Killing Ghosts: a Pioneertown Movie Murder: Book Three - The Morongo Murders

Cowboy actors Gene Autry, Dick Curtis, and Roy Rodger, and their investors developed Pioneertown as a western movie set in the 1930s. By 1960, a water shortage, the threat of wildfires, and a new preference of studios like Paramount to
film on location nearly closed it down. Pioneertown managed to survive as a tourist attraction and a set for low budget films that never made it to a multiplex, and occasional music videos. But, with the new millennium, music icons like Robert Plant and Gram Parsons began dropping in at the watering-hole known as Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace, and when Sir Paul McCartney performed a spontaneous gig there for the first 300 fans with $50 cash in hand during a break in his high ticket concert schedule, the town was on the map again. In 2020 when Covid struck and with it, what locals called the Greater Los Angeles Yuppie Migration, Pioneertown thrived. Prices soared, but the Los Angelenos kept coming. Some of the old time actors and screenwriters returned, if only for the sunrises and the sunsets and an occasional trail ride through the sage after a desert rain. The best known of them was Raymond Grant, a 1950's cowboy actor who fled the high-desert in the '60s and resurfaced as a San Fernando Valley entrepreneur and independent film producer. Grant told late night talk show hosts he was returning to Pioneertown to produce a screenplay and scout locations for a new version of cinema's notorious gunfight at the Old Kindersley Livery and Corrals in Tombstone in1883 which would be his Last Hurrah, but that was only part of his plan. He was returning to the desert movie town to die on his own timeline and according to a script that had nothing to do with Wyatt Earp, and he did not plan to exit life's stage kindly.

Early on the crisp but clear pre-dawn Thursday before Christmas, the cook at the popular saloon on Mane Street found the Old Cowboy's corpse at the entrance to a shoddy replica of the fabled O.K. Corral, where reenactments of the gunfight in Tombstone were performed on Saturdays. When first responders arrived a small gathering of locals was already forming. By the time the commander of the Sheriff's substation in Morongo arrived with the Supervising Deputy D.A. in tow, Homicide Detail had arrived and taken control of the crime scene. The Coroner and Crime Lab vans had rolled in, but so had the local news crews and CNN.
SDDA Liz Jameson's friend, best known by his Call-Sign Charlie Nine, was the first of the pair to view the body. Being shot-gunned in the abdomen at close range was an inelegant way to die.
'Now do you see why Homicide wanted me to drag you out here?'
'Yeah, I do, ' she replied. 'We're looking at a media event and a forensic nightmare. This is a movie set, not a crime scene. Everything we're seeing has been staged.' She continued to peruse the scene while the captain called his wife to tell her not to thaw the Christmas Goose quite yet.