This mystery isn’t completely unsolved like the cases I usually feature in these posts. It does contain the strange and puzzling elements I favor, juicy bits to make the eyes tingle as they read. Ultimately, though, this story is about the grandest mystery of them all: the twisting, turning, tangled terrain of the human heart.

I’ll get to the strange and mysterious part, but first I have to introduce the main character.

When I was a tiny girl, I actually loved going to my pediatrician. Oh yeah, I dreaded shots as much as any kid, but I loved Dr. Raymond La Scola. The gentlest of men, he had shining eyes that I remember as being dark, but it was a long time ago and I was little, so God only knows. The important part was that those eyes broadcast joy at being around children. Kids can tell that stuff, when a grownup really likes being around them and when they’re just going through the motions. Dr. Ray loved kids. He had a melodious voice, so soothing and comforting, and when he talked to me, he talked to me and listened attentively to what I said. Pretty heady stuff for a little kid.

My mom loved him, too. He was the most compassionate of doctors. We were desperately poor, my father working only now and then, my mom struggling to make ends meet by babysitting and sewing and whatever else she could think up. We lived in a ramshackle old house back then in one of the poorest neighborhoods in L.A. When my mother was especially hard up and I needed care, or my shots, Dr. La Scola often waived his fees. Once when I was so sick I could hardly get out of bed, he came to the house–a momentous, archetypal event in my young life. I remember his dark fedora and stylish overcoat, the leather doctor’s bag he carried, his shining stethoscope hovering over my chest, his sweet-sad smile. I remember his comforting voice, telling me it was going to be all right, that I was going to be all right. I remember the quiet ebb and flow of his words talking to my mother, telling her it would be all right, too.

He didn’t charge for that visit, either. I confirmed this with my mother when I was an adult.

Dr. Ray was also something of a Renaissance man. He published a novel, The Creole, and gave my mother an autographed copy which I still have. He was a concert pianist and before becoming a doctor, he tried his hand at being a lawyer. He had a restless spirit, always looking for something to fill his soul. He looked for love, too, but rarely found it. In the bad old days, being gay meant always hiding an essential part of yourself. He had a crush on a policeman friend of my mother’s. J. wasn’t insulted or jeopardized by this. He was secure in his manhood and let Dr. La Scola down easy. J. appreciated what a good man he was because he treated J.’s kids, too.

After I’d moved on to a grownup doctor, my mother one day found herself in the medical building where Dr. La Scola practiced. Since it had been a few years since she’d seen him, she thought to drop in and say hello. “You wouldn’t believe the strange people in that waiting room,” she later told me. “No kids. It looked like he’d gone down to Venice Beach and found the roughest, skunkiest people around.” Venice Beach was where the hippies and druggies hung out back then. It still is, in parts, but it’s also become a tourist mecca and quite upscale in parts. Mom left the office without saying anything to the receptionist or Dr. Ray.

On August 25, 1980, Dr. Raymond La Scola was charged with murder.

Dr. Ray had become a hypnotist sometime after his baby doctor days, and he’d struck up a friendship with a wealthy Buddhist monk, Ariya Dhamma Thera, and his wife, Georgia. Thera had founded the American Institute of Buddhist Studies and from his lectures and teaching he became quite well off. When Thera and his wife decided to move to Palm Springs in 1976, Dr. La Scola bought their house in Los Angeles. Georgia became Dr. Ray’s patient and the three became so close that in 1979, the Theras adopted Ray as their son. Georgia signed a will in February 1979 giving Dr. La Scola $1 million in real estate and personal property with the stipulation that he take care of her husband, in a nursing home by this time, for the rest of his life. She died at Dr. Ray’s home in July of 1979 of congestive heart failure, as the death certificate signed by Dr. La Scola attested.

Then, for some reason no one ever explained, he had Georgia cremated and placed her remains in the trunk of his Cadillac.

The tale becomes even more tangled after this. A former lover and disciple of Thera’s visited him in the nursing home and thought he was being abused, sprung him and took him home with her. Dr. La Scola accused her of kidnap, she counter accused him of using drugs and hypnosis to persuade the Theras to adopt him, and the doctor countercharged that the woman coerced Thera into marriage to get at his money. Georgia’s ashes, a year later, still resided in the trunk of Dr. Ray’s car. A judge overturned the adoption, then things went really bad for Dr. La Scola. A shady ex-con and former heroin addict who had lived with Dr. La Scola claimed that one night when the doctor was drunk, he admitted to giving Georgia large doses of painkillers, and eventually killing her by injecting her with insulin.

The case was so bizarre it splashed all over the local papers and even made the national news, showing up in Time Magazine.

When the charges were dropped in April of 1981, it still made the national papers, but without the fanfare and salacious implications of the original stories.

The ex-con ex-junkie had been proved to be a liar in another case in which he’d testified, and the courts deemed him unworthy to testify against Dr. La Scola. Dr. Ray was sentenced to probation for prescribing drugs illegally. The adult me realizes that the reason my mother found his waiting room full of skunky people was because he’d become one of Those Doctors, the kind who makes money writing out illegal prescriptions.

Sometime after the murder charges were dropped, Dr. Ray moved back to his home town, New Orleans, where he died on my mother’s birthday in 1994.

I cannot reconcile that other doctor with the man I knew. I loved him, you see. I still do, in the part of me that is a tiny child, who adores the man who was always kind, soothing, comforting when I felt bad and when Mommy and Daddy struggled and got fretful. He was the soft hands, the melodic voice, the compassionate eyes of my childhood–and Lord knows, there was little enough of that back then. Dr. La Scola knew that, knew that I lived in a troubled house, that my mother struggled, and he accepted the frailties of the parents of the children he ministered to. He did the right thing, according to his own lights. Dr. La Scola did fall far from grace, I have no illusions about that. But I like to think somewhere in that sordid tangle, a part of him thought he was doing the right thing by the Theras, too. Certainly, I’m not going to take the word of a lying ex-felon out to make a deal with prosecutors and a opportunistic woman whose motives probably weren’t so pure, either.

Only Dr. La Scola knows the truth of those accusations, how far he wandered from or how narrowly he clung to a righteous path, but he’s gone to a place beyond storytelling. His restless heart never did find a port of call, I don’t suppose. I guess I can forgive him for having feet of clay and for being a complicated and frail human being himself.

Human beings are never all one thing, all black, all white. I suppose even Mother Teresa had her dark side. Most of us are a patchwork of blacks and whites, with mostly gray I suspect. It’s not for me to judge Dr. Raymond La Scola. I love him still.