Jeffrey Alan Lash mystery

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Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange Case of Jeffrey Alan Lash
Jeffrey Alan Lash,
2010 Cal. DL photo
On or about July 17, police retrieved the deceased body of Jeffrey Alan Lash from a vehicle parked in Pacific Palisades, Cal. The story soon broke that two women, Catherine Nebron and Dawn VadBunker, parked the car where it was discovered with the corpse inside. Attorney Harland Braun had apparently informed authorities of its location.

Braun was hired by Nebron and described her as Lash's longtime fiancee. Braun informed the media that Nebron and her employee and assistant, VadBunker, were with Lash on July 4 when he died of causes brought on by terminal illness. They were reportedly in a grocery store parking lot at the time.

After Lash died, the women reportedly relocated the vehicle, left the body in it and fled to Oregon. Braun stated the two did so for reasons including they believed Lash was an ET-human hybrid working for US intelligence agencies, and that his contacts would soon retrieve the body. They reportedly opted to not seek medical treatment for the dying man for similar reasons, and maintained they were following his prearranged instructions. It would later surface that at least one additional party may have also been with the two women, and the grocery store where the man was said to have died was, oddly enough, frequented by Whitley Strieber.

Nebron returned to the Los Angeles area from Oregon approximately twelve days later to find the remains of Lash still sitting undiscovered in the vehicle. It was apparently then that she contacted Braun for assistance and legal representation, and the attorney notified authorities of the body.

Police subsequently searched a condo owned by Nebron and reported to be the residence of her and Lash, which was located in the vicinity of where she and VadBunker left the car containing the corpse. The search resulted in the confiscation of some 1200 guns, additional weapons and literally tons of ammo estimated to be worth several million dollars. The two-bedroom, 2,000 square-foot condo was located in a relatively exclusive area and was valued at $750,000 to $1million. Every room of the structure was reportedly stacked to the ceiling with guns and boxes of gun accessories, more weapons, such as machetes and bows, and cases of ammo. Police filled the driveway and a nearby alley with items brought out of the condo. An LA police captain described the scene as the worst case of weapons hoarding she had ever seen in her 27-year law enforcement career. Some $230,000 in cash was confiscated from the condo and reportedly counted in a neighbor's garage.

Media reports described neighbors as saying Lash occasionally claimed he was an intelligence operative, and neighbors also stated they did not know how the condo became filled with weapons and boxes. They had not noticed how all the items were delivered to the residence.

Lash was additionally reported to have owned many vehicles, one of which was described as an SUV equipped to drive underwater. VadBunker's husband, Jim Curry, told reporters the woman's job entailed renting garages all over Southern California to store what he described as Lash's dozens of vehicles. The story, Curry explained, was that Lash was CIA and had other agents who might need vehicles on a whim.

Online sleuths and interested parties began uncovering more info about VadBunker, including an odd letter she wrote to her parents, in which the woman described her recent actions as having been for the good of the world. VadBunker's mother, Laura VadBunker, corroborated existence of the hybrid story to the media, stating that the entire episode was "worse than a Twilight Zone movie."

"He was part alien and part human and was out to save the world," Laura VadBunker added.

Also introduced in the online community was a suspicious alleged legal doc interpreted to have been posted by the younger VadBunker, establishing her as a member of the VadBunker family, but its origins and purposes were not entirely clear. While investigating the document, an individual using the screen name SysConfig subsequently identified the judge who allegedly signed it as having been retired prior to its creation date, further calling its authenticity into question.

SysConfig identified a unit neighboring the condo owned by Nebron as owned by Assistant District Attorney Whelma T. Llanos and attorney Dominic J. Messiha. The unit owned by Llanos was near the condo where Nebron and Lash reportedly resided and the weapons stash was confiscated, and it may possibly have been Llanos' garage where the nearly quarter of a million dollars was counted. SysConfig notified a news outlet which had previously covered the story. A response was received, but no particular interest was demonstrated by the outlet in the irony of an Assistant DA possibly being a neighbor of Lash and Nebron.

Authorities have not yet reported results of their investigations into the origins of the weapons, cash and additional items taken into custody. When all the dust settles, the legal status of the weapons and cash will prove to be key aspects of this truly bizarre story. The intentions of the various people involved, their lines of work, and the purposes of their actions and statements may never be entirely clear, only whether or not police ever file any charges against any of them. At this point, foul play is not suspected in the death of Jeffrey Alan Lash, whoever and whatever he may have actually been in life.

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More Lash pictures.

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September 2, 20155:07pm

More than 1200 guns and several tonnes of ammunition were found inside Jeffrey Alan Lash’s Pacific Palisades home.
BY MARNIE O’NEILLnews.com.au


ON JULY 17, the badly decomposing body of a man was found in an SUV in front of an apartment in California’s Pacific Palisades.

Police were alerted to its presence via a tip-off from celebrity lawyer Harland Braun, who famously got actor Robert Blake acquitted of murder and counts action hero and part-time mobster Steven Seagal as a client.

Braun told officers the dead man was a CIA agent who had died of nerve gas poisoning two weeks earlier. He added that a search of the apartment would reveal an arsenal of weapons and ammunition worth about $US5 million ($A7 million) stashed inside.

The source of Braun’s information was Catherine Nebron, who said she’d been riding in the SUV with her fiancee of 17 years, Jeff Lash, and her friend Dawn VadBunker on July 4 when Lash suddenly became ill.

Nebron and VadBunker tried to cool him down with ice packs in the carpark of a Santa Monica grocery store but he died.

The women drove back to the apartment Nebron shared with Lash at 1770 Pacific Palisades Drive and left the SUV parked across the street with his body still inside. Then they fled to Oregon.

It was mid-August before police investigators could confirm the dead man’s identity as that of Jeffrey Alan Lash, also known as “Bob Smith”, depending on who he was talking to.

According to Braun, Nebron believed Lash was a “half human, half alien” secret government operative on a mission to save humanity. He’d warned her and VadBunker to skip town immediately in the event of his death and that his body would be picked up by his mysterious employers.

Months earlier, Lash had been diagnosed with late stage cancer, a disease, he told Nebron, stemming from having been poisoned by a CIA agent. He also told her he had a brain infection.

“She figured that whoever he was working with would understand what was going on and they would get the body out of there,” Braun told People magazine.

“She still believes it, to her core, that he was working for some government agency.”

But no one ever picked him up. Nebron told Braun she was shocked when she returned from Oregon to find Braun’s bloated, oozing body still there.

“So then she decided we’d better call police,” Braun said.

That call to police opened a door into the secretive life of a 60-year-old loner.
Dawn VadBunker, 39, who was with Catherine Nebron when Jeffrey Lash died, remains missing.

Dawn VadBunker, 39, who was with Catherine Nebron when Jeffrey Lash died, remains missing.Source:Facebook
The entrance to the apartment Lash shared with Nebron at 1770 Pacific Palisades Drive.

The entrance to the apartment Lash shared with Nebron at 1770 Pacific Palisades Drive.Source:Supplied

Neighbours told the LAPD that Lash, whom they knew as “Bob Smith”, had claimed to work for a government agency “like the FBI or CIA”. He told similar stories to neighbours at his previous residence in Sunset Mesa, according to the Palisadian-Post. The apartment manager told the Post Lash always dressed in black and acted paranoid, checking out rooms before he entered.

To Nebron and others, he told stories about daring covert missions, including one that saw him take a bullet to the head, leaving him in a coma for weeks.

Dawn VadBunker, Nebron’s friend and assistant who was with her in the SUV when Lash died, also believed that Lash was half human, half alien.

Unlike Nebron, however, VanBunker never returned to California. Her family filed a missing persons report until they received a letter from her, declaring they would never see her again.

She did, however, speak to People magazine early last month, telling the reporter she had been introduced to Lash in the weeks before his death by Nebron, who’d asked her to perform Reiki, or palm healing, on him.

VadBunker said she was first told a CIA operative poisoned him and later that he had a brain infection.

“I did two sessions and wouldn’t go back,” VadBunker told the magazine. “I was told we were being watched all the time and no one can harm him. The man was very, very ill. I never met a man who wasn’t dead in that condition.”

That was the last anyone heard from VadBunker, who strangely made no mention of being present in the SUV on July 4.

Her mother Laura believes Dawn had a mental breakdown after watching Lash die. She says her daughter and Negron truly believed that Lash was a secret agent whose mission was to save the world.

“I was told he was half alien and half man and came from a different planet,” Mrs VadBunker said.

“It’s worse than a Twilight Zone movie and we’ve lived through hell.”

Laura VadBunker says she was also told that Lash had been reincarnated numerous times, and at one point was George Washington.
Detectives near the SUV containing Jeffrey Lash’s badly decomposed body.

Detectives near the SUV containing Jeffrey Lash’s badly decomposed body.Source:Twitter
Jeffrey Alan Lash, aka Bob Smith, pictured in his 2010 driver’s licence.

Jeffrey Alan Lash, aka Bob Smith, pictured in his 2010 driver’s licence.Source:Supplied
Jeffrey Alan Lash pictured in his 1996 driver’s licence.

Jeffrey Alan Lash pictured in his 1996 driver’s licence.Source:Supplied

So far, little is known about Lash other than the following: He was born on December 3, 1954, to a piano teacher mother and microbiologist father.

He graduated from Los Angeles’s Westchester High School in 1972, enrolled in the University of California, Los Angeles, but dropped out in the mid-1980s. It’s possible he engaged in some classified work for the US Government during this time using one or more false names and fake records.

Lash’s father Joseph owned his own lab and allegedly collaborated with a Dr Elmer Belt, who pioneered sex change surgery techniques. Upon his father’s death on September 11, 2010, Lash may have inherited his dad’s microbiology patents. It’s possible the roots of his claim to be a human-alien hybrid on a mission to save the world stemmed from his father’s legacy.

Shirley Anderson, the longtime girlfriend of Joseph Lash, says Lash would rarely visit his father.

“When we saw him he was perfectly normal,” Ms Anderson said. “He would stop by and we would invite him to dinner and if he could make it he would stay but it was rare.”

The last time she saw him was in 2010 when his father was dying. She heard nothing until Los Angeles County coroner Assistant Chief Ed Winter contacted her last month.

“We were not privy to any of his friends,” she said. “We never knew where he lived. We didn’t know he had a fiancee. He didn’t want us talking on the phone because he didn’t want to put us in harm’s way. I don’t know if it was the truth or he just didn’t want to keep in touch.”

As for the weapons and ammunitions arsenal inside his house, police believe he was simply a gun collector and have found no evidence he sold the weapons or planned to use them illegally.

“He must have been ordering stuff for years,” Braun told the Times. “We are talking about US $5 million dollars worth of guns. There was $230,000 in cash found.”

Braun told the Associated Press that there was no evidence that Lash was a drug dealer or had any source of criminal income.

VadBunker and Nebron, who told Braun she often heard Lash on the phone supposedly speaking to Condoleezza Rice or former CIA director David Petraeus, were not the only women in Lash’s life.

Prior to living with Nebron at Pacific Palisades, Lash shared a Malibu condo with a woman named Jocelyn for 10 years and was also romantically involved with a woman named Michelle Lyons. It has since emerged that all three women had been financially supporting him.

Braun said Nebron was scared that if she stopped financially supporting Lash, a family or friend might get hurt by a government agency member.

Nebron, Jocelyn, and Lyons, in addition to four of Lash’s first cousins have now submitted claims to Lash’s estate.

Meanwhile, Lash’s official cause of death is still unclear and his life an even bigger mystery.

The LAPD says the investigation is ongoing.
Some of the weapons found at Lash’s house had never been fired or still had price tags on them.

Some of the weapons found at Lash’s house had never been fired or still had price tags on them.Source:Twitter

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Dawn VadBunker ex-husband said that Dawn has written her parents indicating that she is now living in a commune of like minded people in Oregon and that they would never see her again.

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Lash parents - father was a microbiologist and mom a piano teacher. 

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Jul 13, 2016 10:16:58 GMT almagata said:

Dawn VadBunker ex-husband said that Dawn has written her parents indicating that she is now living in a commune of like minded people in Oregon and that they would never see her again.

In what city...

[almagata]

Aug 16, 2016 7:31:45 GMT Location Location Location said:

Jul 13, 2016 10:16:58 GMT almagata said:

Dawn VadBunker ex-husband said that Dawn has written her parents indicating that she is now living in a commune of like minded people in Oregon and that they would never see her again.

In what city...

I don't know.  I'd search for her but living in a commune = living off the grid.