He called Prague, where he talked to Vaclav Nectar. He made calls around Berlin, to Potsdam, and to a Baltic island hideaway where Dean sometimes escaped. No one knew anything. Gerrit's heart sank. He began to think it was an accident. He thought about a car crash. That evening Renate was so fearful that Gerrit felt he couldn't leave her. He drove home, got some clothes from his house, and then went back to stay with her.
It appeared that the police were not called initially because there was no reason to suspect anything other than an accident or that Dean had maybe taken off on one of his jaunts.
I put together what happened in the next forty-eight hours leading up to Dean's death from what Renate Reed, Gerrit List, and others told me. What happened was that for two days Renate and Gerrit sat in her house by the lake and called all over Eastern Europe, desperate, hunting for Dean. She was terrified as she surveyed the clutter of Dean's life in his study. She was sure he was dead, then uncertain, and then worried he was with another woman, Then she thought, "Please let him be with another woman, but not dead."
The next day Gerrit called a girlfriend of Renate's and asked her to come over because Renate needed help. Then the English journalist telephoned. My God! An English journalist!
"Did the guy from the Sunday Times reach you?" Dixie had written Dean.
The guy was Russell Miller. On his way through Denver earlier that year on a book promotion tour, the Sunday Times journalist appeared on a radio show. He was looking fot good ideas for his next book, he said casually. Dixie said it was she who had phoned in to the radio station to tell Miller about Dean Reed, although Johnny said he had called the station first.
Eventually, Russell Miller arranged to interview Dean for the Sunday Times. The interview was scheduled for Saturday, June 14, 1986.
Miller arrived in West Berlin on Friday afternoon, June 13. He called the Reed house, and Renate said that Dean had been taken to hospital that morning. In the evening they spoke again and she said the doctors thought Dean had an infection and he was not at all well.
Renate was presumably in a state of confusion and fear when she talked to Miller. The last thing she needed was a foreign journalist intruding on a personal crisis, so she tried to fob him off with an explanation about Dean being ill. At the other end, Miller suddenly found himself talking to a man who had apparently taken the phone from Renate. He told Miller he was Mr. Wieczaukowski, the codirector of the movie Dean was due to start in a few days. He confirmed Dean was in the hospital and might have to stay for several days.
It was Gerrit List who had taken the telephone from Renate.
"I was for these things Renate's producer, too," he said again.
The last thing he needed was an English journalist. My God! Dean is not at home, he said. He is lying ill in the hospital. Either in that conversation or a subsequent one later that day or the next, he told Mr. Miller the interview would be rescheduled. His only thoughts were to help Renate and Dean. In his heart there were forebodings and he had to get rid of Mr. Miller. He gave Miller a phony name and telephone number.
"I said the first thing that came into my head. I was Mr. Wieczaukowski," said Gerrit List, who didn't want Renate to have to deal with a journalist.
"My wife and I, we left Berlin," Russell Miller said. "And that was that, we left without thinking anything was wrong. It was only actually here in England on the Tuesday morning that I picked up the Guardian, I think it was, and there in the obituary column was Dean Reed, just a little paragraph, and I said, 'This is unbelievable.'"
Miller called the number Mr. Wieczaukowski had given him in Potsdam. A woman answered and said it was a private number and no one called Wieczaukowski lived there.
On Saturday Renate and Gerrit continued to look for Dean, still hopeful. Sunday was much worse, Gerrit said. On Sunday, June 15, the employees of the lifeguard station for the Zeuthener See and Schmockwitzer Damm informed the German People's police that an automobile had been standing about twenty meters behind the lifeguard station since at least Friday morning. The license plate number was ILT 8-05. It might have been there earlier, but they would not have seen it until the morning of the 13th when they came on duty. It was Dean's car.
After the car was found, Renate's mood changed constantly. Dean was alive, she thought; he was dead. She knew he was dead. She said it over and over: he's dead, he's alive. Gerrit List didn't know how to help her.
Increasingly distraught, Renate trembled a lot, smoked cigarettes, and was white as death, Gerrit said. On Monday a neighbor phoned. She had seen a lot of police cars near the lake. She had seen the Red Cross. Maybe Dean had drowned, she said. No, no, said Renate, Dean was a good swimmer. It was a shallow lake. It was high summer. He was a good swimmer. Please let him come back. Please. Oh God!
"I am missing this word," Renate now said again to me as we sat in the restaurant near her house in East Berlin in the summer of 1989. We sat late into the evening but it was still light out. "What is this word?"
We left the restaurant and walked for a while and you could smell the pine from the woods. Renate lit a cigarette and told me a story she said she had not told before.
Some years earlier, Renate and Dean had taken Sasha on a skiing holiday. It was a lovely holiday, Renate said. One afternoon she and Sasha were fooling around in the snow, playing and laughing with Dean.
He went inside the chalet to take a telephone call. It was the news of Paton Price's death, but Renate didn't know and she and Sasha kept playing and throwing snowballs and giggling together. After an hour she wondered what was going on and said they ought to go back to the chalet.
When they got inside, she found Dean fast asleep. An open bottle of sleeping pills was beside the bed; it was empty.
Renate ran to another chalet where she knew there was a doctor. He came back with her and looked at Dean and at the pills. He said Dean hadn't taken enough to kill himself. Just let him sleep it off, the doctor said.
Be watchful, the doctor added. Dean may wake in the night, he said. Dean did wake up. Naked, he stumbled toward the door; it was twenty degrees below zero. He was full of sleeping pills and he would have frozen to death if he had gone outside, said Renate.
"If you go out there, you will not only kill yourself, you'll kill Sasha and me," Renate shouted, pulling him back into the chalet with all her force.
It would have been a betrayal.
That was the word she had been looking for all day. Betray. Yes. Betray. That was it.
I waited. Clearly, Renate had never had anything to do with Dean's death, nothing at all. She had felt he was her partner, her lover, her man, as she had once said on a videotape. She had loved him; she still did. She had to believe his death was an accident, not a suicide. If it was a suicide, he had betrayed her love.
Just before he died, in spite of all their fights, silly fights about mowing the lawn, he told her how much he loved her. If he then went and killed himself, it was betraying her trust. She was very fierce about it. It was something that had been preying on her mind for a long time.
We walked together for a few yards, along the rural lane near the lake. It was two years since Dean had died on a summer night like this. I looked at the lake. I said I hoped that Renate would meet someone else nice some day.
"No," she said. "I hate men."
It would have been a betrayal.
On the morning of June 17,1986, Renate's neighbor came across the lawn to Renate's house. Renate could see her from the kitchen window and went outside to meet her. The neighbor smoothed her apron awkwardly.
"I think they've found Dean," she said.
Earlier, at 8:20 a.m. his body had been discovered in the Zeuthener See. "It was approximately 300 feet from the lakeside," noted the police report. Accidental death by drowning was the official verdict. No one believed it.
In Wheat Ridge, Colorado, the telephone rang in house. A machine with Dixie's voice on it answered.
"Dixie, this is Ruth Anna Brown, Dean's mother. Damn this machine! You never call me back, but I guess you've heard the terrible news about Dean? Call me this time, Dixie," she said.
"Hi, Dixie. This is Johnny. Call me! For God's sake, Dixie, call me!"
A reporter in Leipzig telephoned Vaclav Nectar in Prague. His life in fear, as he put it, began with that call; the news made him crazy; he felt Dean's death was a terrible omen for him.
Oleg Smirnoff heard the news in Moscow on TV.
"Dean first, me next," Oleg thought.
In Paris, Erik and Annalise Durschmied were in the Metro and he was reading the Herald Tribune when he turned so white he looked like a man in the middle of a heart attack. When the train stopped, he pulled Annalise onto the platform.
"What is it?" she asked urgently.
"Dean is dead," he said.
In the little house where they lived, Wiebke told Natasha as best she could that her father was dead. Natasha had seen Bobby die on Dallas and she knew that Bobby wasn't really dead.
She said to Wiebke, "Maybe Daddy is not really dead at all. Like Bobby on Dallas."
Gerrit List was put in charge of the funeral: Renate was drugged like a stone. He sent her to a sanitorium, where she slept and slept. He organized everything. He notified the relatives. He received Mrs. Brown when she arrived. He collected Ramona and Patty from West Berlin. At Checkpoint Charlie, the daughter from Dean, as Gerrit called her, was weeping.
"My father is dead," she kept saying.