An eccentric billionaire's lust for a legendary prostitute with a diamond in her tooth may be the key to a mystery that has persisted for decades.
The wall of silence protecting the late Howard Hughes for almost a half-century is apparently beginning to crumble. A former close associate now claims he flew the billionaire on secret nighttime trips to brothels in the late 1960s. That was during a four-year period when Hughes supposedly never left his private lair on the ninth floor of the Las Vegas Desert Inn.
In the most startling revelation, the circumstances surrounding a 1967 visit to a brothel called the Cottontail Ranch appear to bolster a much-ridiculed claim from Utah resident Melvin Dummar. He insists he found Hughes, injured and lying in the Nevada desert, on Dec. 29, 1967, and drove him back to Las Vegas.
Retired FBI investigator Gary Magnesen has just published a new book, "The Investigation," that details the new evidence. "It answers the question as to why Howard Hughes, the richest man in America at the time, was out lying face down in a dirt road in the middle of nowhere," Magnesen said.
If Magnesen's thesis is correct, it means Dummar and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
After Hughes died in 1976, a handwritten will was found at the Church Office Building in Salt Lake City. The will divided the vast Hughes fortune 16 ways, with Dummar and the church to get one-sixteenth each. Each share was said to be worth $150 million. But a jury declared the will a hoax, partly because Dummar's story seemed so unbelievable.
The new evidence comes from G. Robert Deiro, a wealthy Las Vegas businessman who once worked as Hughes' pilot and as Nevada director of aviation for the Hughes Tool Co.
"Do I think the will is real? Absolutely," Deiro said.
Today, Deiro lives in an impressive Italian-style villa. He made his fortune as a California airline executive and later in the Las Vegas real estate business. He's so well-connected and involved in so many charitable activities that a street in Las Vegas was named in his honor.
"He's very well-known in the community," Magnesen said, vouching for Deiro's credibility. "He's an upstanding member of the community. He has nothing to gain (by making up a story about Hughes.)"
In the 1960s Deiro ran the North Las Vegas Air Terminal and stayed on as general manager after Hughes bought the airport. He said the billionaire began sneaking out of his hotel for secret, nighttime flights. A phone call would come from a Hughes aide, asking Deiro to have a plane waiting. A Chrysler sedan would arrive at the airport, always after dark, and Hughes would get out and go flying. On several flights, Deiro and the billionaire, who was a famous aviator in his own right early in his life, would practice simulated approaches to an imaginary airport Hughes hoped to build one day.
Then, Deiro said, the purpose of the secret flights changed. On two occasions Hughes asked Deiro to fly to an isolated brothel known as Ash Meadows. Deiro said the billionaire had a favorite girl there named "Sunny."
"I don't know where she is now," Deiro said. "No one else seems to either. But they all remember her because she had a diamond in her upper left incisor, which was quite outrageous in those days."
One night in 1967, between Christmas and New Year's Eve, Deiro said Hughes asked him to fly to the Cottontail Ranch instead of Ash Meadows. Deiro said Hughes had just learned that "Sunny" had changed her place of business.
Brothels can operate legally in most Nevada counties. The Cottontail Ranch had just opened on Highway 95 at the end of an unpaved airstrip. It's in an isolated location, with no other buildings in sight for many miles.
Inside the brothel, Deiro said the billionaire was shaggy, unkempt and anonymous. "He really didn't care about his personal appearance," Deiro said. "His breath stank, and he stank of body odor."
Hughes paired up with Sunny and disappeared into a back room, Deiro said. The pilot said he was exhausted from a long day. After a couple of drinks, he fell asleep, evidently for several hours.
"I was allowed to go to sleep in the kitchen," Deiro said. "When I awoke, he (Hughes) was gone. And the brothel was closing, and I was unceremoniously told I would have to leave."
Deiro said he flew around the area and couldn't find Hughes. So he flew back to Las Vegas and kept his mouth shut about his missing boss. He's not sure if Hughes left the brothel willingly or unwillingly.
"He was slightly arrogant, you know," Deiro said. "And he may have gotten into a problem there. And he was maybe escorted out, 86'd, as they call it."
Some seven miles south of Cottontail Ranch, just off the highway, investigator Magnesen and Dummar believe they've identified the exact spot where Dummar says he picked up the injured old man.
Magnesen believes Hughes got a ride that night from another customer at the brothel. "They ride down the road," Magnesen said. "They pull off the side of the road, and the guy decides to rob him, smacks him in the side of the head, takes whatever he has and leaves him there," he speculates.
Today, the Cottontail Ranch is closed and temporarily out of business. Caretaker Jeff Frederick allowed a reporter and photographer from KSL-TV to enter. When told that the famous billionaire might have been a customer decades ago, he didn't seemed surprised. "Nope, I've heard it quite a few times," Frederick said.
Before being told about the mysterious "Sunny," the girl with the diamond in her tooth, Frederick pointed at a painting of a woman on the wall. "That gal's name was Sunny something," Frederick said.
In the painting, the woman's lips are closed so the teeth are not visible. But the painting is dated 1968. "She was one of the main working gals here," Frederick said. "One of the most popular."
Another painting on the wall is a portrait of the late Beverly Harrell, who owned the Cottontail Ranch in the 1960s. Magnesen said he interviewed Harrell's widower, who admitted that Hughes became a regular customer. According to Magnesen, Beverly Harrell wanted to go to authorities with that information during the trial of the so-called "Mormon Will" episode, but her husband talked her out of it.
If his story is true, why didn't Deiro come forward years ago?
He said he was under a nondisclosure agreement and was accustomed to never speaking about the secrets of Howard Hughes. Also, Deiro said he never understood the geographic details of Dummar's story until last year. When he read a 2004 interview with Dummar, he said it was like a light went on in his head. Deiro immediately realized his own story meshed perfectly with Dummar's.
Deiro also said one detail of Dummar's story convinced him it was true. Dummar said he dropped the old man off at The Sands resort, not the Desert Inn where everyone knew Howard Hughes lived. Why would Hughes want to be dropped at The Sands?
Deiro believes Hughes needed time to figure out how to sneak back into the Desert Inn after his embarrassing night in the desert. Disheveled and getting out of a strange pickup truck, he wouldn't have wanted to be seen by his low-level employees and his LDS aides. Very few people knew it at the time, Deiro said, but Hughes had a trusted secretary, Nadine Henley, who worked in a tiny office behind The Sands. Deiro believes Hughes had Dummar drop him there so he could sneak back into the Desert Inn.
"For Dummar to have made this up, to create this," Deiro said, "he'd have had to be a genius."
Bob Maheu was Hughes' former right-hand man in Nevada. When contacted by KSL-TV, he reiterated the position Hughes aides have stuck to for three decades: "Mr. Hughes never left the hotel from Thanksgiving Eve 1966 until he left it on Thanksgiving Day 1970," Maheu said.
When he was told that Bob Deiro had gone public with a different story, Maheu seemed surprised. "I have found (Bob) very reliable in the past." Maheu said. "He was a very reliable employee."
For his part, Dummar shed tears when Magnesen presented him with a copy of his new book bolstering the once-discredited story of the old man in the desert. "I've taken a lot of harassment and criticism throughout the years," Dummar said. "And hopefully now, this will help."
On KSL-TV
See John Hollenhorst's interview with Melvin Dummar Sunday night at 10 on KSL-TV Channel 5 and read about it in Monday's Deseret Morning News.
E-mail: hollenhorst@ksl.com