Myths & Legends Of Rancho Santa Fe
The ferocity with which Rancho Santa Fe guards its privacy is no coy pose, as anyone who might try to find a residence on Mapquest will readily agree. Any address entered brings up a map with a maze of unmarked, anonymous streets.

The richest zip code in America does not draw beach-going crowds or gambling tourists, and any resident speaking of the Ranch to an outsider seems wary of giving too much away. Yet Rancho Santa Fe seems to dwell in a hush of history, where tales of bygone local rogues, daring dreamers, and sordid tragedies are whispered if they are told at all.

The first European land owner in the area was Juan Maria Osuna, a wealthy and proud patriot of Alta, California, the short-lived breakaway republic. Osuna’s sons fought the invading American army at the battles of San Pasqual and Mule Hill in December, 1846. The wily Californios trapped General Stephen Watts Kearny’s 100 dragoons on the hill just south of Escondido; the besieged soldiers were forced to kill and devour their pack animals. Renowned cavalry scout Kit Carson escaped and returned three days later with 200 U.S. Marines and sailors to lift the siege, and the U.S. Army marched in to claim Southern California. Soon, the Acheson-Topeka railroad line arrived and planted the famed eucalyptus groves to farm railroad ties. When the scheme crumbled, the railroad parceled out the land, but Rancho Santa Fe became something very different from its neighbors: a planned community that cultivated isolated tranquility.

So oblique are the twists of Ranch history, that even the career of RSF’s inaugural community architect is shrouded in controversy. National City’s Lilian Rice won the plum commission and found herself free to develop a uniquely modern-style building on mission and Mediterranean themes. Diane Welch, author of an upcoming book on Rice, explains that Rice rode the forefront of a new wave of home design. "They wanted homes to be organic," Welch says, "and to harmonize with the landscape, which was a three-sixty from how it had been. So, yes, she was a maverick, particularly because she was a woman."

For her trouble, Rice has been left in historical limbo: Google searches show her name almost unanimously misspelled, the birth year on her headstone is wrong, and some local history buffs even dispute her authorship of much of the designs. Welch admits that no extant records detail the terms of Rice’s commission, but she has pieced together an oral history. Chief engineer LG Sinard chose San Diego’s Requa & Jackson to design the Ranch in 1922. Rice had worked with Requa on The Lodge at Torrey Pines and many naval engineering projects during World War I, and decided to fill in for an overworked Requa. "It was a great opportunity," says Welch, "but the money wasn’t enough. It was out in the boondocks, two hours from the office downtown. The closest thing was Del Mar, and that over a bumpy, dusty road. All that was there were a few adobes."

Rice supervised the work crews and handled a prickly Sinard, but Welch’s research hasn’t uncovered for whom Rice actually worked. "It seems that she would have turned up on the staff of the Santa Fe Land Improvement Company...but there aren’t any records of Rice, beyond Requa & Jackson’s name on the plans." Welch declines to suggest that Rice has been sold short because of her gender, but local realtor and Rancho Santa Fe Record society columnist Elise Esprit insists that many in the Ranch still doubt Rice’s legacy. "There’re some parties, including myself, who believe she did all the work, but others believe that she was a front, and Sinard did most of the work." Realtor and lifelong Ranch resident Tom Clotfelter was born in the Osuna Adobe 2, and has pictures from before and after the renovations performed on it in 1923. He believes Rice’s contributions are genuine.

With the invasion of Hollywood, Rancho Santa Fe joined Del Mar and La Jolla in hosting famous faces, but the Ranch was always more of a cloistered refuge. Douglas Fairbanks famously set up housekeeping in the area with his wife, Mary Pickford, until Hollywood soon called them away. Bing Crosby, Jimmy Durante, Robert Young, Ephraim Zimbalist, Jr., and Peggy Lee all graced the Ranch’s social set, but as local realtor George Barrett describes it, "you wouldn’t know who lived there, unless they wanted you to. It really has an effect, the way it’s structured, on the anonymity of the people living there." The archetypal American recluse, Howard Hughes, settled in the Ranch before moving on to Las Vegas. But the billionaire aviator was a living ghost, unseen by all but his inner circle of handlers. Because the mail was never delivered to homes, the post office became an informal gathering place to keep alive a small town spirit.

One celebrity who never shied from public spectacle was Victor Mature. In his twilight years, the B-movie idol was an omnipresent fixture about town in his infamous scarlet golf cart (with matching fireman’s helmet), and outfitted with a formidable arsenal of potent beverages.

Over the years, the Ranch has had its share of scandal, but the hushed tones and missing links in the stories make the truth hard to follow. Local authority Susie Hayes recalls that the old Massey house became "sort of a hippie compound" in the 1960s. Clotfelter adds that the group was part of Synanon, a drug-recovery program that mutated into a dangerous cult in the ’60s. While Synanon’s notorious Imperial Marines beat defectors and once planted a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a hostile attorney, the cult was banished without incident.

Sadly, another cult would put the national spotlight on the Ranch in 1997. Barrett goes out on a limb discussing Heaven’s Gate at all, a sore subject with most Ranch residents. "It was the right thing to do," he says, "to purchase the property and tear it down." Clotfelter was one of the first civilians on the scene on the tragic day, and describes the scene. "The deputies were coming down the front walk, and their faces were just ashen." When asked if the tragedy changed the Ranch in any lasting way, Clotfelter laughs and gives the Ranchers’ classic response: "They were just renters."

Unfortunately, the privacy afforded by the Ranch has led to many of its juiciest stories ending in unanswered questions, and often shows outsiders taking advantage of the seclusion. In the 1980s, J. David Dominelli, a self-professed foreign currency expert, swindled millions out of his neighbors, while Clifford Graham, a former bodybuilder and social climber, touted a scheme to extract gold from common sand. Dominelli went to federal prison, but Graham vanished without a trace in 1985. "He was a crook from the start," Clotfelter says, noting how Graham added to his fortune from the Fotomat kiosk chain by selling junk stock to his friends. Clotfelter is anything but puzzled about what became of him. "When he took it on the lam, he may have had some hit men after him."

Far less famous, but more unsettling, is the story of Ian Spiro, an international arms dealer with ties to the global intelligence community. In 1992, Spiro and his family moved into the Ranch, after buying a house sight unseen from Lady Diana Spencer’s family. Later that year, sheriff’s deputies found his wife, Gail, 42, and three children, Sara, 16, Adam, 14, and Dina, 10, shot to death in the home. Spiro himself was found in his car in the Anza-Borrego Desert three days later, poisoned by cyanide. The sheriff concluded that Spiro, plagued by marital trouble and high debt, killed his family and then himself, but filmmaker Glenn Smith believes the evidence raises the specter of a far more sinister explanation.

"I just won’t let this die, because I owe it to the family and the community, not to let the government pull the wool over our eyes." Smith interviewed Spiro’s housekeeper extensively, and documents her story in his film The Hungry Woman, due out this month. A few weeks before the murders, a book identified Spiro as a major player in negotiations to release British and U.S. hostages in Lebanon, and gave away his location. Spiro panicked, claiming his "cover was blown," but he did not move quickly enough. Spiro’s housekeeper told Smith that only a few days before the murders, well-dressed, armed Arab gentlemen barged into his home while he was away, then left just as abruptly. The visit was also witnessed by Spiro’s gardener, who turned up murdered, naked, and with hands bound in the desert a week after Spiro’s death.

Spiro never comes up as a player in Iran-Contra transcripts, but hostages Terry Waite and Peter Jacobsen mention him by name, and Oliver North credits him anonymously as the key contact with Hizbollah, the Palestinian radical group behind the kidnappings. The week of the murders, a bomb was discovered beneath the car of a U.S. Navy Admiral in La Jolla — an unusual coincidence, unless one accepts that a Hizbollah hit squad came to America with a list of targets. Smith further speculates that Spiro might have met his end at the hands of his own government cronies. "I can’t say the government did the wrong thing by covering it up," Smith admits. "If you can’t protect people in a military town, they can’t protect anyone."

Other possibilities arise with further investigation, but no certainty. A 1995 San Diego Magazine article posited that Israeli Mossad agents might have committed the murders, and Spiro was a credited informant of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro, whose questionable suicide death in 1991 is a capstone of modern conspiracy lore. Again, more questions than answers surround the missing truth, and a tantalizing knot of mystery is obscured by the peaceful silence of the Ranch.
— Cody Goodfellow, photos by Vincent Knakal, Paramount/The Kobal Collection/WireImage.com, and
courtesy of the Rancho Santa Fe Historical Society archives