REvisiting the crazy lady's Daytona coupe CSX2287) coupla questions

For those of you new to the subject, some years ago
a Cobra Daytona coupe was unearthed in Anaheim after several decades
of being hidden. The owner had been found burned nearly to death
in a park a few weeks earlier and died en route to the hospital. The car changed hands for $ 3 million one day and $4 million the next, making the profit-per-hour owned one of the highest in the used car biz.

I had a couple of questions that I couldn't find answered in the stories that are in print.

--Is it true that Shelby himself found the lady and tried to buy it? And why didn't he convince her?

--what other famous Cobra/Shelby fans have revealed since that they got far enough to make an offer and why didn't they succeed? (George Stauffer, the Wisconsin Cobra man, told me about the lady back in the late '70s but not her name or whether he had ever found her).

My theory of the reason she wouldn't sell is that the previous owner, Mr. P. Spector (of Wall of Sound fame) , had given the car to her father, maybe with the title. But he maintained after the car was found that he ohis bodyguard, only to remove it from his sight, not to keep. I believe that , when she wanted to drive it around town and registration came up due, she forged Spector's signature on the title. That's why she was afraid to sell it, afraid Spector would hear about it
and demand the car back if he could prove his signature was forged. I talked to Spector's lawyer and they were ready to go to court to assert that once the car was found but in the end they were unwilling to try to find the signed off title for fear of revealing they didn't actually have it in hand. I don't know if the California DMV can produce such paperwork from 30-40 years ago. Spector's interest went away when he went up for murder, and he is currently incarcerated.

Of course Stauffer was subsequently almost as lucky (in terms of appreciation potential) when he found the Ford GT that won LeMans. Here's that story in a nutshell: A guy visiting his showroom in Blue Mounds, WI asked him if he liked Rolls Royces and he was polite in saying his interests had moved on from that marque but the guy saw a Cobra in the showroom and asked him if he liked Cobras and GT40s and George said yes and the guy said "Well, I got a couple GT40s you might want to look at." So one turns out to be the car that won LeMans in '66--I think the key was George didn't send the guy on his way after turning down the Roller. So there's a case where politeness won the day

 

I heard that CS had tried to, but her not being a car enthusiast, she wasn't swayed.

And he had his own Daytona coupe for awhile until he put it up for a loan and lost it. Then he immediatley had a new one built by McCluskey though that wasn't one of the originals.

I would think if over 100 barn finders had tried to buy it, at least Cobra enthusiasts would have heard about some of the failed attempts by now, unless they are embarrassed to admit that they tried and failed. The Santa Barbara-based guy that bought it told me on the phone that the lady who hid it away for over 30 years wasn't exactly hiding---if you knew her married name and the city she lived in, you could find her.(I would have tried a classified ad in the Pennysaver, but what if she didn't read Classified Ads). I used to use Classified Ads when looking for collector cars in the '80s but am lost how you do it now with the internet. For instance, let's say back in the '80s (I think that was before the internet...) I could have taken still pictures of it and sent them around and said "Hey, do you think this is real, what should I bid on it?" and weeks later gotten an opinion. Now if you find a worthy car, if you send out an e-mail to just one person, they might e-mail it to 5 others, and so on and pretty soon hundreds of people know about this car you found. Claim jumpers could beat you to it. So the problem nowadays is that you have to be prepared to buy on the spot on whatever scanty info. you have on the car you see in front of you. Now I'll admit Daytona coupes are pretty rare but the same problem occurs with various musclecars that are more numerous but still worthy of collecting.

 

The Bunnies ref.

Not sure what that means. The dead lady was accompanied
by at least three of her bunny rabbit pets, all burned as well as her. If we want to believe the police she walked over half a mile in the dark in the dead of night carrying three bunnies, one bunny cage, one can of gasoline and then immolated herself.
She dies. A few months later, someone gets millions.
I'd suspect homicide, but then I'm a mystery writer.