Authorities’ tentative conclusion is that Jeffrey Alan Lash was a rich eccentric so caught up in his make-believe world of spying that his fiancee believed it, too 
 
 Inside his own head, Jeffrey Alan Lash was a secret government operative under constant surveillance by the CIA, the FBI or both. 
 
 He spent lavishly to build up an arsenal of 1,200 firearms, six and half tons of ammunition and explosive-making materials, which he piled high in every room of the small condominium he shared with his fiancee in a well-heeled hillside enclave high above the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles. 
 
 He had twelve cars, including one reported to be bullet-proof and worth around $100,000. When he and his fiancee went to dinner at the local Italian restaurant, they drove in separate cars, and always paid in cash. 
 
 Any time Lash saw a camera, he would get upset. He told people his name was Bob Smith. Then he died, and things got truly strange. 
 
 Police in Los Angeles have spent several days figuring out why Lash’s body ended up in a car outside his house and was left to decompose for almost two weeks. They found it last Saturday – not because of a tip-off from the neighbours, who appear to have been oblivious throughout, but because a lawyer representing his fiancee gave them a call. 
 
 They also deployed a bomb squad and chemical experts in Hazmat suits to go through his vast arsenal of weapons and explosives – all of it, to judge police photographs and initial reports from the investigation, acquired legally and left untouched. 
 
 Some chemicals were too unstable to transport, so the police blew them up. The tentative conclusion is that Lash was a rich eccentric so caught up in his make-believe world of spying and derring-do that he had his fiancee, Catherine Nebron-Gorin, convinced it was real. 
 
 When he was diagnosed with cancer a year ago, he reportedly told her it was the result of chemical weapons exposure on an old mission. 
 
 On 3 July, the couple and a friend were shopping at a supermarket in Santa Monica, a few miles away from the house, when Lash became unwell and died in the outdoor parking lot. 
 
 Nebron-Gorin later told a friend she had specific instructions from Lash on what to do if he died. Don’t call the authorities. Leave him in a car. Get out of town, and let his minders take care of the body. So she did that. 
 
 The friend, a doctor who did not want to be named, told the Palisadian Post newspaper he spent 90 minutes trying to revive Lash in the passenger seat of an SUV outside his house on the night he died as Nebron-Gorin was “wailing and grieving”. 
 
 Nebron-Gorin left for Oregon and when she returned she was stunned to see Lash’s body where she had previously left it. She called a high-profile criminal defence lawyer, Harland Braun, whose previous clients have included Dennis Rodman, Roseanne Barr, Gary Busey and Robert Blake, the actor eventually acquitted of murdering his wife in circumstances almost as bizarre as the Lash case. 
 
 Braun told the police about the body and warned them the house was stuffed with weapons. And the police immediately evacuated the neighbourhood. 
 
 Lash grew up in a modest home near the Los Angeles international airport and had ambitions at one point to become a microbiologist like his father. Then, according to his stepmother, he largely cut himself off from his family and became secretive about what he was doing. “He was just a loner, as far as we were concerned,” Shirley Anderson told the Los Angeles Times. “He just became weird because he changed all of a sudden.” 
 
 There was no immediate explanation of how he obtained his money or what, if anything, he had done for a living. According to police estimates, Lash spent at least half a million dollars, and perhaps more than twice that, on his weapons stash. The condominium, which is in Nebron-Gorin’s name, last sold for $440,000 in 1991. 
 
 Braun, the lawyer, said he doubted the story about working for the government was true. “Whether he really was working undercover for some government agency or not,” Braun told the Palisadian Post, “he was convinced he was and he had my client convinced.” 
 
 Lash’s neighbours said they too were told Lash had worked for the CIA and found him odd. One employee of the Casa Nostra restaurant said Lash and Nebron-Gorin had eaten most of their meals there for the past seven years. Invariably, Lash would order raw filet mignon. ||||| LOS ANGELES (AP) — The body of a mystery man was decomposing in his car in the ritzy Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Southern California for nearly two weeks before he was found by authorities, an attorney said. 
 
 Inside his home, detectives discovered more than 1,200 guns, scopes, 6.5 tons of ammunition, bows and arrows, knives, machetes and $230,000 in cash after he was found on Friday. 
 
 They also located eight of the 14 vehicles stashed around Los Angeles registered to the man, including an SUV designed to drive underwater. 
 
 Who he was and how he came to accumulate the arsenal and vehicles are questions authorities are still trying to answer. 
 
 Veteran defense attorney Harland Braun represents the man's fiancee Catherine Nebron and identified him as Jeffrey Alan Lash. 
 
 That's also the name authorities are working with and they're in touch with a relative to try to officially identify the body, said Craig Harvey, the coroner's chief of investigations. 
 
 Lash and Nebron were together for 17 years and she believed him when he told her that he worked as an undercover operative for unnamed government agencies, Braun said Wednesday. 
 
 "The story itself sounds totally crazy but then how do you explain all this?" Braun said. "There's no evidence he was a drug dealer or he stole these weapons, or had any criminal source of income, no stolen property, all the stuff you'd look for." 
 
 There's no indication the man was doing anything illegal with the weapons, LAPD Deputy Chief of Detectives Kirk Albanese said. Detectives were reviewing everything, but so far the guns appeared to be registered to him. Many were still in boxes or had price tags. 
 
 Braun said Nebron and two friends were in a car at a supermarket early July 4, when Lash felt hot and had trouble breathing. 
 
 "He wouldn't go to a hospital and didn't want any 911 call," Braun said. When he died, Nebron parked him in a car down the street from the condo they shared, the lawyer said. 
 
 Authorities don't believe there was any foul play involved, but won't give a cause until there is more investigation. 
 
 Lash told Nebron the government agencies would take care of his body and the items in the home, so Nebron and her friends took a trip to Oregon, distraught. 
 
 When they returned about 10 days later, Nebron was shocked to still see Lash's body in the car. 
 
 She contacted Braun, and together they called police, who found the body, guns and more. 
 
 Neighbors thought Lash was dying of cancer because his health appeared to be degenerating over the past year, but Lash told Nebron that he had been exposed to nerve-damaging chemicals on a mission and his condition was worsening. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Tami Abdollah can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/latams .
– The death of a Los Angeles man in his car has led police to a huge stash of firearms and an even bigger pile of strangeness. From what cops can piece together, Jeffrey Alan Lash claimed to be a spy—sometimes a hybrid human-alien spy—and just before he died in his car on July 4, he told his fiancee that government agencies would take care of his body, the Guardian reports. She left town on his orders and called police two weeks later after discovering his rotting corpse was still in the vehicle in the upscale Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Police found a stash of 1,200 firearms in the apartment they shared—which has now risen to 1,500, according to the Los Angeles Times—along with $230,000 cash, explosives, and 6.5 tons of ammo. Police say the weapons were legally acquired and that out of 14 vehicles registered to Lash, they've found eight in various LA locations—including an SUV that can drive underwater, the AP reports. The partner of Lash's late father tells the Times that he was a loner and that she lost touch with him years ago and didn't know where his money came from. Police say Lash had late-stage cancer and that foul play is not suspected in his death. He had told his fiancee that his illness was caused by chemical weapons exposure on a secret mission, reports the Guardian, which notes that the "tentative conclusion" investigators have reached is that he was so caught up in a fantasy world of spying that others around him started to believe it.