The last time Steve Robles spoke to his mom was two days before Mother’s Day.
Lorraine Bird had received an offer for her Twentynine Palms home. She planned to counter, she told her son, describing the terms.
Then, the 86-year-old disappeared.
Ten days later, a content creator exploring a desolate stretch of the Mojave Desert found Bird’s nearly naked body curled up inside a graffiti-splashed boulder pile. Authorities haven’t determined if her death was a homicide or from natural causes and have made no arrests in the case, but say that an investigation is ongoing.
The mystery has split her surviving family members and pushed her loved ones to seek answers.
“This is a really, really ugly story,” Robles said. “There’s no good ending to it.”
Bird’s daughter, Doreen Bird, did not return messages seeking comment for this article.
Lorraine Blondina Bird was born in East Los Angeles. She made her name as a top Realtor in the sunny oceanside community of Redondo Beach, where she started selling homes in 1978.
Her success afforded her all the things she didn’t have growing up: meals at nice restaurants, ski trips to Tahoe, a college education for her son. She wore jewelry and silk scarves; kept her hair styled and her nails manicured. Her silver Mercedes had a custom license plate: LBBIRD1.
But although Lorraine loved the finer things, she loved her two children most.
So in 2021, when her daughter, Doreen Bird, asked her to buy a home in Twentynine Palms, the mother agreed, according to Robles. Bird’s grandson, Blake Thomas, provided $30,000 toward the down payment.
Friends of the stylish octogenarian were surprised when she announced that she was moving to the dusty desert town between Joshua Tree National Park and the nation’s largest Marine base.
Bird’s life seemed lonely there, Robles said, and as the years went by, his mother’s relationship with her daughter became increasingly strained.
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Real estate attorney Sherry Lear was surprised to hear from Bird in January of last year. She hadn’t spoken with her former longtime client in years. But that afternoon, she told The Times in an interview, Bird called her Torrance office asking for help. According to Lear, who keeps notes of her conversations with clients, this is what Bird told her:
Doreen Bird had decided to leave the area and move in with her son, who was living in Florida. Lorraine Bird didn’t want to stay in the desert alone, so she had arranged to move to a friend’s estate in the eastern Sierra Nevada. She wanted to sell her Twentynine Palms house.
But both Bird’s daughter and grandson wanted money if it sold — her daughter for improvements she’d made to the property, her grandson for the money he’d put toward the initial down payment. What’s more, he wanted his grandmother to sign a deed of trust that would make him a secured creditor against the property, similar to a mortgage holder.
Bird felt pressured, Lear said. So the attorney agreed to act as a mediator between the troubled family members.
But tensions escalated.
Early that February, Bird called Lear in a panic. She said her daughter handed her a packet of papers containing a deed of trust and demanded she sign them, Lear said.
According to Lear, Bird had a fight with her daughter. Bird claimed her daughter threatened to shut off the utilities she was paying for if she didn’t sign the papers.
“Lorraine was very upset,” Lear said. “She said this wasn’t the first time that Doreen had yelled at her. And that she was afraid of her.”
“Should something like this happen again, appropriate authorities will be notified,” Lear wrote in a cease-and-desist letter to Bird’s daughter and grandson reviewed by The Times. Thomas said he was aware of a confrontation between his mother and Bird but did not know the details.
Lear called Robles, who booked a hotel room for his mother.
But weeks later, Bird would sign a promissory note pledging to pay her grandson $30,000 in proceeds within days of Bird selling her home, according to a notarized copy of the document reviewed by The Times. The debt would be forgiven if Thomas received 80% of the property title after Bird’s death, the note states.
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Through the turmoil, Bird found comfort in the office of local Realtor Sandra Claus. She hired Claus to sell her home, but the two bonded over a shared passion for real estate. Bird was hands-on when it came to the sale, creating her own list of comparable homes to help price the property and having an agent run seller net sheets to estimate how much she stood to profit. Claus was impressed by her sharpness.
Oftentimes, Bird would drop by to sit and chat, venting about problems with her daughter and grandson, Claus said. “I knew she was just trying to get away.”
Claus last spoke to Lorraine by phone the morning of May 10, when they agreed on final terms for the sale of her home. She emailed a contract to Bird to sign that evening but didn’t hear back.
The next day, Claus texted her: “Happy Mother’s Day, Lorraine. Did you get the contract?” No answer.
The day after that, she sent her an email: ”Lorraine, please contact me. I’m worried about you.” Nothing.
Claus said she then received a call from Bird’s grandson, saying Bird had gone to visit a relative in Apple Valley. Thomas made that call after his mother told him that his grandmother “took off” to visit family following an argument, he said.
On May 13, Doreen Bird reported her mother missing to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.
“I pretty much told my mom, ‘hey, we need to figure this out. She’s not supposed to not contact anybody,’” Thomas said. “No matter if they were in an argument or whatever.”
The sheriff’s bulletin stated that Lorraine hadn’t been heard from since she drove away from her home around noon on May 10. She had health problems that included early-stage dementia, and she didn’t take her medications with her, it said.
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The investigation plodded along in the days that followed, Robles said. At one point, detectives were able to trace his mother’s cellphone signal to a tower near a local pharmacy, but when they visited the area, they found no clues, he said.
Frustrated by a lack of answers, Steve and his cousin Burke Roble drove from the Los Angeles area to Twentynine Palms on May 19. Claus met them at the sheriff’s station.
She wanted to know: Had they seen the video?
A woman who posts travel videos on social media had stopped to explore a place some locals call Graffiti Rocks. The pile of massive, spray-painted boulders rises along a remote stretch of highway.
As the content creator squeezed through a narrow opening within the rock formation, she’d come upon a body. She had called police and then livestreamed herself recounting the discovery as she waited for deputies to arrive, Claus said.
The body appeared to be that of a small woman or child, the woman said in the video. And she was well-groomed, she said, noting that her nails were manicured.
Bird’s family and friends feared the worst.
A detective later summoned Robles and his cousin to the coroner’s office. The coroner told them the body, naked except for a pair of underwear, was decomposed to the point of being unrecognizable. But fingerprints had identified her as Lorraine Bird. Her car and other personal items were missing.
“She was just thrown out there,” Robles said. “Disposed of.”
His mother’s Mercedes was later found in Twentynine Palms, some 30 miles away from the spot where her body was discovered, he said.
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The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department declined to provide details about the investigation into Bird’s death and declined to say whether it is being investigated as a homicide or suspicious death.
An autopsy report released in response to a public records request provides little in the way of answers. It lists Bird’s cause of death as undetermined and her time of death as unknown. The coroner was unable to rule out trauma due to insect activity and decomposition.
A postmortem examination found that Bird had a broken rib, but an absence of blood near the fracture indicates the injury was sustained after her death, said renowned forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who reviewed the autopsy report at the request of The Times. Toxicology testing detected caffeine and a beta blocker, a class of medications commonly used to treat high blood pressure.
The autopsy also revealed that Bird had severe heart disease with up to 90% coronary artery narrowing — the most common cause of death in the country, Baden pointed out. There is no indication for any unnatural cause for her death, he said.
The mysterious circumstances of Bird’s death have left her surviving family members deeply divided.
Thomas, Bird’s grandson, said that Robles, his uncle, has accused him and his mother of being involved somehow in Bird’s death — an accusation he said they both strenuously deny.
The allegations have left Thomas and Doreen Bird on one side of a family rift, and Robles and his cousin on the other, Thomas said. “It’s all just a biased, one-sided story from that side.” Robles dismissed that statement.
Thomas conceded that his mother and grandmother would often fight but insisted that neither he nor his mother harmed her or played a role in her disappearance, adding that he was at his home in Florida at the time. “I loved my grandma very much and I’m very sad that she’s gone.”
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A few weeks after Lorraine died, Robles and his cousin traveled to Twentynine Palms to clean out Bird’s home.
They packed files from her desk into plastic totes. The documents revealed a meticulous mind. Lorraine had kept receipts from everything she’d ever bought, organized by date and the reason for each purchase. She’d printed and saved research about medications and vitamins she took. And she’d kept a collection of journals that she appeared to write in every day, which they handed over to police, he said.
Robles thinks a lot about what he could have done differently, whether he missed red flags that his mother was in some kind of danger. He wishes he’d been successful in convincing her to move to his neighborhood on the Long Beach Peninsula, where he can see boats pass by his window and families gather for regular art walks and an annual Christmas parade.
“I have all these unanswered questions,” he said. “But I don’t get to understand at this point.”
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