Who wanted him gone and why?
“[It was] terrible.”
The victim was a boyish-faced 36-year-old singer, songwriter, harmonica player, and TV host named Peter Ivers.
Credit: George Rose/Getty Images
His head had been bludgeoned.
An autopsy revealed he died from massive fractures of the skull with brain injury.
The day after Ivers' body was found, the police stated there were no suspects in the case.
No one was ever arrested for Ivers' murder, and his death remains a mystery.
Even the dramatic manner of his passing has not cemented Ivers' place in history.
“He did not get his just deserts,” Parks says.
“That should not make me angry.
But it sure does make me sad.”
“He was in a kind of world of his own,” says Ivers' friendDavid Lynch.
“Oh God, the night from hell,” says Fisher with a shudder.
Fisher’s recollection of that evening is that Ivers came out in a diaper and was then heckled.
“The audience was not prepared for him,” she says.
“Peter was an inveterate iconoclast,” says Parks.
“His general demeanor was antiauthoritarian.”
“One of the things that made him so singular was the harmonica,” says Parks.
“The herd was stampeding to either guitars or the piano.
The harmonica put him in a singular place.”
“He was an intellectual pop artist,” says Lynch.
“You could say he was ahead of his time.”
“[Film] executives liked him,” says drummer Russell Buddy Helm.
“He could talk the talk.
[Laughs]Ron was cool.
He came in, he didn’t mind.”
“I was really embarrassed about my lyrics because they’re so simple,” says Lynch.
“Pete said, ‘No, I love them.’
I came back to Pete’s house two weeks later.
“It’s almost childish, the song,” says Devo bassist Jerry Casale.
“But it was dark and foreboding at the same time.
It was like a nursery rhyme turned on its head.”
Casale met Ivers when the band visited Los Angeles.
“He knew everybody,” says Casale.
“He was everywhere on any given night.
He was quite a larger-than-life character.”
“That was one of his other major gifts.”
If only the artist could find the perfect outlet for his equally irreverent personality and music.
(Both were acquitted.)
“It was a madhouse,” says Lynch.
The space the drummer found for him was large but basic.
“It was not an apartment,” says Helm.
“These were very crude, large loft spaces previously used for industrial businesses.”
Fisher recalls being alarmed at her ex’s new neighborhood.
“Yeah, I was concerned,” she says.
“He wanted a bigger space where he could rehearse.
But it was a scary place.”
That concern would prove horribly justified.
It was the neighbor who found Ivers' body: fully clothed, on bloodstained sheets.
“His head was smashed in.”
Either way, it wouldn’t have been hard for an intruder to gain entry.
“It was so easy, it was very unsecure,” says the now-retired Petroski.
“One of those locks, you just rattle it a few times and the door opens.”
Fisher was unhappy with the police investigation from the beginning.
Petroski admits that the situation was not ideal.
“Oh no, it was crummy,” he says.
Petroski recalls the hammer bore no fingerprints.
But the crime scene did yield one clue missing stereo equipment.
“You could see where the stereo equipment would have been,” says Petroski.
“There were some wires still there.
So it was obvious that something was missing from the shelf.
Then he learned that a burglar had fallen to his death in the area.
Given the stolen stereo, Petroski theorized that the same thief might have been responsible for the killing.
Fisher, meanwhile, hired a private detective to look into the murder.
“I did continue on for close to a year,” she says.
While Ivers had a reputation of being merely offbeat, Jove was, to many, downright dangerous.
Devo members found the producer so unnerving when they met him that the band never appeared on the show.
“We were afraid of him,” says Casale.
“He was a scary kind of loose cannon.”
According to Helm, Jove who died in 2004 was angry at the possibility of Ivers leaving the show.
“Peter was having difficulties with David Jove andNew Wave Theater,” says the drummer.
“David Jove was obsessive and quite the cocaine abuser.
Peter was really kind of sick of doing David’s scene.
But law enforcement never seemed sold on any connection to Ivers' death.
You would like to have better answers, but I don’t think there ever will be.
I think this is it.”
“I honestly think the sky’s the limit,” says Fisher about what Ivers might have accomplished.
“He was very entrepreneurial, and he had his finger on the pulse.”
She has also done her best to keep Ivers' name alive.
Shortly after his murder, she founded the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Program at Harvard.
“He could win over fans one at time.
He just didn’t have enough time.”
