Horseback Riding [Archive] - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

Shahla

01-26-2010, 08:29 PM

I saw this segment about Shelly Malone today and was also looking for the mentioned article. I think I found it:

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

EVERYONE LOVED SHELLY
SHE WAS A BEAUTY WHO DIED TOO YOUNG. THE POLICE SAY IT WAS A HORSE-RIDING ACCIDENT. HER FAMILY CLAIMS SHE WAS MURDERED AND ROBBED. OFFICIALLY, THE INVESTIGATION IS OVER, BUT THE STRANGE CASE OF SHELLY MALONE GOES ON AND ON.
BY HOWARD MEANS
Washingtonian
July 1993
Her name was Shelly Malone, and in the last years of her life, in the small, exclusive world of the Virginia Hunt Country--the sort of world she had always dreamed of--she became a person of note.

The 1989 program for the Middleburg Spring Race Association lists her as a member of the Sports Council, the patrons who support the annual steeplechase races. Among the other patrons: Riggs National Bank chairman Joe Allbritton; Pamela Harriman, the Democratic doyenne and now ambassador to France; George McGhee, former US ambassador to West Germany and Turkey; Paul Mellon, heir to the fortune that founded the National Gallery of Art; and Bruce Sundlun, the wealthy governor of Rhode Island.

Dixon had provided prostitutes to then- Texas Savings and Loan Commissioner Linton Bowman. One of the two alleged prostitutes was Shelly Malone.
She was a racing patron on her own, too, and a racehorse owner. Capriole-- the gift shop she had started in Middleburg in 1988--sponsored the point-to- point Lady Rider Championship. Ten Bar, Shelly's steeplechaser, had won at the 1992 meeting of the Foxfield Spring Races. As almost everyone does in that part of Virginia, she rode, competing in dressage events. Unlike some in the insular world of Hunt Country, though, Shelly's world reached beyond the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

In June 1992, four months before her death, the National Glaucoma Trust had presented Shelly with one of its Singular Sensation awards, given annually to women of achievement. The program for this year's ceremony included a page paying tribute to her memory.

Shelly lived in The Plains--a hamlet eight miles south of Middleburg--in a modest pre-Civil War home set among imposing estates.

In Manhattan, where she frequently went on business and for pleasure, she had an apartment on Central Park West at her disposal and a private secretary to answer calls.

She traveled frequently to Europe, where she had attended both the American College in Paris and the Mediterranean Center in Cap d'Ail on the French Riviera, and she knew some of the most socially prominent people on the continent. One Christmas card, preserved among her mementos, is from Prince Albert of Monaco.

"Shelly Dear," the message reads. "I'm sorry I missed you in Paris. I was only there a couple of days in December anyway. Thanks for the present. I won't open it until the 25th in the afternoon when we open all our presents. All my best for the holiday season. See you soon. Love, Albert."

Shelly was 37 years old when she died, in what the Fauquier Times-Democrat, in a front-page obituary, called "a freak horseback riding accident."

In addition to comments from her long-time boyfriend, George Carhart Jr., and another friend, Michele Rouse, the obituary also notes that Shelly had managed gift products for the Virginia Gold Cup and the Great Meadow riding center since 1991. And the newspaper quotes from what it calls a "close friend, " Arthur W. (Nick) Arundel, chairman of both the Gold Cup and Great Meadow: "We have lost one of the most vibrant and talented young people to come into this community in many, many years."

Because there is no need to do so in Hunt Country, the Times-Democrat does not tell readers that Nick Arundel is the paper's publisher and owner. Nor, because obituaries tend to accentuate the positive, does the Times- Democrat mention the twisting and sometimes torturous road that Shelly traveled from childhood to The Plains or the peculiar arrangement that funded her business and paid the rent on her farm. It doesn't mention the time she spent on probation on drug charges. Nor does it say that she had been called to testify before a Texas grand jury in a case that grew from one of the most spectacular collapses of the savings-and-loan crisis.

Finally, because obituaries cannot see into the future, there is no mention of the questions that would arise about the manner of her death--questions that would drive her family to desperation and near despair.

Everyone loved Shelly--you hear it time and again when you ask about her, from her friends in The Plains and from her family. But almost no one, it seems, knew her whole.

She was born Joan Rochelle Malone in December 1954 in Annapolis. Her father, Joseph R. Malone, was working there as a dental technician at the Naval Academy. As he would with the two sons to follow, he wanted his daughter to have his initials.

After he left the Navy, Joseph Malone moved his family to Mississippi and later, when Shelly was in the last years of elementary school, to Fort Lauderdale and then Boca Raton, Florida, where he worked as a textbook salesman. Soon the marriage was falling apart, and Shelly's relation with her father had hit rock bottom.

Valerie Shea, now a Miami lawyer, was Shelly's best friend in junior high and high school: "We used to go over to her house every day after school. Her parents were miserable then. There was always a huge list of chores she had to do."

Shelly "chose not to be home alone with her father," Shea recalls. "Often one of the reasons I accompanied her home was that if he wasn't out of town, he worked at home. He had an Irish temper; he would haul off and smack her. It wasn't very pleasant, but it wasn't reportable. . . . My parents divorced when I was twelve, and Shelly used to say, 'You're so lucky.' "

Shelly left home at age 17 to marry David Burgnon. Her family contends that Joseph Malone, who by then had divorced Shelly's mother, offered the two teenagers money to marry as a way of freeing himself of child-support payments to Shelly. Valerie Shea concurs, at least in part:

"I recall it was some deal," she says. "He was going to finance them because it got him out of some obligations. But I think Shelly was desperate enough to get out of the house that it didn't take much incentive."

Shelly and David settled in Louisville, Kentucky, where he started a carpet business and she began classes at the University of Louisville. Seven years into their marriage the sky fell on both of them.

"David had a problem with the IRS," says Frances Shewan, Shelly's mother. "They had his bank account, his business. He thought he could make some fast money. And he paid for it dearly."

The cocaine trade promised the fastest money around in 1979, but David Burgnon apparently never completed a sale before his and Shelly's house was raided in what was then the biggest drug bust in Kentucky history, according to Shelly's brother Joe Malone.

Shelly, who was inside the house at the time, would spend that night in jail and draw a five-year probation. David, for his part, would do long time.

"Shelly told me that she sat there in jail and looked around her," her mother remembers. "She was with all kinds of women who were hardened criminals, and there she sat. She didn't want to lie down. She said the tears were just burning, but she couldn't cry."

But Shelly was a survivor. And she had three things going for her. She had loved horses from the time she was a child and had dreamed of some day being part of the world of horses. She had an iron will and the American faith that dreams can come true. And she was beautiful--the kind of woman that men can't stop looking at.

If you had asked Shelly at age 12 what she wanted to be, she would have answered, "a horse," her mother says, "and failing that, a jockey, but she was already five-nine-and-a-half. She wanted to do anything that would put her with horses."

In Louisville, Shelly had worked part- time as a groom at Churchill Downs, the home of the Kentucky Derby. Later, after the drug bust and a brief stint modeling in Pennsylvania, she moved to Fort Lauderdale--where her mother was living--and found work in the shoe department of a Burdine's department store and later as an aide at an architectural firm. On the side, Shelly helped exercise horses at the nearby Pompano Park racetrack. It was at the architect's office that she made the connections that would land her a job as assistant manager, later manager, of a $2.6-million, 112-foot luxury yacht called High Spirits, owned by the Vernon Savings and Loan Association of Texas and controlled by its flamboyant executive officer, Don Dixon.

Sister ship to Sequoia, once the presidential yacht, High Spirits docked frequently in Washington, where it was often used by former House Whip Tony Coelho to wine and dine contributors to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But like so much else connected with Vernon S&L, the yacht was part of Don Dixon's house of cards.

When federal regulators finally moved against Dixon in March 1987, 96 percent of Vernon's loans were delinquent. The cleanup would cost taxpayers more than $1 billion.

Dixon, who had paid himself $8 million a year, would be found guilty on 23 counts of fraud and racketeering in connection with Vernon. One of those counts charged that at a March 1985 party in California, Dixon had provided prostitutes to then- Texas Savings and Loan Commissioner Linton Bowman. One of the two alleged prostitutes was Shelly Malone.

In The Daisy Chain, his book on the Vernon S&L collapse, journalist James O'Shea writes that Shelly had at first been reluctant to make the trip to the West Coast, where she was to meet four men, including Dixon and Bowman, but had consented when her friend, Regina, was allowed to come along.

"Shelly and Regina would be flown from Florida to California, courtesy of Vernon's investment subsidiary," O'Shea writes. "They would then meet the four men at a restaurant just north of San Diego for lunch and a lovely weekend. To say that Shelly was 'statuesque' was like saying the 'Mona Lisa' was a snapshot. She had been handpicked for Bowman by Don Dixon, and Dixon had exquisite taste."

From San Diego, the party moved on to a nearby million-dollar beach house owned by the savings-and-loan association and, the next day, to San Francisco, where Shelly and Bowman and Dixon and Regina shared a two-bedroom suite at a hotel on Nob Hill. Bowman later told investigators that he had not been compromised during the extended weekend because he was impotent.

Shelly wrote O'Shea soon after his book was published, in early 1991.

"It was almost a setting-the-record- straight letter, rather than complaining," O'Shea says. "Basically, she says 'I was with Bowman, but I didn't sleep with him.' The bare bones was that nothing I said was inaccurate. "

Valerie Shea, Shelly's childhood friend, talked with her shortly after Shelly had testified before a Dallas grand jury on the Linton Bowman incident:

"To her credit, it totally didn't faze her," Shea recalls. "I would have been totally crushed for anyone to insinuate that about me, but Shelly being Shelly, she went totally on the offense. She told me that a couple of the jurors asked her questions, and she said, 'Look, you people just don't understand the real world.' I'm sure that prosecutor couldn't get her on the plane out of town fast enough."

By luck or good sense, Shelly had bailed out of the High Spirits position about six months before federal regulators rang the curtain down on Dixon. By then, she didn't need the job because, by then, she had met Cecil Altman.

Of all the men in Shelly's life, Cecil Altman may be the most intriguing. An international investor based in Switzerland--with interests in banks, hotels, and other businesses around the world--Altman met Shelly at an Atlanta gathering of investors staged by Don Dixon.

Soon, Altman--who had grown children of his own, as well as a wife--was inviting Shelly to Vienna to see the Lipizzaner horses at the Spanish Riding Academy. "It was her first trip to Europe," Shelly's mother says. It also was the right button to push: "She couldn't wait."

Vienna was only the beginning. It was Altman who paid for Shelly's education in Europe; it was Altman who provided Shelly with her first and favorite horse, Ten Bar; it was Altman's apartment in Manhattan that Shelly had the run of; it was his private secretary who took her calls there. Once, Frances remembers, Shelly and Altman were having lunch at a New York restaurant when Shelly told him that she had long been afraid of mathematics. Altman had a phone brought to the table, and within minutes Shelly was being counseled by a prominent mathematician.

Altman underwrote Capriole, Shelly's store in Middleburg, and absorbed its losses. He introduced Shelly to Prince Albert and to Harold Brooks-Baker, the American who took over Burke's Peerage in 1984. In time, Capriole became the sole US outlet for products licensed by the 167-year-old genealogist to British nobility, an agreement that contributed more in prestige than it did in profits.

For Shelly's personal needs, Altman sent her a monthly payment of $5,000 and provided for more substantial funds in the event of his death. When Shelly had exhausted her monthly $5,000, as she frequently did, other lines of credit in Altman's name appear to have been available to her.

In all, Joe Malone estimates, Cecil Altman gave to Shelly or invested in her business more than $1 million during the nearly seven years they knew one another. But more than the money, he gave her access, and in the Virginia Hunt Country, Shelly found a place where the pedigree of horse flesh is more important than the history that humans carry with them.

"Shelly had a horse," says her onetime boyfriend Steven Head, a personal fitness trainer in McLean. "That in a sense qualified her. And Cecil gave her enough money to put up appearances. With five to six thousand a month, you could put up a horse, buy nice clothes, sponsor races, whatever."

Head characterizes the Altman-Shelly relationship as "a kind of Professor Higgins-Eliza Doolittle thing. Cecil recognized an intelligent, attractive woman. He convinced her of things she desperately wanted to believe--that she deserved more out of life, the finer things of life. You plunk down a thousand dollars and invite someone to Paris for lunch, and that's going to impress her, especially someone so desperate for esteem, for recognition and material trappings."

But the relationship was more than a financial or tutorial one.

"I'm not saying there wasn't a romantic interest between Shelly and Cecil, because there was," Joe Malone says. "But it wasn't a filthy, smutty thing. . . . He made few demands on Shelly--not what I would want for a million dollars. "

For Shelly, the arrangement was not quite as simple as it seems.

For almost four years after moving to the Washington area, Shelly lived in a small brick rental house on Kurtz Road in McLean, commuting to her store in Middleburg. At first, her second husband, Pablo Aguirre Larrosa, lived there with her.

The two had met in the south of France when Shelly was a student at the Mediterranean Center in Cap d'Ail and Aguirre Larrosa was a language instructor there. By all accounts a marriage of convenience--Shelly's way of repaying Pablo's attentions with a green card for immigration--it didn't work out.

Frustrated at having to rely financially on his wife, Aguirre Larrosa moved back to Europe in 1989, but the two were never divorced. Although her obituary failed to mention it, Shelly was still legally married at the time of her death.

It is unlikely that Cecil Altman knew of Shelly's marriage. She kept a second phone line at her house at Kurtz Road--and later in The Plains--that was for Altman's calls only. Nor is it known whether he was aware of her two subsequent male companions, Steven Head and George Carhart Jr.

Head and Shelly met, he recalls, on a Saturday morning in mid-De cember 1988 "at ten twenty-five in the morning. She had heard that I was a personal trainer who was living in Middleburg, and she made an appointment for ten o'clock. True to form, she was twenty-five minutes late for a forty-five minute appointment."

Their relationship, Head says repeatedly, was a meeting of "kindred spirits. . . . We both have a lot of goodness in us that's had trouble overcoming our bad-boy streaks." Platonic at first, the relationship would last until September 1990.

"She absolutely broke my heart," Head says. "We took a three-month sabbatical, then we resumed our friendship." In fact, Steven Head would love Shelly to her grave, and beyond.

It was George Carhart who came between Shelly and Head. Younger than Shelly by five years, Carhart had met her through his friend, Carter Wiley, a 1987 honorable-mention All-American defensive back at Virginia Tech, who had been drafted by the Atlanta Falcons but cut during 1988 training camp. Soon, Carhart and Shelly were spending most weekends together in McLean, the Middleburg area, and later The Plains, with Carhart returning during the week to New York, where he worked in the men's-fashion industry.

Nearly two years after meeting George Carhart, Shelly moved out of the brick bungalow in McLean to Western View Farm in The Plains.

The two-bedroom, two-story farmhouse, a dependency of the far grander Montrose estate across State Route 626, had stables for Ten Bar and the horse Shelly would soon buy, Impressive Tim. Behind it a path rose steeply through a wooded hillside to open fields where she could ride. In front of the farm-- west across rolling land to the sun setting behind the Blue Ridge mountains-- was the sort of picture-postcard view these Virginia foothills are famous for.

Shelly's main diary, the one she had kept for years, would disappear after her death, as would many of her personal papers and perhaps much or all of her jewelry. But she started keeping a second diary shortly after she moved into Western View, one devoted to her impressions of her new home.

In it, she recorded some of her early feelings on June 26, 1992:

"There is a hypnotic tranquility about this place. Though I'm not at the point of feeling completely settled and 'at home' after not quite a month of living here, it's as if I sense I was destined to be here. It's a bit spooky at moments. I've never felt such a sense of peace and comfort like I feel here. I can't imagine living anywhere else, which is a first. . . .

"Years ago, at least twenty of them, I would say I wished one day to live some place where people would pass and ask, 'I wonder who lives there?' as I myself often did. Well, excepting the fact most or a lot of the people that pass know me, I'm feeling pretty sure I've lived long enough to see yet another dream of mine come to pass."

A month after writing that, Shelly would go off to England and Ireland. Two months after she returned, she was dead.

It was about five o'clock on an unseasonably cold Sunday afternoon-- October 18, 1992--when Shelly and Erica Stumvoll set out on their horses up the steep wooded trail behind Western View Farm.

The ride had been planned the day before, when the two women and their boyfriends, George Carhart and Carter Wiley, had met at a Hunt Country race. Shelly would ride Impressive Tim. Stumvoll, less experienced at trail riding, would take the tamer Cornpone, which Shelly had borrowed hoping Carhart might join her on one of these late-afternoon ventures. Carhart and Wiley would stay behind at the farm to split wood.

At the top of the hill, the two riders passed through a gate and into an open, flat field. From there, no one knows precisely where they went--field led to field as they rode through the knee-high grass--but eventually they came to a final tract defined by a wooden fence and low stone walls. Near its bottom, in a small wooded knoll, is a cherry tree, cracked off about six feet up so the top half bends to the ground. It was under this cherry tree that Shelly Malone would die.

"We were approximately one hundred yards into a 'new' field from a gate we had just entered and just downhill from a small knoll of trees," Erica Stumvoll recalled in a voluntary written statement given to the Fauquier County sheriff's office five weeks after Shelly's death.

"We were walking the horses side by side with Shelly slightly behind me and to my left, to cool them down. Unexpectedly, both horses 'spooked' or 'started. ' The horse that I was on rushed forward, down the hill, bucking. I was thrown/fell off to the left of my horse. I fell onto my hip, with my right hand still gripping the reins and left arm bracing the fall."

Shaken but not seriously injured, Stumvoll struggled to her feet to look for Shelly: "I sighted her about thirty feet away, uphill and adjacent to the knoll of trees, curled face up, under her horse. She was on her back, holding her chest with both arms with her legs drawn up.

"As the horse moved away from her, the horse stepped on her legs, face, and head, kicking her head as he did so in an apparent attempt to get away. I did not move as I was both in shock at the sight and fearful of scaring the horse into doing further damage. As the horse moved away from her, however, I immediately ran to her, my horse in tow by the reins.

"As I approached her, she began to sit up on her hands and knees. She was gasping for air as if out of breath. I yelled at her to tell me what was wrong. She responded by saying, 'I don't know.' I yelled again, 'What is wrong? Did you get the wind knocked out of you?' Again she responded, 'I don't know,' still trying to catch her breath and moving to sit back on her haunches, arms out front supporting her."

Impressive Tim returned at this point, Stumvoll writes, and began agitating her own horse, Cornpone, which she was holding tightly by the reins. Fearful that she and Shelly might be kicked by one or both horses--or Shelly trampled again-- Stumvoll looked for branches to tie them to but concluded that the slender branches available wouldn't restrain the horses for long. Instead, she let go of Cornpone's reins, and both animals ran off.

She again turned her attention to Shelly.

"She was still sitting up, though back on her haunches more with one arm supporting her. When I asked again if she could tell me what was wrong, she did not respond verbally but indicated that she wanted to lie down (which she proceeded to do). She was now breathing steady, not out of breath as before, but her breathing was labored and she appeared to fade in and out of consciousness."

Stumvoll checked Shelly for broken bones, bleeding, and mouth obstructions, finding none, and for pulse and reflexes, both of which were present, and then covered her with extra clothing.

"She would only occasionally moan," Stumvoll writes. ". . . Fearful of a head injury as a result of seeing the horse kick her in the head, I then concluded that the best thing to do was to try to seek medical help."

There was a problem: Erica Stumvoll had only the vaguest idea of where she was.

It is less than a mile from the broken cherry tree to Western View Farm, where George Carhart and Carter Wiley now were drinking beer, waiting for their girlfriends to return. But Shelly and Stumvoll hadn't gotten to the cherry tree as the crow flies.

Disoriented, Stumvoll ran west, up a short hill to where a fence line marks a field the two had not ridden over. It was the wrong decision. East, down the hill and through a stand of trees, would have brought her in only a few minutes to a road and, just across it, the gatehouse to the Currier estate, manned by a guard with a phone, only a mile or so from The Plains Volunteer Fire Department.

Seeing neither house nor road from the top of the hill, Stumvoll writes that she then ran back to check on Shelly: "She appeared to be unconscious and was breathing, although her breathing was still labored. The horses were uphill from the knoll of trees, and I set out to catch one."

Astride Cornpone, Stumvoll rode out through the gate the two had passed through, crossed a second field, became disoriented, and righted herself again. Finally, "galloping at every opportunity," Stumvoll came across a stone house with a red door that she and Shelly had seen early in their ride.

Inside, Stumvoll placed her first call to Lynn Wiley, the stepmother of Carter Wiley. The owner of the house--Carol Morgan--got on the phone to give directions to her house. Morgan called The Plains rescue squad, and she and Stumvoll drove down to where the Morgan drive meets the county road to wait.

Nearly 45 minutes had passed since Shelly had been trampled by Impressive Tim. Another 45 minutes would pass before the rescue squad would reach her.

Lynn Wiley drove her Jeep-- with Stumvoll giving directions beside her-- followed by The Plains ambulance and George Carhart and Carter Wiley in Shelly's Toyota 4 Runner. But as they drove across the darkening fields, it became apparent that Stumvoll had little idea where she had been or where she had come from. The procession crisscrossed and backtracked, dwindling down to two vehicles when Lynn Wiley's Jeep began getting stuck in the rough terrain. Finally, Stumvoll recalled two vacant farmhouses she and Shelly had passed early in their ride, and with that, Early Wines--the rescue squad's senior cardiac technician--was able to patch a way together to find the small clump of trees Shelly was lying under.

Wines and Stumvoll were the first to reach Shelly, but by then Shelly had neither a pulse nor breath: "I saw Early feel for her pulse and begin to cry. "

The rescue squad called for a helicopter, and Wines and the other squad members began trying to resuscitate her. A board was placed under Shelly--to provide an even surface for cardiopulmonary resuscitation--while her clothes were cut off with a scissors. Pressure sleeves were fitted on her arms and legs to force whatever circulation she might have to her vital organs. When the sleeves were fully inflated, the blood that had been pooling in Shelly's abdomen began spewing out of her mouth and nose.

Not long after, the helicopter arrived, but one last confusion remained. Stumvoll, George Carhart, and Carter Wiley sped to the hospital in nearby Warrenton, expecting Shelly to be taken there. Instead, they were told, she had been flown to DC's Washington Hospital Center, and so they raced off for there. By then, Shelly's death--apparent to all who had been in the field--had been made official.

She arrived at Washington Hospital Center clad only in string bikini underwear. There, at 8:08 pm on October 18, medical examiner Joye Carter pronounced her dead. The cause of death, Carter wrote, was "hemopericardium due to laceration of the heart due to blunt force trauma to the chest."

In lay terms, Shelly's heart had exploded with the impact of Impressive Tim's hoof. And there the story might rest had not so much weirdness ensued.

Frances Shewan was planning to make her annual visit to see her daughter-- and her first visit to Shelly's new home at Western View--the week of October 26. Shewan; her husband, Bill; and other family members were planning to travel around Virginia with Shelly.

Shewan says she was at work as an aide at the Wilton Manors Police Department, in Fort Lauderdale, at 11:35 that night when George Carhart--by now returned to the farm--called to say that her only daughter was dead. As she remembers the call, Carhart's first words were, "It looks like you won't be taking that vacation after all. . . . Shelly has a problem."

"I knew from talking to Shelly that she took this ride at night to see the sunset," Shewan says, "and I'm expecting him to say that she's broken a leg or an arm. I'm even thinking the horse broke a leg for a brief period, but I'm not expecting to hear what I'm going to hear. I may have come back with, 'Did she break a leg?' or 'What's the matter?' And he said, 'Shelly's dead.' "

For the relationship between Shelly's immediate family and her extended family in The Plains, it was the beginning of the end.

Frances and Bill Shewan; her sons, Joe and Jeff; and a cousin, Tom Hardy, arrived at Western View Farm on Monday evening, the day after Shelly's death.

"It was nine or nine-thirty," Shewan remembers. "When we got to the house, people were there--fifteen to twenty people I had never seen in my life, partying. I'm at my lowest, and this really hurt me to walk into that. There wasn't any place to hide, any place to embrace someone.

"All the chairs were occupied in the front room. There was a fire going; otherwise it was pitch dark in there. . . . It was like you just opened the doors to smoke and drinks and laughing and music. Everybody was enjoying themselves like we'd walked into a New Year's Eve party."

Early on, George Carhart suggested-- and tried to insist--that the Van Halen anthem "Jump" be played at Shelly's funeral. It was a musical joke of sorts: Capriole, Shelly's store, is the term for a jump in the dressage event. It is even a joke that Shelly might have appreciated. But that, too, sat wrong with the family.

So did Carhart's sense of humor. At one point when they were at Western View together, Shelly's brother Jeff asked Carhart to point him to the field where she died. Instead of directing Malone to the east, up the hill behind the farmhouse, Carhart sent him on a wild-goose chase to the north. Later, the Malones say, he explained he was kidding and pointed Jeff Malone to the south.

And there were, the Malones say, the endless cocktail gatherings at Western View and at Montrose House across the road, where the Malones were staying.

In part, it was a clash of cultures. Many of Shelly's friends in The Plains had been born to money and lived the sort of fast life that was alien to the experience of Frances Shewan and her sons. They were tight- knit, too. Like any small community, The Plains is a place where everybody knows everybody else's business. And they were steeped in the ethos of the Hunt Country, where a certain fatalism toward riding accidents and a respect for the brute power of horses is inbred.

"I go out riding two or three times a week, and I always know I'm taking my life in my hands, especially when you go down these trails," says a woman in The Plains, who, like so many other residents contacted for this story, would not be quoted on the record. "It's almost a red badge of courage out here if you get hurt in a horse-riding accident."

But the strangeness seems to have gone beyond cultural gaps. And being hurt in a riding accident is not the same as being killed.

Shelly's cousin Tom Hardy, a professor of English and art history at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, says that on that first night at Western View, he saw eight of Shelly's rings--many of them well- turned gold pieces--laid out on the dresser in the guest bedroom. The rings have not been seen since by any family members.

Shelly was also wearing three rings at the time of her death. The last of them was not returned to the Malones until a week later, after a heated confrontation with Carhart. Another day passed before Carhart turned over the earrings Shelly had been wearing.

Frances, Jeff, and Joe Malone intended to rent Western View Farm until the beginning of this year, to allow them time to sort through Shelly's possessions. On Sunday, October 25, two days after her funeral, the three of them returned to the farm from breakfast in The Plains to find all of Shelly's heavy furniture being carted away for storage in the barn of Jim and Lynn Wiley, Carter's father and stepmother. At the same time, many of Shelly's smaller possessions were being stowed in garbage bags for removal to a county recycling site. Almost inexplicably, the Malone brothers lent a hand.

"I don't know how to explain it," Joe Malone says, "other than this: I'd come home many a day a loser, but this time I had lost more than anything I'd ever lost in my life. . . . To see these people you've assigned no ulterior motives to doing that, to deal with a bunch of material goods that I didn't give a damn about, and to make the mental twist to get angry at these people was too big a jump."

The next morning, though, Joe and Jeff Malone went to the dump. Inside the six garbage bags they managed to recover were an inlaid-wood jewelry box, videocassettes of Shelly, photo negatives, and an assortment of empty jewelry pouches from such stores as Tiffany & Company, Cartier, and Black Starr & Frost. More empty jewelry containers were found among the debris left behind at Western View Farm. The Malone brothers never recovered the diary that Shelly had kept for years, or her Rolodex. Why they were thrown out or why they were taken is a question they can't leave alone.

In the beginning, Joe Malone says, he, his brother, and his mother were determined to treat George Carhart like a member of the family. "I said, 'George, you can have the VCR; George, you can have the TV, the stereo or whatever. We don't want to argue about this,' " Joe recalls.

But somewhere in the time between Shelly's possessions' being bagged for removal to the dump and Joe and Jeff Malone's trip there to recover what they could, whatever trust had existed between the Malones and Shelly's circle in The Plains disappeared. As that happened, the Malones' mounting concern began to feed itself.

The Malones videotaped their trip to the dump, as they would later videotape their trip to Jim and Lynn Wiley's barn to inventory and recover Shelly's furniture, and as, still later, they would attempt to videotape their first group meeting with the local police. The taping was the first step in the family's effort to build a case--though against whom and what they weren't sure then and, in some ways, are not sure yet. The effort to videotape the police meeting was also the first poison in the well of relationships with the Fauquier County sheriff's office.

As suspicion mounted on suspicion, seemingly innocuous events began to assume a more sinister face for the Malones. John Heyl, who had sold Impressive Tim to Shelly, offered to board both Tim and Shelly's other horse, Ten Bar, for free while the family was sorting out her affairs. But at the Wileys' insistence, Joe Malone says, both horses were sent to another stable, where a boarding fee was charged. Why? And why was Impressive Tim returned several weeks later with one of its shoes missing?

Shelly's bloodstained clothes, the ones that had been cut off her in the field by the rescue squad, also disappeared, along with her jewelry and diary. Why?

There was, the Malones say, an attempt through Jim Wiley--via his Hunt Country friend Senator John Warner--to circumvent the customary autopsy performed on trauma fatalities. Why? And why was Carter Wiley in the field where Shelly had died the next morning, recovering the one piece of apparel-- her riding boot--that had been left behind?

In fact, plausible explanations exist on every front. Carter Wiley said that he was helping to clear the course for a race that was to come through the field that day. Jim Wiley did place a call to John Warner's farm about the autopsy, but, he says, it was at Frances Shewan's request, and Warner was not home. The Wileys' barn, Jim Wiley says, is a storehouse for the excess furniture of many people in the area--Shelly already had some pieces there-- and it seemed sensible to have the house cleared by the end of the month, when the rent was due.

Her friends in The Plains say, too, that Shelly rarely talked about her past and seemed at least partially estranged from her family. As for George Carhart's erratic behavior, his friends suggest that he was provoked by his treatment at the hands of Shelly's family.

"The people who came to George's aid after the accident are some of the kindest, gentlest people I know," says one person who was there, "and we were wholly unprepared for this pit of vipers. The Malones started accusing us of stealing within twenty-four hours of their arrival. And they loathed George."

The empty jewelry boxes and pouches, Carhart has contended, were from pieces that Shelly had pawned or sold privately in New York.

Yet to the Malones these events came more and more to suggest a systematic attempt to remove every trace of physical evidence, just as the clearing of Shelly's furniture seemed an attempt to force them out of The Plains by denying them a place to stay and the absence of her jewelry seemed clear evidence of theft. Soon-- very soon--their suspicions reached a critical mass, and Joe Malone, who is an electrician by trade, went to work on Western View Farm.

"My big concern while we were out there," he says, "was that at some point one of these people was going to say, 'Look, I know a way to handle this. I know this old boy at an old tavern, and for five thousand down and five thousand when he's done, we can settle this. Even if he gets caught, no one can tie him to us.'

"So I lit that property up so that anyone who was thinking of doing something like that would know that somebody in the house understood what they were up to. It was a signal--a way of saying, 'I know, and I've done this much. What else will I do? What else do I have in store?' "

By this time, too, the Malones' suspicion had leapt the family circle. Harry Dorman, Joe Malone's friend and landlord in Annandale, followed events closely during the first week after Shelly's death, several times accompanying Joe to Western View. On October 27, he typed up his impressions, first summing up many of the events described above and then ending thus:

"I am afraid--could this be a murder? Drugs? Smuggling? Gambling? What is going on here? The above is in no particular order, just my stream of consciousness trying to get all this stuff down before I forget or if I happen to have an 'accident' caused by the 'Fauquier cty mafia.' I have told many people of my suspicions to protect myself in case I have an 'accident.'

"Stopped by Dawsons Gun & Tackle in Annandale this PM to price a .45 cal 1911A1 and Marlin 30-30 rifle. This is crazy! How am I in this mess? Is it a mess? What is going on here?"

Things would get only more complicated.

Someone who saw Impressive Tim the morning after Shelly's death swears that he showed signs of having been heavily lathered and that the bit he was wearing was bent. Both the lather and the bent bit, this person contends, suggest that the horse was involved in a struggle far more intense than is consistent with the description of Shelly's accident. The bit, this person says, has disappeared.

Shelly's love life also turned out to be more complicated than it appeared on the surface, in part because, at age 37, she seems to have felt her biological clock running.

"I think she felt ambivalent and some pressure about not being a parent," Val erie Shea says. "She wasn't convinced that it would be the right choice for her, that she would be fulfilled by it, but I think she had a strong urge to mother someone and have a child."

The logical father would have been George Carhart, but the implications of fatherhood seem to have troubled him, Shea says.

"I find George to be one of the more inscrutable people Shelly ever had around her. He went from being extremely gung ho and putting the full press on to having reservations. When he saw that they were progressing to a commitment, he became a lot more noncommittal."

Shelly also seems to have needed companionship. "She called me once," Steven Head recalls, "and said, 'I get really self- destructive when I'm alone.' "

Frances Shewan, for one, is convinced that Shelly was preparing to break off the relationship with George Carhart at the time of her death. By then, Carhart--and Cecil Altman at a distance--were not the only men in Shelly's life.

Steven Head, Shelly's former boyfriend, says that the two of them made love on Sunday afternoon, September 19, almost a month before her death. The evening prior, he says, "we had a conversation. She told me, 'I have no plans to marry George. He has no plans to move here, and I have no plans of going to New York. I have no idea where I go from here.'

"I was going to propose to her on her birthday, December 26," Head goes on. "After she told me this relationship with George wasn't going anywhere and she was going to end it, I thought that she could not find anyone to love her as much as I could."

Head already had ordered an engagement gift--a plate from the Bradford Collection that showed Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara. After Shelly's death, he gave it to Frances.

Nor was Head the only other man.

On Friday, October 16, Shelly spent a romantic afternoon, presumably for the first time, with a prominent Warrenton attorney named Robin Gulick, who handled some of Shelly's legal affairs. Two days later, Gulick wrote her from the Tides Inn, in Irvington, Virginia, where he was staying while preparing for a case. At the end of the letter, Gulick says that he is going to watch the geese land on the pond, an evening custom at the inn. By then, Shelly was either dead or at death's door.

In his letter--which was opened posthumously by the Malones as they sorted through Shelly's mail--Gulick also expresses his concern about the effect of their tryst on his relationship with Beth Benhard, one of Shelly's neighbors and good friends. Presumably, he could have had no way of knowing that only 48 hours earlier--two nights before Shelly's death--the two women had argued vehemently at an upscale Plains restaurant called Fiddler's Green. About what is unknown or at least thus far untold.

Almost as complicated, and as complicating, were Shelly's finances. She was generous, perhaps to a fault. She had paid for both her brothers to visit her in Europe; she often flew with her cat-- "Ricky the Traveling Cat," as he was known to the family--by buying him a first-class seat on the plane, next to hers.

"Shelly was the most extraordinarily generous human being I think I've ever met," her friend Michele Rouse recalls. "She never left without returning with the most ideal gift. She knew a hundred people. How on earth would she find the time, energy, and magic to give me the one thing that would make me weep for joy?"

Thanks to Cecil Altman, they were luxuries she could afford.

Thanks to Altman, too, she could afford to be not a very good businesswoman. For all her good ideas, her creative energy, Capriole never showed a profit. It was on Federal Street, a block off Middleburg's main street, in an old house that showed its age. The hours were sometimes erratic; so were customers. Toward the end she had tried to shift into the specialty T-shirt and sweatshirt business with a "Heroes of the Racetrack" line. Near the very end, Altman himself had begun to choke off funds for the business, although Shelly's personal funds still flowed freely.

After Shelly's death, Joe Malone talked with Cecil Altman: "He said, 'I didn't want to get this candid with you, Joe, but I sent your sister that money every month, and every time I let her build up some funds, she would buy some penny stocks or something, and twice a year I would bail her out. That's been the pattern.' "

But if Shelly had no talent for holding on to her money, she seems to have been anxious almost to the point of desperation for more of it. Ironically, the reason appears to be the very source of her income, Cecil Altman, according to Steven Head.

"She provided Cecil sexual attention maybe a handful of times, and she loathed that. It was killing her," Head says. "The whole idea of Capriole was to become financially independent and get out from under Cecil. It was tearing her up--her dignity, her pride--and she had so much pride."

And maybe that, more than anything else, explains the polarity that some of those who knew her best saw in Shelly-- the tension between the life she lived and the personal history that lay behind it.

"Shelly wanted to laugh and drink gin and not get fat," one good friend recalls. "She loved good restaurants, good wine, blue-suede jodhpurs . . . but there was also a strange streak with her. Whether it was a chip on the shoulder or hidden rage, I don't know, but she would just lose it sometimes. There would be spitting, vituperative hatred. It was never personal; it was always at them."

Especially in light of Shelly's desire for financial independence and her own past, there also is a temptation to find something in a call left on Shelly's answering machine by George Carhart's friend, Carter Wiley. (The tape was recovered from the machine after her death.)

"Shelly, the ship is in," the message begins. "Come by my house around eight o'clock, and we can hang out. This is Carter. The old man's out of town. Come on by and drink some wine, beer, carry on. We'll have a little din-din, go out, whatever. Come on by. I'm going duck hunting, going to the races. See you later. Bye."

The call may well be a simple social moment, but to the Malones the phrase "the ship is in"--with its echo of the drug trade--had resonance.

Shelly's autopsy revealed no trace of cocaine or any other proscribed drug in her blood or urine. But as her childhood friend Valerie Shea says, "Shelly tended to believe that virtue would not necessarily get its reward. I think she believed virtue was self-rewarded but not apt to bring the world to its knees. She thought that what made it happen was finances, opinion, and aggression."

For those willing to believe that Shelly Malone had fallen somehow on the wrong side of the law--or fallen among thieves and brigands--the blood in the car was the final straw.

After the funeral, Jeff Malone returned to Fort Lauderdale, driving Shelly's Toyota 4 Runner. The car had been baking in the Florida sun only a few days when it began to reek with a smell that seemed to come from the brown spots scattered on the upholstery. His girlfriend, Shari Dalton, was certain that the smell was that of decaying blood.

Dalton and Malone took the car to the Wilton Manors police headquarters, where Frances Shewan works, and asked Detective Tony Lewis to have a look at the interior. Lewis, in turn, got a test kit.

"You use three solutions," he says, "and you test the sample against them. If it turns blue, it's positively human blood-- and it turned blue."

Even more significant, Lewis says, was the pattern of the brown spots in the car.

"Blood splatter has a velocity to it. If you cut your hand and it drips blood straight down, you'll get a circle. Depending on how high you hold your hand, you'll get a bigger circle. If you're shot, the blood splatter will have a much higher velocity, and it will have a tail to it.

"In this vehicle, overhead of the passenger seat and overhead behind the driver's seat, there was a splatter of blood with a tail to it. It's as if someone was hit in the passenger seat and their head snapped to the side. It's usually around the third hit that the blood splatter gets created, and I saw a blood splatter."

The Toyota 4 Runner was returned to Virginia, and on December 14 it was turned over by the Malones to the Fauquier County sheriff's office for testing. Also turned over was a sample of Shelly's blood taken from the accident site. A month later, technicians determined that at least some of the splatters in the car were human blood. The sheriff's office then informed the Malones that it would have to delay typing the human blood with Shelly's blood--a test that, it said, involved shipping the materials to a private lab--because of the expense involved.

That test was never done.

Nor were statements ever taken from any of those either with or around Shelly in the hours before her death. The sole statement in the record--Erica Stumvoll's--was given voluntarily and in writing five weeks after the accident.

In a February 1993 telephone conversation with Joe Malone, Fauquier County Detective Greg Mauck, the third county official to be put in charge of the incident, said that he had told Stumvoll that he wanted her to show him exactly how the two women had left Western View Farm on their ride that afternoon. She never did.

Mauck also said he wanted to ask George Carhart why he had led Jeff Malone astray not once but twice on the location of Shelly's death.

"If I ever do get the chance to talk to George," Mauck said, "I want to ask him why he did that. I really do. That's one question that's been bugging me and bugging me and bugging me, and still to this day it bugs me." He never did get that chance, either. Carhart, who is currently unemployed, hired a lawyer, refused to make a statement, and was never subpoenaed. Nor does Detective Mauck seem to have looked into the screaming match between Shelly and Beth Benhard at the restaurant the night before Shelly's death.

Mauck does appear to have made a concerted effort to track Shelly's cash flow, but the larger implications of her seemingly anxious need for money appear to have gone unexplored, as have the twists and turns of her sexual adventures in the weeks before her death.

And now, seemingly, such issues are to stay unexplored, at least in any official capacity. On April 22 of this year the Fauquier County sheriff's office officially closed its files on Shelly Malone. Its finding remains the same as that made on the evening of October 18, 1992: accidental death.

Fiction has a way of tying it self up with precision, but not everything in real life ends so neat and clean. Sometimes all you have left is ambiguity.

That Shelly had a lacerated heart is certain. That a horse stepped on her chest is clear in photos taken shortly after her death. What haunts the Malones is how it could have happened and why they were treated as they say they were in the aftermath of the event.

One of the rescue-squad workers who tended to Shelly that night said he saw a large deer in the field when the team arrived--and jumping or bolting deer have been known to spook horses. Shelly was, by all accounts, a good trail rider, but even very good riders get thrown. Yet to call what happened to Shelly a "freak accident" almost underexaggerates.

"It's very rare to have a fatal riding accident," says John Strassburger, editor of the Chronicle of the Horse, in Middleburg. But it is far more rare still for a horse to step on anyone with the weight necessary to explode an organ.

"They don't want to step on you," Strassburger goes on. "It's just some instinct that they have. Their instinct is that when they put their foot on something unsteady, they could fall down. And with extremely rare exceptions, horses are not mean or vicious."

Shelly's friend Michele Rouse, a professional rider, says that "it's the most bizarre accident I ever heard of." What's more "inconceivable," Rouse says, is that "you could bribe a horse to step on someone's heart. In the weirdest Dick Francis novel, it couldn't happen."

The Malones have their own theories about what happened to Shelly. The basic one is that, accidentally or intentionally, she was struck and killed while sitting in the passenger seat of her car. To cover it up, they say, she was then dragged out into the field, and Impressive Tim was somehow forced to step on her. It would explain, they say, the heavy lathering of Tim, the bent bit, the splattered blood in the Toyota 4 Runner, the lack of any physical evidence.

Yet to believe that Shelly was murdered--as her family so passionately does-- is to buy into a plot of startling complexity, involving at least half a dozen players, all lying for one another. Understandably, Fauquier County officials have resisted that, despite endless entreaties from the Malones to do otherwise.

At the most, the sheriff's office seems to concede, there are questions about the disposition of Shelly's property after her death: the rings that disappeared, a mink coat that George Carhart took with him to New York and has since returned; a horse print, perhaps worth thousands of dollars, that is missing; and other items. But that, officials say, is more properly a civil matter than a criminal one.

By the book, that is probably so. And with their videotaping, their incessant letter-writing to higher officials, their appeals to other police forces in other jurisdictions and states, the Malones have made themselves persona non grata in both the Fauquier County sheriff's office and in Hunt Country generally.

"This family has been plaguing this town, trying to get some money," says one resident of The Plains. "It just smells dirty to me, smells rotten. They are trying to get press, trying to sue people, which is really unheard of in this territory. It's Mellon territory, Currier and Ives country . . . . Apparently, the CIA or the FBI is into this, hounding people."

Much of that is wrong, and some of it is foolish. Tom Hardy did talk to an adult student of his whose husband works for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the family has been working the press, but the only money they seem to have any interest in is that which they think rightfully belongs to Shelly's estate. Still, this is a case that invites endless theorizing.

Jim Gannon retired as a lieu tenant after twenty years with the DC police and works today as a security officer and a private investigator in Northern Virginia. Before they decided they couldn't afford the expense, the Malones hired him to look into Shelly's case.

"I went through all the materials they had given me--the tapes, the documents, and so forth," Gannon says. "It was very impressive and extremely confusing. However, I'll be honest--going into it after reading everything and meeting Tom Hardy and Joe Malone, I was a little bit leery, for the simple reason that they're very emotional about this. I said let's take everything with a grain of salt."

Today, Gannon says, he is convinced "something happened," although what--a violent crime, an accident the real origins of which need to be covered up, a practical joke that got out of hand, theft from the dead--he can't put a face on. Gannon cites, as others have, the disappearance of physical evidence, the bloodstains, the classical motives of violent crime: complicated love triangles, Shelly's seeming need for money.

"The least that's going on," he says, is that the Fauquier County sheriff's office "is making a concerted effort to cover up their incompetence, and it's extensive-- it's extensive."

Bill Hicks, a Springfield lawyer who is a former assistant commonwealth's attorney in Arlington, also was employed briefly by the Malones and has read through the documentation.

"Most police departments," Hicks says, "assume any traumatic death needs to be thoroughly investigated." And that, he says, is especially so in a case with so many loose ends.

"Just from what I have read, it was frankly one of the shoddiest, shabbiest investigations one could imagine. . . . What happened is that they were handed a 'fully solved' death."

The case, Hicks says, "absolutely cries out for thorough investigation."

Fairfax lawyer Helene Luce, who had handled the estate work for the Malones, was present when the sheriff's office officially closed its investigation and has seen the autopsy photos and other evidence. She is convinced Shelly died of natural, if freakish, causes, but that, she says, does not rule out other criminal activity.

"What I honestly think happened," Luce says, "is that these people are vultures. They thought Shelly was worth a lot of money because of the lifestyle she led, and before the body was cold or just after it was, they started helping themselves to her property."

And, Luce adds, "to the credit of the sheriff's office, they said there is no question that the initial investigation was incredibly sloppy. They admitted that."

There is one other element that Jim Gannon cites--what might be called the force of personal history. "Shelly is not the blushing virgin who just came down the pike. She was not pure as the driven snow, and she was liable to get into something."

In a sense, Gannon's state ment points to the secondary tragedy in the death of Shelly Malone. To satisfy their need to know, to try to close the gap between what the authorities say happened and what the evidence suggests to them might have happened, the Malones have had to play a hand in destroying the woman that Shelly created.

The Shelly Malone who was the races patron, the National Glaucoma Trust honoree, the woman who received cards from Prince Albert, probably would have loved to die in a riding accident. The timing was wrong--she was too vibrant to die so young--but the manner of death fit her romantic conception of herself. The potential for foul play, though, rests more in the other woman who had those dreams and made them come true, at least for a season or so. And it is that second person who emerges when one studies the life and death of Shelly Malone.

"Shelly would have hated to attract this sort of notoriety," says a close friend. "I think her family has failed to perceive how she would have felt about that."

Yet one gets the sense that Shelly was more than a sister, daughter, and close cousin to the Malones and Tom Hardy-- that her magnetism helped to hold the family together, that her energy did much to animate it. Shelly, her mother says, "was a virtual repository of our lives." In such circumstances, it is often hard to let the dead lie still, especially when so many questions about Shelly's death were never answered in any official sense, much less asked.

Surely, the Malones and Tom Hardy are obsessed, but the question is whether they are obsessed with cause or without. And for the time being it seems to be a tragedy--and an obsession--without end. The Malones and Tom Hardy have stretched their already thin resources to retain yet another lawyer; there is vague talk of civil actions, even of having Shelly's body exhumed. Like Dickens's Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the case threatens to go on and on.

"Shelly wanted to be very fi nancially self-sufficient," Steven Head recalls. "She wanted to be very involved in all things that had to do with horses. She told me a number of times that when she died, if she got her obituary in the Blood- Horse, she would have been successful. And she wanted to be loved by a primary man--to feel secure in a relationship with a man. And I think she wanted that more than anything else."

She was deeply involved with horses, and she seems to have had at the end almost as much money as one could want to spend, but she never won her financial self-sufficiency.

She lived, finally, in Hunt Country, just as she had dreamed she someday might, although perhaps she was not as accepted as she had hoped. As one friend notes, "A single woman that beautiful is not that welcome"--at least by everyone.

She subscribed to the Blood-Horse--the weekly magazine of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association--for years, and at the end, the magazine carried her obituary, as she had hoped it would.

She was loved, too--nobly or ignobly, not enough or too much--by many men, although she seems to have carried far too much baggage to ever feel secure with any one of them.

"Every man who met Shelly fell in love with her or wanted to have her," Head says, "but not many people had the endurance to love Shelly. It took a lot of patience, a lot of understanding. . . . Shelly was an emotional handful, and what initially attracted a man to her didn't have much to do with that. They wanted to take her to bed, and Shelly knew that. What attracted most men to Shelly initially had nothing to do with love."

At her core beat a kind of paradox: She was an extrovert who held at least part of her life in the shadows. "I think she was more complicated than any of us realized," Michele Rouse says. "As open as I always thought she was, there were a lot of sides to Shelly. She was like a prism that caught the light and threw it back at us." Now, Rouse says, she can't tell the fact of Shelly's life from the fiction.

It wasn't a life without faults, God knows, but it was the one Shelly Malone was handed--and she gave it a hell of a ride.