Hollywood's Nightmare Couple

Evi filmed her run-in at the union offices with her ever-present handheld camera. Altringer says she was shown the video during a meeting this June at the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills at which time the Quaids hired her to get information on those who’d taken out the restraining orders. After the Quaids’ stay at that luxury hotel, the bill was paid with a credit card in the name of “Janet Cross.” Altringer says Evi gave her that card to use for dinner and it was declined.

Altringer quickly got sucked into the Quaids’ strange world. She says they insisted that a former business manager had taken out a million-dollar life-insurance policy on Randy and had hired “the Mob” to kill both Quaids to collect the payout. It was to be staged to look like a murder/suicide, Evi explained, and Altringer’s job was to help identify the “killers.”

Altringer says she witnessed Evi Quaid self-medicating with Demerol three times a day. "She told me she snorted it in her left nostril so it would go right to her brain to cure her migraines. I saw her do this myself. She also … believed [Michael] Jackson was murdered along with Heath Ledger, Chris Penn, David Carradine, Natasha Richardson, and other stars who (had been) in movies with Randy.”

Altringer says she was instructed by Evi to run a check on several license plate numbers from the funeral of David Carradine. The Quaids were certain the drivers were the “killers.” The plates came back as employees of Forest Lawn Cemetery.

“One day we were outside and Evi pointed to some towers on a nearby hill. ‘Look, Becky,’ she said to me, ‘there they are watching us, keeping track of us.’ She pointed to firemen training in the distance too. I tried to tell her they were just communications towers and firemen but ….” Altringer’s voice trails off.

Evi also told the private investigator that she had convinced Randy to turn down the offer of a major part on the Fox TV show Fringe because she said Fox was “part of the Mob.”

The Quaids had moved out of not one but two Beverly Hills residences and told Altringer bizarre tales of poisoned swimming pools, a dead dog, and feeling unsafe. With nowhere in particular to live, the Quaids seem to have hit the road and they left a trail of bills—both overdue and unpaid.

They owed $10,546.96 to the San Ysidro Ranch, for which they were arrested. Paperwork filed with the arrest warrant says the Quaids checked in with a bogus credit card, a phony address and phone numbers and gave multiple excuses to hotel management as they drove up the tab. Interestingly, just a short while before their arrest they finally paid about half that bill via a cashier’s check.

According to police, the Quaids have owed $17,000 to the Bel Air Hotel in Beverly Hills for more than a year and they ran out on a night’s stay (about $500) from the Biltmore Hotel in Montecito, California. In July 2008, the Quaids left a $55,243 bill at San Francisco’s Nob Hill hotel, according to a letter from the hotel. Their Mercedes was mysteriously stolen from the hotel’s valet stand and that might have been the reason they left the hotel bill unpaid. Just recently a source close to the situation said, “They have now paid us all they owed.”

The Quaids’ former business manager in Beverly Hills got stiffed for as much as $50,000, though legal documents seen by The Daily Beast indicate the Quaids may not have paid the firm because they believe it failed to protect them in the Actors' Equity dispute; a California woman who rented the Quaids a trailer home for $2,000 for parts of June, July and August says she never got a penny, and that the star and his wife left the trailer trashed; and a lawsuit was filed recently in Ventura County, California by a former friend of the couple’s who claims they took an antique table and chairs worth $8,500 after she refused to give in to Evi’s demand that she lend them money. The Mickey Fine Pharmacy in Beverly Hills has been in court demanding an unspecified back payment from Evi since November 2008. There are several other small claims suits still pending in the Los Angeles court system as well.