Billionaire Family Tragedy the Getty Curse Strikes Again

Born into one of America’s wealthiest families, Andrew Getty could afford to indulge his passions: He wanted to make gory horror movies. He wanted to write the world’s longest palindrome (a phrase that reads the same forward and backward). He wanted to buy a flying car like one he had seen on YouTube. And he wanted to visit Costa Rica this month. Says his friend Alisha Lucero: “We were talking about April to see the waterfalls.”

But like much in Getty’s peculiar life, those plans would go unfulfilled. On March 31 the 47-year-old grandson of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty was found dead, bleeding in the bathroom hallway of his Hollywood Hills mansion. His body was discovered by an ex-girlfriend, Lanessa DeJonge, against whom Getty had sought a restraining order two weeks earlier, claiming that DeJonge refused to leave his house. But police say they do not believe foul play was involved in Getty’s death, and L.A. county coroner’s assistant chief Ed Winter told PEOPLE the cause was “probably gastrointestinal bleeding.” Getty had problems with drugs in the past, according to sources, and suffered from dangerously high blood pressure. Winter said that prescription drugs were found at the scene but he believed Getty had been sober “for some time.”

The sad end is the latest in a long series of tragedies to befall the legendary Getty family, which built its multibillion-dollar dynasty on oil-field fortunes (see sidebar). For Andrew, that wealth “attracted people that shouldn’t be around,” says his friend Elan Morrison. A rotating group of houseguests shared room in his sprawling home with his collection of puppets, skulls and even the skeleton of a prehistoric bird. “He was addicted to troubled women,” says another friend, Noelle Leanne. “He had this hero thing, so he would always try to help people. He was a playboy who had a big heart.”

But he was haunted by his family’s demons. He talked to friends about his cousin John Paul Getty III’s kidnapping and death threats he said his family had gotten. “He was paranoid and afraid of being alone,” Leanne says. Less business-focused than his forebears, he pursued a career as a director, sinking $6 million into a horror film, The Storyteller, that went unreleased.

Behind closed doors, “he had a fetish for women’s clothing,” says Leanne. He bought closets full of garments online and asked female guests to model them for him. In 2002 his then-girlfriend Tara Kersch painted a dark picture of Getty in a request for a restraining order, alleging that he was addicted to crystal meth and had threatened to kill her. He “ate and drank whatever the hell he wanted,” says Leanne. “He didn’t go out much. He would bring the party home. It was a purely indulgent lifestyle.”

And yet “he wasn’t just this oil tycoon baby,” says Morrison. “He saw people who were down and wanted to fix them. I know he wanted his own family. I think he never found what he was looking for.”