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by George Snyder?
Writer Richard Brautigan, who was found dead Thursday in his Bolinas? home, apparently committed suicide — a close friend said yesterday that the author had been preparing for death for some time.
David Fechheimer?, a San Francisco private investigator, said: "Toward the end of summer he seemed to be taking care of a number of housekeeping details. For example, he cleaned out his North Beach office upstairs from Vesuvio's and put everything in storage.
"Ironically," said Fechheimer, "he seemed to be in better shape in the last few months than he had been for a long time.
"He had a difficult divorce four or five years ago," Fechheimer added, "and it seemed as though he had finally gotten over it.
In retrospect, I guess it was plain he thought he was coming to the end. He had deep emotional troubles. He complained about his back hurting him and he had problems with his teeth, for example.
"If they say it was suicide," Fechheimer said, "there is no question but that I believe it."
The Marin County coroner's office withheld such a ruling yesterday. An official said formal identification of Brautigan's body and a determination of the cause of death for the 49-year-old author will not be released until Monday at the earliest.
A coroner's spokeswoman said her office is waiting for dental charts to be sent from Livingston, Mont., where Brautigan had an 80-acre ranch in Paradise Valley.
Brautigan's badly decomposed body, which had been in his three-story Bolinas home for up to three weeks, was found in a second-story bedroom with a large-caliber pistol nearby, according to sources.
A nearby wall, they said, was splattered with blood.
Fechheimer said a call from Livingston led to the discovery of Brautigan's body.
"I got a call from Becky Fonda? -— Peter's wife," he said, "saying that they hadn't heard from him in a while and that they were worried."
Fechheimer said he called a mutual friend -— whom he declined to identify -— and asked him to check on the writer. The friend went to the house and found the body.
Fechheimer said Brautigan, who spent his winters in Japan and summers in Montana, had been living in the house since June.
Another Brautigan friend, a free-lance journalist who asked to remain anonymous, said he believed "Richard came to Bolinas to die.
"I know he killed himself from what the people who found him said," the friend said. "They found a pistol there.
"His second wife was Japanese," he added, "and after their divorce he spent a lot of time in Japan. He had a thing for Asian women.
"He spent time there and time at his ranch outside Livingston. The last thing he told people when he left the ranch was, 'I'm not coming back." I don't think they believed him," the friend said.
Fechheimer said that Brautigan's body will be cremated without any formal services. His ashes will be placed in an urn being brought to California by a friend, novelist Tom McGuane?.
The urn, he said, will be given to Brautigan's daughter by his first marriage, Ianthe Wiston [Swenson] of Santa Rosa.
San Francisco Chronicle?
October 27, 1984: 1, 14
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