Jeffrey Lash had been dying long before his death. In the years leading up to his passing, he had lost so much weight that his neighbors had begun to call him “Skinny Bob.” (He told them that his name was Bob. Only a few people in his inner circle knew his real name.)
Part of this inner circle was Lash’s fiancé Catherine Nebron, as well as her personal assistant Dawn VadBunker. They lived with Jeffrey and knew plenty of secret information about him. How true any of this information was is another story.
He confided in them that he was a former CIA operative keeping a low profile in Los Angeles. He was slowly dying because enemy spies had poisoned him with a slow-working and undetectable toxin. To make matters even stranger, he told the two women that when he died, they were to make sure his body didn’t fall into “enemy hands.”
The Death of Jeffrey Lash
There is very little known about about recluse Jeffrey Alan Lash who died with a massive arsenal in his home pic.twitter.com/kCQh3gnGpE
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) July 28, 2015
On July 3, 2015, Jeffrey Lash collapsed in a grocery store parking lot and died. Catherine was with him at the time, and she did as he had instructed her to do in the case of his death: she bundled him into their SUV and placed packs of ice atop his body. She drove the SUV to a previously decided upon residential street and left his corpse propped up in the driver’s seat.
He had informed her that government agents would come to collect his body, and it was crucial that she wasn’t in town when this happened. So the next day, Catherine and Dawn left LA and drove to rural Oregon, where they hid in a motel. Neither of the two women had told anyone where they were going. And before long, Dawn’s mother had filed a missing person’s report. This led to police tracking down Catherine and Dawn.
The pair returned to LA two weeks after Jeffrey’s death. When Catherine drove down the street where she had left him, she was surprised to see that the SUV was still there, his body still inside. For whatever reason, government agents hadn’t come to collect the remains. (It should be noted that the reason the body wasn’t found during those two weeks because the SUV had completely blacked out windows.)
The Real Jeffrey Lash
“He could have been working for anyone,’ atty says of mystery man w/ Palisades gun/ammo cache http://t.co/OrbeiERCC6 pic.twitter.com/M89Vz5Pv7M
— KTLA (@KTLA) July 23, 2015
Catherine’s world was shattered. If Jeffrey hadn’t been honest about government agents coming to collect his body, what else had he lied to her about? Perhaps he was never a CIA operative at all. She phoned the police, who came to retrieve what was left of Jeff. They also searched his place of residence: a home that belonged to Catherine.
Jeff had made many alterations to Catherine’s home, adding secret rooms that he did not allow her to enter. He was on a “top-secret mission,” after all. He made her sleep on the bathroom floor, as he had filled the rest of the house with his own belongings. Police found millions of dollars’ worth of items throughout the house.
What was most disturbing was Jeff’s firearms collection. Police found 1,200 guns and enough ammunition to supply an army. The collective value of his guns was estimated to be around $3 million.
No one knows how Jeffrey Lash got the money to purchase these firearms. Records show that he’d never worked a day in his life. He could have inherited the money, but again, that’s something that likely would have shown up on his records.
Jeffrey Lash: Half-Human, Half-Alien?
Here’s where things get really weird. Following his death, Catherine revealed that Jeff had told her that he was actually a half-human, half-alien hybrid. According to him, he had been “sent to Earth to save the planet from an interstellar war.” Somehow, both Catherine and Dawn believed Jeff. Dawn even claimed that she watched him shape-shift in front of her.
Clearly, Jeffrey Lash was a master manipulator. Aside from Catherine and Dawn, Jeffrey dated and manipulated other women into believing his obvious lies. One such woman was named Michelle Lyons, who referred to him as her “boyfriend” (despite his being engaged). She was a successful businesswoman who would bend over backwards for Jeff. His seduction of wealthy women could possibly explain where he got his money from.
Catherine even said in an interview that, aside from confining her to small sections of her own house, he would give her “fines” if she failed to comply with him. Additionally, Lyons claimed that she bought him over a million dollars’ worth of guns over the years.
So is the mystery solved? Was Jeffrey Lash just a brilliant con man who manipulated women into giving him money? Well, there are still a few unanswered questions.
The Questions We Still Have
Any rational person will agree that Jeffrey Lash was not an alien. However, the fact that Dawn claims to have seen him shape-shift raises some questions. Was she so manipulated that she was literally made to see things that weren’t there? Were hallucinogenic drugs involved? Was she lying? We may never know. What’s even more mysterious is that the coroner gave him no official cause of death.
Still, these unanswered questions do not deter from the fact that he was a dishonest person who thrived off the exploitation of others. In the case of Jeffrey Lash, we must remember that usually the simplest explanation is the correct one.