Sex on Tape: The Wild True Crime at the Heart of Pam & Tommy

During the first year of the Lees’ marriage (Anderson went by Pamela Lee during that time), Mötley Cruë did a lot of recording amid the building detritus in Malibu, but the couple lived primarily at Anderson’s condo and spent Christmas in London. The model-actress was pregnant again after suffering a miscarriage earlier in the year and being hospitalized, citing exhaustion, that October.

“He’s really excited about the baby,” Anderson said in a 1996 interview. “I don’t want to ruin his image, but Tommy is not what you think. He loves flowers, even plants them. He cooks and cleans.” Their eldest son, Brandon Thomas Lee, was born June 5, 1996.

But also in early 1996, Lee went out to the garage in Malibu to get something out of his safe—and the safe wasn’t there. In Tommyland, Lee recalled wondering if maybe he had told someone to move it and just forgot. But quickly he realized they’d been robbed and, in his opinion, it had to be an inside job, people who had access and knew their way around.  

Sure enough, it was Gauthier, the disgruntled electrician who didn’t take kindly to having a gun pointed at him and sought revenge by stealing Lee’s safe, figuring it had to have something valuable in it. (He told Rolling Stone he acted alone, though Lee thought it was way too heavy for a one-man job.)