Mysteries

A puzzle that has haunted Hollywood for more than a year, the disappearance of screenwriter Gary Devore, was apparently solved Wednesday when an armchair detective, saying he was guided only by a newspaper account of the mystery, led investigators to Devore's vehicle submerged in an aqueduct near Palmdale, with a body still at the wheel. Divers found a partially decomposed body dressed in blue jeans, a Western-style shirt and cowboy boots.

What could possibly cause rocks picked up at a popular state beach to ignite in the pocket of a woman's cargo shorts? To scientists, the answer is - well, there is no clear answer. The case of an Orange County woman severely burned after rocks collected last weekend from San Onofre State Beach ignited in her pocket has puzzled scientists, who say they've never seen anything like it and aren't quite sure how it happened. "It's pretty implausible," said Larry Overman, a professor of chemistry at UC Irvine.

The most enduring and romantic legend of the Russian Revolution -- that two children of Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, survived the slaughter that killed the rest of their family -- may finally be put to rest with the positive identification of bone fragments from a lonely Russian grave.

In"Lovely Molly,"a young woman moves with her new husband back into her family's empty old house. She immediately begins behaving strangely, as if the house itself exerts some mysterious power - whether she is being overtaken by bad memories and old habits or something supernatural is initially unclear. If the story sounds somewhat similar to the recent Elizabeth Olsen vehicle"Silent House,"it is, and unfortunately, "Lovely Molly" and its star, newcomer Gretchen Lodge, only suffer in comparison.

Deep in the woods near Brushy Creek stands an old beech tree, its smooth bark etched with dozens of carvings, including biblical references, a heart and a legless horse. Bob Brewer was 10 when his great-uncle, W.D. "Grandpa" Ashcraft, pointed it out on a logging trip 57 years ago. "He said, 'Boy, you see that tree? That's a treasure tree,' " Brewer recalled on a recent visit to the site. " 'You see that writing? If you can figure out what that is, you'll find some gold.'

On a clear day, the expanse of blue ocean seen from the living room of this San Clemente home seems almost endless. Sometimes, as day gives way to evening, a line of pink stretches like a crayon scrawl in the sky. When night falls, the sea is an abyss of black. Margrit Ucar fell instantly for the panorama. Even before her husband, Manas, had a chance to see the house, she knew it was where they would raise their two young daughters, twins Margo and Grace.

Twenty years ago today, a groundskeeper making his rounds discovered the horror: the body of 8-year-old Susan Nason dumped in a litter-strewn ravine. Now, long after detectives had shelved the investigation as unsolvable, George T. Franklin Sr., 50, a father of five, is in jail. San Mateo County sheriff's detectives arrested him on Wednesday after one of his daughters came forward and named him as the killer of Susan, her childhood playmate.

'Mysteries of Lisbon' No MPAA rating Running time: 4 hours, 17 minutes Playing: At the Landmark, West Los Angeles

To his followers, L. Ron Hubbard was bigger than life. But it was an image largely of his own making. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge put it bluntly while presiding over a Church of Scientology lawsuit in 1984. Scientology's founder, he said, was "virtually a pathological liar" about his past. Hubbard was an intelligent and well-read man, with diverse interests, experience and expertise. But that apparently was not enough to satisfy him.

When we think of detectives, we may think of someone like Sherlock Holmes, who emerges from the London fog with the answers to such questions as whodunit? And why? And yet every day we can be detectives, using our powers of observation, analysis and deduction to solve cases ranging from finding missing items to discovering how and why something works the way it does.

MOVIES One of the great films of noir intrigue, "The Mystery of the Double Cross" finds a man bound to inherit a fortune when a mysterious warning to, yep, avoid the "double cross" proves prescient after a woman bearing the mark enters his life. Coincidence or harbinger of doom? Either way, it's a must-see engagement of the episodic series in 8mm format. Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. 7:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat. american cinematheque.com.

On Jan. 31, alarms alerted the control room at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station that a radiation leak was occurring in one of the nearly 39,000 tubes that carry radioactive water in the steam generators. That failure led to an unparalleled shutdown of one of California's two nuclear power plants and triggered more than three months of detective work by Southern California Edison officials and federal nuclear regulators that has yet to determine the problem's root cause or when San Onofre will reopen.

Thanks to a new method of modeling earthquakes, scientists may now understand why the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas fault - a carefully studied region known for producing moderate temblors every 20 years or so - has been behaving unexpectedly since around the time Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Taking data collected by sensors on the ground and in space and combining them with observations from laboratory physics experiments, Caltech researchers conducted a computer simulation of tectonic events at Parkfield and discovered that a series of small quakes there may have staved off a larger shaker that geologists predicted would occur in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

An environmental crusader known as "Mr. Malibu" has apologized to Pepperdine University and retracted accusations that the school is to blame for effluent flowing down Marie Canyon Creek and into the Pacific Ocean. In exchange, the university has agreed to drop a lawsuit against activist Cary ONeal that alleged libel and "invasion of privacy by placing person in a false light in public eye. " In two videos he posted online, ONeal claimed that a foamy substance pooling on a Malibu beach was sewage released by Pepperdine.

'Masterpiece Mystery! Sherlock, Series II: A Scandal in Belgravia' Where: KOCE When: 9 p.m. Sunday Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)

For those in preemptive mourning for Fox's Sherlock Holmes-inspired "House,"which comes to an end later this month, a bit of comfort: Season 2 of "Sherlock,"the BBC's flirty but still faithful contemporary rendition of the unforgettable detective, begins on PBS' "Masterpiece Mystery" Sunday night. As reimagined by British TV maestro Steven Moffat ("Doctor Who," "Jekyll") and Mark Gatiss ("Doctor Who"), this Sherlock, played with aquamarine and alabaster radiance by Benedict Cumberbatch, is a London consulting detective as brilliant, icy and occasionally preening as the original.

His name might not rank with Amelia Earhart's and Judge Crater's, but the disappearance of Everett Ruess has been an enduring legend of the Southwest for 75 years. Only 20 at the time of his disappearance, the writer, artist and environmentalist who has been compared to a young John Muir was last seen near Utah's Davis Gulch in 1934. Numerous search parties failed to find him, and authors have speculated widely about his demise. Many believed he drowned in the Colorado River.

In his role as editor of the online magazine Lapis, Ralph White is scholarly and staid, offering literary explorations of myths, traditions, symbols and lore that have swayed thought for centuries. But once a year, White, 60, leads a number of adventurous souls on quests for the deeper mysteries of spiritual experience in castles, cathedrals, temples, tombs and ancient ruins around the world. Last week, White and 65 others have been on "An Esoteric Quest for Inner America" in Rip Van Winkle country, or upstate New York, which is the birthplace of such homegrown spiritual and cultural movements as the 19th century utopian Oneida Community and the 1969 Woodstock festival.

He spent his life trying to determine how people died. But now his colleagues are searching for answers after he died under mysterious circumstances. Los Angeles police detectives, with the help of the Los Angeles County coroner's office, are investigating the death of Michael Cormier, a coroner's technician. Officials said he might have died of poisoning, but they have not provided further information. Cormier, 61, died last week after being taken to Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank from his North Hollywood home.

In the worlds of myth and literature, plenty of figures have had their "lost" years. There are, to name a few, Sherlock Holmes (after the plunge from Reichenbach Falls), the wizard Merlin (was he imprisoned in a cave or was he killed?), Shakespeare (what was his education and upbringing?) and Jesus (did he or didn't he go to India as a child?). What did they do during those years? How did they live? Such questions have lured many writers into producing books that try to fill in these tantalizing gaps with definitive evidence.