The Alien-Spy-Grifter-Hybrid of The Highlands

And How Frances Sharpe of the Palisadian-Post Got the Scoop

Scott Johnson of The Hollywood Reporter investigates the late Jeffrey Lash and how this gun-obsessed charmer exposed the dark side of “Mayberry” to the outside world.

Jeffrey Lash was a spy, a post-9/11 covert operative who seduced women in LA’s tony Pacific Palisades with tales of, yes, supernatural powers. But when police found him dead in his car with a $5 million gun stash near the homes of showbiz elite, a stranger-than-fiction tale emerged of abuse, lies, a mystery illness and a grifter with “more charisma than 10 Trumps.”

Like well-tended balconies, the hills of Pacific Palisades rise abruptly from the sea in sloping terraces, giving the place a dreamy quality. Houses with floor-to-ceiling windows and gently swaying chimes preen westward.

Tesla SUVs park in clean and quiet driveways. J.J. Abrams, Reese Witherspoon and honorary mayor Kevin Nealon—the list of Hollywood folks who live here is dizzying.

Much of it is leafy and green, nestled in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Police reports reflect the area’s relative security: a laptop stolen from an unlocked car, a phone swiped through an open kitchen door.

“We’d always joke that this was Mayberry,” says Frances Sharpe, who, for two years served as the editor of the Palisadian-Post, the town’s oldest newspaper.

The Post’s stories were charming. An ice cream shop was having a sale. Someone was turning 100. They offered a bonhomie that brought this exclusive Los Angeles community, where the average home value is $2.7 million, a bit closer together.

And then one day in July 2015, the Post ran a different kind of story online, the first of many just like it, even though the paper never ran stories online (until Sept. 7, 2017).

It was accompanied by a photo showing police gathered behind a Palisades condominium, where they had discovered hundreds of high-powered assault rifles and pistols, $230,000 in crisp bills and more than six tons of ammunition.

The owner of this arsenal was a local named Jeffrey Lash, whose decomposing corpse had been found in the front passenger seat of an SUV on Palisades Drive, dead for two weeks.

In the coming months, a bizarre tale that involved secret government agencies, covert Black Ops missions and even aliens (those from outer space) began to filter out.

News outlets from around the world dove in and then departed, leaving behind a feeling that the “palus,” the stakes that sheltered this community from the gaze of the outside world, had been torn loose.

Two years have passed since Lash was found.

Two women who knew him, and loved him, are now fighting in court against a coterie of cousins to recoup what they say is their share of millions.

Another woman from the dead man’s past has vanished, with no apparent explanation.

Romantic entanglements with others have emerged.

UFO enthusiasts have concluded that Lash’s death is evidence of dark truths long kept hidden from them.

Sitting at a Starbucks on Palisades Drive, not far from where Lash’s arsenal was found, Sharpe shakes her head. “It just wasn’t Mayberry anymore,” she says.

Sharpe was at work on July 18, 2015. It was a Saturday. She was nervous because the Post was about to publish the biggest investigative scoop in its long history.

For more than a year, Sharpe and her colleagues had been looking into allegations that a beloved local jeweler (Denton’s) had been thieving from customers. There had been 27 lawsuits. For a small community, it was shaping up to be a major scandal. Sharpe saw it as her duty to publish the dirty laundry.

As her team put the final touches on the story, Sharpe checked Facebook. Police had cordoned off Palisades Drive, the tree-lined road that winds uphill from Sunset Boulevard.

Rain poured down as Frances and staff photographer (Rich Schmitt) drove to the police cordon.

Instead of the local cops whom Frances knew, she ran into unfamiliar LAPD officers who barred her from entry. A bomb squad was stationed nearby.

She and Schmitt skirted around the cordon on back streets, going house by house, until they found one with an open garage door.

They knocked, identified themselves and were invited to the backyard, where they put up a ladder, peering over the foliage onto a broad alley below.

A white tent had been erected, a bit like the ad hoc government headquarters in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” A K-9 unit and a hazmat team had assembled. Police had cleared the closest neighbors. Men in civilian clothes milled around.

Rich snapped pictures, and the pair returned to the office, where Sharpe began emailing news alerts to the Post’s subscribers: A neighbor had been found dead in his SUV on the side of the road; inside his condo, police had found enough high-powered weapons to stage a rebellion.

The police thought they’d stumbled upon a gun trafficking ring (he had bought them legally). A neighbor sent Sharpe a picture showing a cop placing a rifle atop a huge pile of stacked guns, just some of the hundreds that Lash had stockpiled. For what purpose, nobody knew.

The news dispatches ricocheted across Southern California. In Santa Monica, Michelle Lyons, now 66, watched, and listened, and felt sick.

The arms cache discovery had made global headlines, but no one knew about her yet, even though she and Lash had been lovers since the mid-1980s.

Every day for three decades, Lyons had attended to Lash, and she thought she knew him. But in those first days, with news reports coming fast and furious, Lyons began to realize she knew very little. Her boyfriend, who had said his name was Jeff Henderson, obviously wasn’t who he had claimed to be.

She wasn’t even his only girlfriend—not by a mile. She felt adrift, mourning a dead stranger.

Lyons met Lash in 1984.

Here was a brilliant man with real charisma, she thought. His demeanor was intense and authentic; his stories were rich with detail. Thin and wiry, with a runner’s build and gray-blue eyes, Lash seemed alive to her needs.

In those early years, Lyons recalls, he was often angry, unable to control his emotions. He and Lyons made a pact. She would teach him love and communication; he would show her commitment and excellence.

He told her he was former CIA with top-secret security clearance. He said he performed counter-terrorism operations, hostage rescues and saved people from cults.

Lash owned lots of guns and seemed to know his way around them. He brought dozens of high-powered rifles and the gear that went with them into the condo they shared.

“He had this way of making you feel like the only person in the room, to respond right to your heart—you can’t fake that,” she says, “But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t evil.”

One day in 1998, after nearly 13 years together, Lash informed Lyons that he would be moving out of her apartment for a while.

(He had turned off the water, saying it would damage his guns, meaning for years she had to shower at a neighbor’s.)

He said a national security emergency had arisen that required immediate attention.

He then moved into the Pacific Palisades home of Lyons’ close friend Catherine Nebron and her husband, Phil Gorin, a dentist with a practice in Brentwood. It was a swanky condo complex.

Former Miami Heat center Chris Bosh lived nearby. So did “The Hills” star Lauren Conrad.

He never came home to Lyons. Still, she persisted.

From 2008 until Lash’s death, Lyons made a nightly trip to the Palisades to deliver whatever Lash and Nebron needed, including cash, food, ice and merchandise purchased from Amazon.

It was supposed to last for a few weeks, but Lyons ponied up the money for seven years.

She bought two “healing frequency machines” for $12,000 each, plus another $9,800 a year in storage fees (for a fleet of cars, including a “submarine vehicle”) for a decade.

In all, Lyons, who runs a successful computer consulting firm, estimates she shelled out $1.8 million.

(She is not alone: On Tuesday, Oct. 3, Nebron and Gorin, and nine of Lash’s distant cousins, are expected downtown at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse to assert their claim to estate assets.)

In 2015, Nebron hired an assistant, a young woman from Oxnard named Dawn Marie VadBunker to help manage paperwork for properties she owned around LA.

“Dawn mentioned he was turning her into an alien hybrid,” said her mother, Laura. “She could tell her head was getting larger. She said, ‘You know that [my ex-husband] wouldn’t be able to see me if he drove by because I would be invisible.’”

Turn westwards from the Palisades towards Malibu and the hills are scraped bare, which gives the neighborhoods a raw texture. Tilting perilously above the Pacific can leave you feeling adrift, unmoored by the sea’s tug.

This was the setting of Lash’s last stand. (It is believed he was suffering from ALS.) As his illness progressed and his relationships with Nebron, Gorin and Lyons grew more complex, Lash sought out yet more conquests.

Sometime around 2012, he established a relationship with Jocelyn Eberstein, an acupuncturist who lived in a Coastline Drive condominium and took him in. He spent half his time at Eberstein’s place where, again, he passed himself off as a covert agent.

Her landlord, Paul Rodriguez, recalls a morning when Lash emerged looking frantic. “Did you hear the shootout last night?” Lash asked excitedly. Rodriguez wasn’t aware of a shootout. “Right here,” Lash insisted, indicating that the gunmen had been lined up and down the street, duking it out. Rodriguez wasn’t buying it. Lash eventually backed off the story.

With his health fading, 60-year-old Lash had given Nebron instructions in the event of his death.

She was not to contact the police, he told her. Instead, he wanted her to wrap his body in blankets and leave it in his car to be found. Which is exactly what she did when, on July 4, 2015, Lash died. Per Lash’s instructions, Nebron and VadBunker wrapped Lash in blankets, closed the tinted windows, drove the car to the Palisades, locked the doors and took off.

“I just wanted to get outta Dodge,” Gorin later told Sharpe. Nebron and VadBunker relocated to Oregon.

It would take weeks before Lyons gathered the courage to investigate the other women in Lash’s life. She did so with Sharpe’s help. The two are collaborating on a book about Lyons’ experience, titled “One-Man Cult.”

(Lash seduced at least 10 women during the Palisadian years: Lyons contacted four and their stories mirrored her own.)

Lash had swooped in and disrupted their relationships. He had bilked them of money and leeched off their goodwill for years. Some had been intimidated and were scared, believing that Lash was capable of killing them.

It is hard to imagine how so many smart, successful women fell for Lash’s con. “That’s the question everyone has,” says Sharpe. “How could one person entice these people to do what they did?”

Sharpe believes the Lash case changed something fundamental in her homey community.

“Maybe the notion that we’re not immune to crime, to frightening things, to the things we usually see in other parts of the world,” she says.

It could have been worse, of course. Lash could have gone on a rampage. The guns could have fallen into the wrong hands. The house could have exploded.

“There’s this realization that you don’t know who your neighbors are,” she says. “That’s frightening.”

For the full version of this extraordinary story, visit hollywoodreporter.com/features/a-decomposing-body-10-duped-girlfriends-saga-alien-con-man-hollywoods-backyard-1037967.