Woman Found Dead, Barricaded in Closet : Crime: Deputies find body of West Hollywood widow, 72. She apparently was left trapped by an intruder as much as a month ago.

No one knows how long Carol Fuller scratched and clawed for her life, trapped in the bedroom closet of her West Hollywood home.

All homicide detectives could say Thursday was that Fuller, 72, was dead, probably of dehydration or starvation. And that her life beside one of the city’s busiest intersections was so solitary that it took up to a month or more before anybody noticed she was gone.

The stylish widow whom neighbors described as a diva and an Italian eccentric had been thrown in her closet sometime in December or January by someone who ransacked and robbed her well-kept bungalow, authorities said. The intruder left the closet door barricaded, trapping her inside.

It was not until a concerned neighbor called that sheriff’s deputies went to check early Thursday and found the body.

What they also found was evidence of a desperate struggle to survive. The inside of the closet door had been splintered, gouged and was stained with blood, apparently from fingers that were cut by the frantic attempt to break free.

Fuller was not tied up or gagged, but she apparently could not make herself heard above the din of traffic that rushes almost around the clock past Santa Monica and Crescent Heights boulevards.

In the weeks since she died, many neighbors wondered what had become of the independent woman who had been a fixture for years outside her Spanish-style home, where she liked to water and tend her lawn and plants.

A son supposedly lives in Orange County, but no one knows what became of him. The mail carrier canceled deliveries when too much mail was left uncollected. A woman across the street wondered where she was, but did not want to meddle. And several acquaintances said they hoped that the elegant woman in black had finally taken a long-planned trip to Northern Italy, where her father was born.

“The trouble is, everyone is engrossed in their own problems, in their own circumstances,” said Florence Del Barian, a neighbor who said she knew Fuller as well as anyone. “It’s like you wave, but you don’t really know everything that goes on with someone. . . . We are not that neighbor-like. We watch from a distance.”

Fuller’s given name was Esther, but everyone knew her as Carol. The house near the busy intersection had been in her husband’s family for years, neighbors said, before the encroachment of businesses that pushed right up against one side of the home.

Her husband, Ed, died 10 or 15 years ago after a career in the motion picture business. He told neighbors that he had designed a special platform for mounting several cameras on a car at once--making it easier to record the epic stampedes, chases and cavalry charges that were the fixture of a generation of Hollywood movies.

Carol Fuller had aspirations to act, and might have even gotten a few bit parts in her youth. Later, she turned to selling real estate.

To the few neighbors who caught glimpses of her life in retirement, Fuller was the picture of sophistication. She took great pride in her cooking--using only fresh food. And her house, though small, was well-appointed with sculptures, paintings, china and silver.

She could speak Italian, they said, and was adamant that her ancestors’ roots were in the cosmopolitan north of that country, not in the rough-hewn south.

“She had the most beautiful things. Even if they were just knickknacks, it was all so tasteful. She was an artist in everything she did,” said Inga Boos, a neighbor, who would sometimes talk with Fuller late into the night.

Fuller painted such a cultivated image that Boos speculated on the vast holdings and villas she was sure that the woman’s relatives must have owned in Italy. It was not clear though why Fuller never took that long-awaited trip.

Detectives ducked in and out under the red crime-scene tape surrounding the Fuller bungalow Thursday. They would not say much about the case. Late in the day, they were still trying to notify a relative.

The only missing item they would describe was the white, 1972 two-door Lincoln that Fuller kept wedged into her tiny garage. Authorities are searching for the car, license 2ATP684.

And neighbors were taking another look at their neighborhood and their lives.

Residents remember that 30 years ago they did not bother to lock their doors at night because they felt so safe. In recent years, neighbors say the area has remained friendly even as it has become more diverse.

There have been complaints about transients--Fuller often had to shoo homeless men off her lawn and had to clean up the trash they left behind. More ominously, neighbors said, there was a murder on a nearby street about a year ago. And then Fuller’s death.

It was enough to leave one man thinking that it might be time to get to know the neighbors better.

“I said to my landlady, ‘We should do something more--maybe start a Neighborhood Watch,” said Ilian Balfour, a fashion designer who lives across the street from Fuller’s house. “Things are really getting pretty bad.”