Sibling Castaways

Eben Gossage, 20, seemed upset when no one answered the door at the apartment where his sister Amelia, 19, lived in San Francisco's North Beach. He went to Edward Seto, an officer of the firm that managed the girl's apartment building, who unlocked the door. Inside, the two men found Amelia (whom friends and family called Amy) dead, bludgeoned about the head and stabbed in the neck. Clad in a blood-soaked T shirt and white panties and partly covered with a bed sheet, the girl was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. The wall near by was spattered with blood; her two small dogs were cowering under the bed.

When Eben saw the girl's body, he screamed, "Who did this? Who's doing something to my sister?" When an ambulance arrived to carry the body away, Eben jumped on the bed and yelled, "An animal did this to my sister!" After questioning Eben for several hours, homicide detectives arrested him and charged him with murdering Amy.

It was only the most recent tragedy to befall the children of Howard Gossage, a brilliant, maverick advertising executive who created, among other shrewdly promoted schemes, the Beethoven sweatshirt and the International Paper Airplane Competition. He died of leukemia in 1969. Eben and Amy had a half sister, June, who was killed in an automobile crash, and their mother died last May of cirrhosis of the liver.

High Living. Brother and sister both inherited some money, yet the testimony of close friends is that the pair were all too adept at spending. "Eben rented a penthouse," says LeRue Grim, his attorney, "and lived as extravagantly as anyone could. He spent it all." Amy, willowy, beautiful and sophisticated, may have shown a bit more restraint, but she did her share of high living, too. She spent about three months in Rome in 1973, ostensibly studying sculpture but mostly having a good time.

A fixture on the seedy North Beach scene in the past few years, the pair--especially Eben--according to Grim developed another expensive taste: hard drugs. Eben is chronically depressed and often disturbed, and is a serious user of heroin. Grim says that Amy was an occasional user of cocaine. He further maintains that in the weeks before her death both Eben and his sister were being shaken down by the same drug dealer; Amy, he says, may have owed the dealer as much as $5,000, Eben as much as $2,500. The dealer, he implies, threatened the pair, and when the money owed was not forthcoming, could have killed Amy and left a scattering of clues that would point to Eben as the murderer.

Only Suspect. San Francisco police found a blood-stained claw hammer and a pair of bloody scissors, along with a bloodstained shirt and pair of slacks, in a cardboard box on the porch of Eben's apartment. Eben, police believe, argued with his sister over $5,000 that was due her shortly from her mother's estate, saying that he wanted the money to go to Spain. The police theorize that when she refused him the money, he killed her. "Eben Gossage is our only suspect at this point," said Homicide Inspector Kenneth Mannly. Grim argues that the incriminating evidence could easily have been planted by Amy's killer or killers. And companions of the brother and sister insist that there had been no conflict over the trip. Says Graham Nash: "Amy told me she wanted to go to Spain with her brother to help him get clean of drugs."

"They were close by circumstance," says a friend of the brother and sister, "like two people who are cast off in a lifeboat." Adds another who knew them both well: "If Eben did kill her, I'm convinced he doesn't know he did it."

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