"In the GDR we do not have crime," he said.
Eventually, the officials relented and days and days after Dean died - no one was sure exactly how many days - Patty went to the morgue. Renate couldn't bear to go.
In the morgue, in order to get a good look at Dean's body, Patty knelt down beside it as if she were praying. It was Dean's body, she said. She was sure. She told the Denver Post, "They were Dean's toes. My daughter has his toes."
Then the body was cremated.
Mrs. Brown had a lot of questions: If Dean meant to defect why did he take his important papers with him on the night he disappeared, but not his passport? Why was he wearing two coats on a warm June night? Why was he cremated so quickly? But it had been Gerrit List who gave the order for the cremation because it was the proper thing to do once the autopsy report was complete. Will Roberts, who had made American Rebel, the documentary about Dean, arrived in town and went a little nuts from grief. He said that Dean was murdered.
The night before the memorial service, there was some wrangling over the disposal of the remains: Will Roberts wanted to have parts of Dean sent to places he loved like Chile and Nicaragua. The women were horrified. Things were so tense in the house in Schmockwitz that Mrs. Brown couldn't stand it and went to stay in a hotel.
The memorial service was finally held on Tuesday, June 24, in East Berlin, the day that had been scheduled for the start of Bloody Heart.
All of the Reed women were there: Ruth Anna Brown, Patty, Wiebke, and Renate. They declared themselves sisters. They were all Reed women, they said, and held hands.
All of the children came, too: Ramona, Natasha, and Alexander, whom everyone called Sasha. Friends came from abroad, including Vaclav Nectar.
It was like a big Hollywood funeral with the bereft beautiful women, and famous faces, and powerful dignitaries who packed the hall and included the Deputy Minister of Culture, the Director General of the DEFA Film Studios, a member of the East German Communist Party Central Committee, the First Deputy Chairman and General Secretary of the German Democratic Peace Council, and the President of the Committee for Entertainment.
The service was organized by Gerrit List and his colleagues at DEFA and everything was correct, Gerrit said. It was a hero's send-off; Dean had been a hero in the DDR, honored, officially approved, supported, and loved.
Pink carnations decorated the hall and the overwhelming smell of the flowers made Wiebke feel sick; she had never been so queasy in her life and she thought she might faint. Renate was drugged like a stone. She used the expression over and over. She was up to six Valium a day.
Suddenly, Will Roberts got up, faced the crowd, and delivered a funeral oration. He said that Dean's ashes ought to be tossed across the oceans of the countries he loved. He said everyone should stand up and give a big hand for Dean and started clapping, but no one joined in. Gerrit List was mortified. It was not the way things were done in Germany. It ought to have been a somber occasion. There was a form to these things. But he rose, too, and began clapping and everyone else clapped now. It was surreal and a little macabre, the sober Germans in their dark suits, the Party officials, the Americans, all of them clapping for a dead man at his funeral.
As the service ended, Dean's peppy singing voice came over the loudspeaker. He was singing "Gimme me a guitar...' Many of the family stood and applauded. Mrs. Brown rose and said that Dean must be buried in East Berlin; here were his friends, she said.
To himself, Gerrit said, Please God, no more applause.
A hundred people went to the Reed house in Schmockwitz for coffee and cake. Patty was nice to Renate. Renate felt Patty had really helped her understand Dean's moodiness and was truly a sister. All the wives embraced.
"We are all Reed women," they said again to one another.
Mrs. Brown wondered why there was no candlelight parade through the streets of East Berlin for Dean. She couldn't understand why no one held a big parade or a vigil for Dean.
"Like they did in New York for John Lennon, she said.
When there were just a few people left in the Reed house, Gerrit finally went home and got into his own bed.
"It is all over," he said to himself and slept.
It wasn't over.
There were a dozen theories that grew into a hundred conspiracies. On June 18, 1986, an Associated Press item appeared on the obituary page of the New York Times. I read it at home in New York; it caught my eye because I'd seen the 60 Minutes piece on April 20. I couldn't believe it. That's the guy from 60 Minutes, I said to myself, the man who brought rock and roll to the Soviet Union.
The obit was short and uninformative, noting only that the East German press agency had reported that Mr. Dean Reed died from a "tragic accident." Then someone sent me a piece from the London Sunday Times by Russell Miller, dated June 22, five days after Dean's body was pulled from the lake. Miller described his efforts to interview Dean and his mysterious conversations with a Mr. Wieczaukowski.
So little news came out of East Germany that the mystery Miller reported became the basis for other articles, the centerpiece really of a web of theories. Mike Wallace had a stab at a follow-up piece but he abandoned it after a couple of phone calls. For 60 Minutes it was only another story.
Until I met Gerrit List in Berlin two years after Dean died, no one identified him as the disappearing Mr. Wieczaukowski.
"Accidental death by drowning," the official report read. No one accepted it, because it was intolerable: it meant Dean's death had no meaning. Only Gerrit List clung to it. He insisted that Dean had gone out on the pier on the lake because from the end of it you could see a bungalow on the other shore that looked American. Dean thought it might work as a set for Bloody Heart. You couldn't get to the end of the pier, though, without going through a corrugated metal gate, but the gate was locked.' According to Gerrit List, Dean had tried to climb it, flipped over, fell into the water, and drowned. No, said Renate firmly. That gate was always open.
Questions were raised about the autopsy. There was a Valium-like substance in Dean's blood. Enough to kill him? It depended. His liver was as enlarged as an alcoholic's, said the report, but Dean never drank.
Then I met Clive who was a British stringer for Time in West Berlin and he said, "You knew about the reports?"
"What reports?"
"They were pretty convincing, the reports I read about Dean having treatment for cancer in the last months of his life," said Clive.
There was nothing about cancer in the autopsy report, and the rumors spread and the mystery grew and any firm ground turned into a swamp. All dead ends, I thought. I couldn't get any real fix on Dean's death. And, why was Dean wearing two coats on a warm June night, if he was? When his body was found, Dean was wearing a jeans jacket Johnny Rosenburg had given him, as well as an overcoat. Or maybe just the coat. It wasn't clear.
Was it because he planned to flee? What about his passport? Had it been stolen? Wiebke said it had been stolen, but how did she know? Or did Dean leave home, discover he had forgotten it or lost it, and then fly into a rage and slam his car down towards the lake?
Another theory about the extra clothing ran like this. Obsessed with authentic detail on Bloody Heart, Dean wanted to break in his costume. There was a kind of precedent for this because in Loveland Johnny had once found Dean banging up a brand new camera bag in the backyard.
"What in the name of heaven?" said Johnny. Dean said he was breaking it in. You could not have brand new gear in a movie. It looked phony.
In Dean's car were copies of Mother Jones which Ruth Anna Brown had sent him. Dean also had his dad's last letter there.
How could it be have been an accident? How could he have drowned? Dean was a great swimmer. Everyone said so. As a kid he had been a ligfeguard at the pool at Estes Park in Colorado. At forty-seven he was in top shape and could walk on his hands, Phil Everly said.
Mrs. Brown had 2006 scenarios, she told the Denver Post.
Everybody had a scenario. There were those who believed that the East German Stasi or the KGB killed Dean because he wanted to go home to America. Because he lost faith in the system. But why had he lost it now, in 1986, when Glasnost was delivering hope for change and Gorbachev, in whom Dean passionately believed, was in power? And why would anyone bother? He wasn't important enough to kill, said Vladimir Pozner. Pozner was talking about the Soviet Union, though; in East Germany even as late as 1986, the Stasi controlled a lot of people, a lot of territory; it had enormous power. If Dean got out of line, wasn't it possible that someone in the Stasi pushed him into the lake?
Leslie Woodhead could just imagine a scenario in which a police official made his displeasure with Dean unofficially known to an ambitious - or drunken - underling, who then took it on himself to get rid of Dean.
"What I mean is that perhaps it was made known but never overtly. The turbulent priest scenario," Leslie said. "As in who will rid me of this turbulent priest? Maybe it was like that. Maybe someone did it to please a superior without actually being asked."
"Unlikely," said Georgy Arbatov in Moscow. "It would be too big a risk for any policeman without explicit orders from his superior."
Did Dean know some awful secrets about Erich Honecker's lavish lifestyle that weren't revealed until the end of 1989? Was he going to tell? Or was Dean part of it? The Countess had said that Dean did errands for the bigwigs in the GDR, that he took money to Swiss banks for them. She said he drove a Porsche, but no one else ever mentioned it.
Others said it was just a screw-up, a blurry East German version of a Mafia hit. Dean knew important men. Once you were in, you couldn't get out, people hinted, and everyone cut his theories to suit his politics. I remembered Mrs. Brown had whispered to me that the CIA was on notice to do a "wet job" on Dean if he got out of line. Wet job? Did she mean assassination? Did she mean killing by drowning?
Vaclav Nectar believed it was the Czech secret police and the Stasi together who killed Dean. He said Dean had come to fear for his life in the East and that once, on his way to Prague, a wheel mysteriously came off his car when he knew it had just been screwed on tight.
After Dean's funeral, Nectar went to see Gerrit List in East Berlin and they sat together on a bench in a park, talking. Although in public Gerrit insisted it was an accident, he told Nectar that he believed "someone helped Dean die."
I even heard a theory that the KGB and the CIA got together, decided Dean was a nuisance, and acted together to get rid of him.
"Hogwash," said a retired diplomat who had known Dean in Berlin. "The KGB and CIA conspiracy theories were hogwash. Dean's death was accepted as an accident until those people from Colorado got involved."
Then there were the really wild theories: homosexual triangles; jealous women; jealous husbands; and skinheads, the louts who hated foreigners and roamed the fringes of East Berlin society. Most exotic and certainly the most absurd was a rumor that Renate fingered Dean to the Party because he wanted to go home to America. It wasn't true, of course, but there was no end to it.