Arthur's court
(20:31):
and he meets Merlin and he has this realization where
he says, uh, he says, holy, this guy thinks he's
a real magician, even though he obviously it is not.
So there's like, yeah, there may be some self delusion
going on there, and that's a really good point that
also comes into play in a big way or it
(20:51):
leaves us some big questions. But to answer that original question, um, no, yes,
depending on sircumstances, there will be processes for handling or
disposing a body if the disposing of a body of
things go south. But the issue here is that unless
somebody is somehow in on an operation or an initiative,
(21:17):
you probably if you're a spy, you probably wouldn't tell them, right,
You wouldn't tell them anything because you don't want to
be my spooky government friend. You want to be you know,
your local neighborhood. Yeah. So it does sound weird though
the way you recount it, because it sounds really specific.
(21:39):
And she does this. Whatever he has told her, she
has digested it, she believes it. So she leaves his body,
dips off to Oregon with an employee of hers who
is an assistant, and they're gone for about a week
and a half, two weeks, letting things blow over. They
(22:03):
come back and they're they're over, you know, they're at
the Palisades, and they say, and then Katherine is thinking,
holy smokes, this vehicle is still here. It's in the
same spot. How long is it gonna take his you know,
people or whatever they are to pick him up. Let's
(22:24):
let's leave it. Let's leave it right there, because now
we have to start asking ourselves. Hold on, rewind, who
is Jeffrey Allen Lash? Most immediately, how did he actually die?
He just got hot, He got hot to death. And
why on earth do they use dry eye to try
and cool him down? That's an odd flex as well. Well,
(22:46):
I mean it was just the cooling effect is I
don't think you would use regular ice, so you can
actually put it directly in contact with the skin. Dry
ice burns if you put it on your skin. That's
why they needed the blankets. No, come on, excuse me.
So okay, So there was more going on with lashes
(23:10):
body and his health than was immediately known. So according
to Los Angeles Police Deputy Chief Kirk Albany's uh, he said,
detectives didn't believe, at least after they examined the body,
even though it was in a state of decay, they
didn't believe that he had died from foul play of
any kind, at least initially. That's what they believed, That's
(23:30):
what they observed. Um This Deputy chief also said that
the man was suffering from end stage cancer. So there's
a reason why, you know, just being hot could have
been a problem. There's a reason why maybe his body
was overheating. He was. He was going through it for real,
and doesn't appear to have been undergoing chemotherapy or some
(23:54):
of the other treatments, uh, you know, because chemotherapy would
have noticeable visual effects on the body. Yeah, he was.
They were going a different route according to much of
the reporting. What we would learn later, he was eating
a very specific diet, taking some supplements and some other things.
You know. I actually had a piano teacher um when
I was younger, who had UH this type of cancer,
(24:16):
and she did the same thing. She ate lots of
UH foods that were high in certain nutrients, and she
ate a lot of carrots, and it actually was I
remember her remarking on it, and I noticed she was
eating so many carrots and her skin actually took on
this kind of orange ish hue. But she did that
completely in place of more traditional I guess, you know,
(24:36):
Western remedies. Yeah. I mean, that's a true that's a
true story. That's a real thing that can happen if
you eat enough carrots, your your skin will start to show.
Jeffrey Alan Lash seemed to be more of a raw
meat juices guy at this point. But but you're You're right,
you know, And it's it's an understandable, frightening thing. In
(24:58):
the grips of illnesses that are you know, going to
be considered terminal for any number of reasons, people will
naturally and logically reach out to any any pot, reach
out for any possible glimmer of hope, any treatment, especially
as mortality for the moment of death approaches side note unrelated.
(25:22):
When I see terminal conditions here in the US, I
think we also have to acknowledge that there are curable
conditions that are terminal for the vast majority of people
because they are too expensive right to fix. Yeah, which
is something the future historians will not look back on
(25:44):
with a very high opinion of society. That's not a
political thing. That's just true. You can you can, uh,
And I'm going somewhere with this. It's not just the soapbox.
You can die of completely curable things because you do
not have enough money or a credit line to survive.
(26:04):
There's very there's very much a price put on the
average American life. But this should not have applied to
Jeffrey Allen Lash. He lived in a very wealthy neighborhood.
He had tons of rich man's toys. Right, we haven't
even gotten into his weird cars yet, and he just
had hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting around. The guy
(26:26):
could have gone to treatment centers. So he made a
personal choice. Maybe it's for privacy, or maybe you know, um,
maybe he did in the course of his own research,
like your piano teacher. Maybe he became convinced that there
was a hidden cure, right, or there was something less
(26:49):
damaging to the body than chemotherapy that he could have done. Anyway,
one of the big don't think he had insurance, been
no paper trail, that's true. Yeah, he would have been
paying shout of pocket because he always paid with cash,
so it would have been that magic Johnson style injection
from South Park An maybe, yeah, right, I remember that one. Well. Also,
(27:12):
this is another I know I'm taking us on tangents, sorry,
but this is another thing. Maybe not everybody realizes about
the some of the very well to do people, probably
people a few atmosphere levels of wealth above Lash as
far as we know, after a certain threshold of income
(27:33):
and wealth, you don't go to the doctor. You have
a doctor on retainer for twenty four hours day, seven
days a week. They just come when you call, They
will show up at your house. You pay them a
lot of money. Also write whatever prescription you want. It's
pretty great healthcare. But going back to Albany's and the
(27:56):
question of how he died, you know, was his foul
play was as homicide? He says something really interesting. He
publicly says, we are also certain that lash did not
work for any government security agency, and so for his name,
at least there's there's no record of it. Yeah, right,
(28:19):
different thing. That's smart. That's a really good point. But
then there's still so many questions. You know, where do
you get this money? Where do you come from? When
I have so many names? Why I have so many guns?
You know what I mean? Why did they all appear
to be legal? And when did he get the guns?
That's yeah, when and how? And gentlemanber the name of
(28:40):
Jeffrey Dwyer, who's the president of one of many Pacific
Palisades homeowners associations. He was the president of the fourth Chapter,
said that there were no signs to be seen of
hoarding guns or ammunition during a twenty eleven repair and
inspection in this town house where where lived, and the
(29:01):
neighbors didn't necessarily know Lash's real name. They thought that
he was called Bob Smith, which sounds like the most
lazy pseudonym imaginable. Um, But this guy seems like he
had a weird kind of dark streak in terms of
his sense of humor and the way he you know,
gave out just enough weird information to his neighbors to
(29:21):
seem mysterious and dangerous, like you said, Ben, Uh. And
according to Dwyer, the homeowner group never had a reason
to question whether Bob Smith was his real name because
Nebron Goren owned the townhouse, so he was just like
living there, you know, as her guest. Essentially, Yeah, it
was very very smart to Uh. It's very it's a
(29:42):
very effective way of obscuring ownership or keeping yourself off
of government records, and and from a social engineering aspect,
it's brilliant because it all depends on like what people
think is polite and diplomatic and conversation, and so when
(30:02):
you're looking at the social dynamic between neighbors, even if
you want, even if you're on the homeowners association, Uh,
you're not. You're probably not gonna ever say to your neighbor,
So what's going on in your relationship? Man? It's your
your girlfriend actually owns the house. Is that that's something
(30:23):
you want to talk to me about? You would never
say that, that's like, that's so ruble and it would
never even need to come up, you know what I mean?
But if if they if they basically acted as a
unit as a couple, even if you know, and the
thing is, you can be someone's fiancee for like ever, right,
But that's still is enough that the cover story totally
checks out, even if there were some details that were
(30:45):
super sketchy, like the dude's twelve cars. Uh that that
that that he kept around? How do you even keep
twelve cars in a town house? Doesn't know? There'll be
enough parking for that because you have to have a
separate garage. But one of them appeared to be bullet
proof and worth around a hundred grand, and then another
one was like a specialty custom job that appeared to
(31:07):
be designed to go ben You questioned whether maybe it
was an underwater car, but at the very least, it
was a highly waterproof vehicle, right. Yeah, So so it
was described that way, and it has been described that
way in a lot of different places. And just just
a note here, there are these are storage units where
like storage garages, essensibly essentially where these vehicles were stored
(31:30):
in many places, and they are also well we won't
talk about it now, there are apparently a lot of
storage units associated with Jeffrey Allen lash and and uh,
to the point about, yeah, I didn't mean to be
starky when I was talking about the underwater vehicle, because okay,
here's why. So reading about this underwater vehicle, I'm thinking, oh,
(31:54):
this is so cool. We maybe we are getting into
some James Bond territory. Even if this guy a little deluded. Uh,
it's funny. I read some statements by that lawyer we
mentioned earlier. Broad and Broad is of all the things
he's skeptical about, he's weirdly skeptical about that car. It's
(32:16):
like they you know, they say it's an underwater car,
and that's that's amazing, but it's it's not like a
submarine or something. I think maybe you could drive through
a river like that that's how we talked. This is
the car. You know, it's not mince words here. I
mean most cars are pretty much waterproof, but I mean, well,
(32:36):
I mean, just in general, you can drive through a
torrential Downpourt and you're not going to have leak edge
in your car. But the undercarriage is the part that
you don't want to get wet, so that would be
a part that probably have to be specially designed to
be sealed. I think it's exactly. I think it's an
amphibious car, so it's probably more meant to just float
or help you forward a stream, a creek or river,
(32:57):
or maybe you just have a It's pretty cool. It's
pretty cool, and it's very James Bond esque, uh, I mean,
and the bulletproof car, dude. And the fact that what
he and his uh fiance would would always go to
dinner separately, in separate vehicles and I'll always pay cash.
That was something that was noted of them. And somehow
they got away without using license plates. Yes, that's why
(33:20):
I wanted to talk about. Yeah, that's amazing, isn't it
that they got away for so long without getting pulled over?
So exactly, so, according to that freelancer who wrote for Playboy.
They had a scheme essentially where they would trade in
vehicles after a certain amount of time, so they always
had dealer plates. So, you know, you get that, you
(33:43):
get a new car, used car, whatever it is, you
got a dealer plate for a certain amount of time
before you have to get actual plates. Get pulled over
the day after my birthday for having an expired tag.
How do you get away with that for so long?
It just seems like cheating fate. You know, well, if
it looks like a new car, then the authorities would
have no reason to even think about checking your plate.
(34:04):
I mean, yeah, that's that is true. But when you're
in the Palisades, remember right, so the police are going
to be a little bit more deferential as long as
you look like you belong. But then is probably based on, honestly,
how nice your car is, I imagine, But but but
you're right, it is a different world. I also tend
(34:27):
to get pulled over for a lot of that stuff.
I was going through something a number of years ago
where I was just really lazy. I kept forgetting to
put that little sticker you get in Georgia on the plate,
and I was so lazy that I had it in
my glove box and I got pulled over, uh twice,
(34:48):
But in both times the police were we're sort of annoyed.
They were like it, just put it. It's a sticker,
and just put it on your like before you drive away.
The second time the guy was like, just before you
drive away, just put this on, like I have other
stuff to do. Um. So I can understand how those
(35:09):
little things could be a hassle, but they were. The
point is they were putting time and energy and assiduous
thought into not ever having to interact with the DMV.
They were buying these cars cash as well. We should
mention so that there was not a payment plan. There's
no loan business that comes in. Everything that this guy
(35:29):
is doing is completely meant to prevent him from being documented.
And did we do we mention that he freaked out
around cameras like a vampire with mirrors. Yeah, just ducking
all the time, doing the the old cough into the
arm move. Uh that's we don't know if that if
that's the paparazzi shuffle. So that's called I thought he
(35:50):
covered his coat space and did like warn r Poku.
It's very we're painting. It is a very mature person.
Actually sounds like a lot of fun at this point,
I know, Gosh really said I never got to meet
this guy. Uh well, hey, what speaking of meeting him,
Let's take another break here word from our sponsor, and
(36:12):
when we come back, we'll get into more of the
biographical details of what we know about Jeffrey Allen lash
or Bob Smith. And we have returned, so we know
a little bit about his background. Now we know he
grew up in a middle class lifestyle in modest family
(36:38):
home in near near the l A Airport. For a while,
he wanted to be a microbiologist like his father, and
his mother was a piano teacher. But then um around
the time he dropped out of college, according to his stepmother,
Shirley Anderson, he cut himself off from his family. He
became super sketch and very secretive about what he was doing,
(37:03):
and his stepmother and his father had no reliable way
of contacting him. He would just sort of drift in
every so often in person, you know what I mean,
never calling on the phone, just in person, and then
he was gone again. He would show up like two
days before Thanksgiving, but never on Thanksgiving, which is kind
(37:25):
of brilliant if you think about it. I hate that.
Nothing worse than someone showing up early to a holiday. Yeah,
so we have it. We have a quote from his stepmother.
She says he was just a loner as far as
we were concerned. He just became weird because he changed
all of a sudden. He just became weird. That's about right.
(37:46):
I can't talk to you on the phone anymore. Mother,
I've become weird. Become weird, I've changed. Okay, Well, let
us know if you need a sweetheart, absolutely not. But
I'll see three days before Thanksgiving, I'll come with a
fresh pumpkins, specially baked pumpkin pie. I just love that.
(38:07):
I love you. Know. What do you think just between
like the five of us was hanging on the show today,
do you think we could get away with using I've
become weird, I've become strange as an excuse conversation. I
can't milk COVID forever. I'm so sorry, guys, I can't.
I have to stop this right here. I've become weird. Yeah, right, Like, Hey, hey,
(38:29):
do you wanna you wanna go get some wings with us? Later? Uh,
later after work been I'm sorry, I can't make it.
I've I've become strange. Stop you right there. But you know,
there is a interesting connection, you know, with the family
here to this perhaps metamorphosis. When Lash's father was dying,
(38:50):
Anderson said that she was unable to reach Lash, who
never came to the funeral, not even three days early,
which would have been weird, um, Anderson said, which you know,
in character for him. Anderson said that she was unaware
of any like, you know, independent wealth that he might
have accrued that would allow Lash to purchase these millions
(39:11):
of dollars and weapons. Uh. And just reminder that's that's
the stepmother, and that whatever this secret job might have been,
if it even existed, he definitely had money. And do
do we know much about his fiancee because I'm sorry
to think about that name just makes me think wealth.
I don't know why a hyphen it name always makes
(39:33):
me think wealth. We do because before she was his
fiance she was married too. She was married to a dentist,
I believe, and when Lash moved in with her that
she and the dentist were still living together. That's why
her name was Nebro and gored and eventually he drove
(39:58):
to a part she was. She had She was a
business owner, Katherine never and Gordon was, and she did
pretty well for herself. She owned several different properties throughout
the area. Business was booming. She was to some success story,
which I think is objectively true, and then to a
(40:21):
certain type of person, she was a ripe target. But
the point about the family is really interesting because it's
kind of a badger in the bag, right, an elephant
in the room. When your story is about very eccentric
people who have who seemed to have a lot of
stuff and get away with a lot of things, one
of the first questions you have to ask yourself is
(40:42):
their family money at play? Right? Like when you read
stories about who was that guy? Was he a DuPont Air?
You know, I'm talking about who's into wrestling? Oh the
fox Catcher guy? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it wasn't he
from family? Yeah, I remember, I just remember recreations of
(41:02):
the house from the movie reenactment of those events. But
it was lovely. Well, that's that's the thing. I mean,
it's it's true, like you have to ask yourself, is
their family money at play? Because and the father did
their DIY. So there was a question for a time
of whether there was an inheritance in the mix. Anderson,
(41:25):
the stepmother, says that there was not. And this is
of great interest to the investigators because she also says,
I don't know where you got the money from, and
that's what they're that's what they're looking for, right, because
there should be some sort of way to account for
these massive amounts of cash, you know, even if it's
(41:47):
even if it's something illicit, right, if it's like for
a while, there was a suspicion that maybe he was
of a former drug dealer, maybe at kingpin level, who
who just got out of the game, and that that
would explain why the cash was so old, his what
do we call what do we call it lash slash uh,
(42:10):
But this didn't seem to be the case, so no
one still, no one knows where the money was from.
I would say that that scenario also would make a
lot of sense for why he absolutely didn't want to
be tracked. And yeah, yeah, I think we could say
it here on this show. We don't think he was
narco um, We don't think that he was well, he
(42:34):
definitely wasn't currently a drug dealer, but he may have
been involved in the past. We just there are just
a lot of missing spots in his biography. But police
know that he had to. Like at this point, before
they've gotten um evaluation of just the firearms from the lawyers. Uh.
(42:56):
Police initially look at all this stuff and they say, Okay,
this is at least half a million dollars depending on
how you bought it, you know what I mean, off
the grid. This is before they were able to spend
the time tracing everything. And then later sources come back
and they say, actually, this is more like five million
dollars just for the guns. The condo itself. Um, we
(43:21):
know the value of it from well at the time
of this investigation. So we know the value of the
condo from the last time it was sold, which was
where it was worth almost five hundred thousand dollars. Because
of the location it's in, that price has surely spiked.
(43:41):
I wonder how many millions that actually would be. That's crazy.
Thank you tracked two thousand eight whatever the crash happened,
and then you just add you know, add seven. You know,
I've been on Zillo a lot. Give me an address.
I'll tell you how much. It was the cost right now,
such as Zillo Guy Zillo, It'll make you feel really
(44:03):
bad about your current situation. There's some I saw some
page I can't remember what it was online, but was
called Zillo Gone Wild. Yeah, and it's just um what's
it's just weird houses on Zillo houses. Your mother would
be ashamed of how since you can't take home to
(44:26):
meet your parents. So this is you know, we have
some levity, but there are some dark things coming up.
Whatever the official story is or whatever story he was pushing,
it is clear that Lash may have been sick for
some time. He was sixty years old at the time
of his death, and shortly before passing away, he had
(44:49):
told Katherine nebrind Goren that he was suffering from terminal cancer.
He did add that this was a result of exposure
to mysterious dangerous chemicals in the course of his career
as a spy or an operative, and he had been
acting so very sketchy for so very long. He was
(45:12):
always careful to cantileze people, to never tell them exactly
what he did for a living, but to drop mysterious
hints it uh and just just in conversation, right, and
It's weird because the way that he talks to people
about this, or the way they recount conversations with him,
it sounds like he is trying to bait people into
(45:35):
asking him more so that he can say, you know,
I can't say anymore, you know what I mean? He
just wants he wants to be that U dos Eck's
most interesting man. This doesn't work out for him, as
you know. That's why we started with the death. But
this is part one of our examination in the story.
(45:57):
We know it sounds a little crazy right now where
we at. We've got an unsolved death, and we've got
questions that seem to mount as the investigation continues. Can
we answer any of these questions? Well, we'll we'll give
it a shot in part two of this episode. In
the meantime, we want to know what you think. Have
(46:17):
you ever heard of Jeffrey Allen lash Do you have
other stories of mysterious deaths that you would like to
share with your fellow conspiracy realists? If so, let us know.
We try to be easy to find online. That's right.
You can find us a Conspiracy Stuff on Twitter and Facebook,
Conspiracy Stuff show on Instagram. Um, why don't you do
(46:38):
us a solid tode and pop on over to Apple
Podcasts and leave a review, five star review if you please.
We appreciate it, and it helps people discover the show.
Uh and helps to kind of bump up in those
those Apple rankings. Yes, and also, uh, just to add
this in before we get out of here and we
tell you about a couple other contact methods. I keep
(46:59):
thinking about this concept that he wasn't a part or
at least it was confirmed that he wasn't a part
of any kind of drug running scheme or like an
overlord or any an overlord, a drug lord of any kind.
Um It. It keeps sticking in my mind just how
clean his life was, even with all of those guns,
(47:21):
even with all the cash and all the weird cars
and all the stuff, How clean his life was, um
and it it feels like to me, that's almost a
reaction to being in a life where you know none
of your money is legitimate. You can't spend any of
your cash, you can't do anything with it. So you
(47:43):
find a way to clean it. You find a way
to live a life that is um where you could
actually use your wealth for whatever you wanted. And if
somebody looked at you. You wouldn't get in trouble anyway. Well,
I'm sorry, we don't have to talk about this now.
Ah was to stay stay tuned, folks. Uh, And that's
(48:04):
a that's a great that. I'm really glad that you're
pointing that out, because after a certain threshold, being too
clean can be almost as bad as having some believable priors.
So we're going to we're gonna hold for that. We
want to hear what you think about situations like this. Also,
if you want to learn more about people who have
(48:27):
ditched their identities or committed pseudo side faking one's death,
then do check out. There's an excellent book Playing Dead.
We can talk a little bit more about how people
try to transform their personalities, how to some dues and don'ts.
Maybe we'll throw some of those in. But we want
(48:47):
to hear from you. Give us give us call one
eight three three st d W y t K. Tell
us which we shoot for it. Tell us about times
you had a different identity, maybe maybe for a few hours,
maybe for you days. Uh, you know, let us know
if we can use your name and or a cool
nickname on the air. You've got three minutes, they belong
to you. If you have a story that is longer
(49:10):
than three minutes, I assume that faking your death or
living under a different identity would be more than a
three minute story. Feel free to write it out in
full and send it to us as a good old
fashioned email where we are conspiracy at i heart radio
dot com. Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is
(49:47):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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