• When Casey Kasem's wife got angry, it didn't matter that the old man couldn't walk and could barely talk. When Jean Kasem felt possessive, it just didn't matter that her ailing husband—the legendary deejay whose warm, husky voice had once reached a reported 8 million listeners in seventeen countries—couldn't swallow and was at risk for aspiration. Jean was upset that Casey's two daughters from his first marriage had dared to visit their father without her permission. Her will would be done.
    It was after midnight on May 7, 2014, when Jean arrived at the Santa Monica convalescent hospital where her 82-year-old husband was suffering from Lewy body dementia, a disease similar to Parkinson's. She told the nurse on duty that it was unacceptable that Kasem's eldest daughters had come by the day before to talk with him and hold his hand. Jean said the facility offered "no privacy for Mr. Kasem," according to the nurse's sworn declaration, and therefore she was removing him immediately. The nurse told Jean that such a move could kill him. Kasem's feeding tube, which was surgically implanted in his stomach, would require immediate medical intervention if it became dislodged, and Kasem's doctor had refused to issue discharge orders.
    Jean didn't relent. At 2:30 A.M., the sometime actress—a zaftig blonde who once played Loretta, the wife of Nick Tortelli, on six episodes of Cheers—put her bedridden husband in a wheelchair and rolled him out into the night. It had been just five years since Kasem signed off on his final countdown, but to look at him, you'd think it might have been much longer. Frail and bewildered, he was loaded into a white SUV that was driven by a private caregiver. Jean and Liberty, her 23-year-old daughter with Kasem, piled into a different SUV, this one black, and sped away. Just over a month later, Kasem would be dead—and about to embark on a posthumous journey that would take him halfway around the world.
    "This broad is right out of a Raymond Chandler novel," Logan Clarke told me, referring to Jean and sounding like a man who's read a few Chandler novels himself. Clarke, a private investigator whom Kasem's eldest daughter retained to track Jean down, is one of several characters in this story who come across like some fun-house distortion of an L.A. stereotype. "The six-foot blonde wannabe actress 'kidnaps' the seriously ill star from the hospital," he says, "and hides him from the world, with a private eye in hot pursuit."
    ···
    Sit back, close your eyes, and try to come up with an American celebrity, living or dead, you'd be less likely to associate with this kind of lurid tabloid grotesque than Casey Kasem. (Okay, maybe Mister Rogers.)
    Long before America's most beloved radio personality got sucked into the vortex of his family's fierce infighting—before Jean barred his three children from his first marriage and his only brother from visiting him; before the battle spilled into court, racking up more than $650,000 in lawyers' fees; before Kerri, Kasem's eldest daughter, took custody of her father, prompting Jean to stand in a driveway hurling raw hamburger meat while quoting what sounded like Scripture; before various Kasem relatives accused one another of infidelity, of posing for pornography, of greed and lying and unimaginable cruelty; and before Kasem died in a Seattle-area hospital and his final chapter played out like a real-life Weekend at Bernie's—thirty-nine years' worth of weekend mornings began something like this:
    Here we go with the top forty hits of the nation this week on American Top 40, the best-selling and most-played songs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. This is Casey Kasem in Hollywood....
    His voice was unmistakable—richly nasal, with an unpolished quality that he dubbed "garbage" for its familiar guy-next-door tone. That, Kasem always said, was key to his popularity: He sounded like a regular Joe just telling a few stories. Except that the Detroit-born son of a Lebanese grocer was so much more than that. From 1970 until his final show in 2009, Kasem's reports of which songs had leapt up a notch and which had slid down reflected a belief in meritocracy and a sort of Horatio Alger-style optimism that was peculiarly, iconically American. When he read a long-distance dedication, he imbued it with an intimacy upon which his listeners came to rely. It comes to us in the form of a letter: "Dear Casey..." Kasem was a constant reassuring presence that bound generations together. He was schmaltzy, sure, but classy, too. A reliable standard-bearer. A stand-up guy.
    "Of all the radio personalities in America, Casey was the most significant, period," said Mike Curb, a record executive and former lieutenant governor of California who was Kasem's close friend for more than forty years. On his show, Curb said, Kasem "affected the culture of music and the importance of Top 40 music more than any person who has ever lived."
    Kasem got his start in the mid-'50s, voice-acting on Detroit-based radio shows such as The Lone Ranger before becoming a radio announcer in his hometown and later in Cleveland, Buffalo, Oakland, and Los Angeles. He and a few partners launched American Top 40 on seven stations in 1970; that number would eventually exceed 500. The four-hour weekly program was tightly scripted, with folksy admonitions, lessons in music history, and plenty of "teaser and bio," a cliff-hanger technique that Kasem had developed while spinning records in the California Bay Area. (How did the B-52's get their name? Find out after the break....) By the time ABC purchased American Top 40 in 1982, Kasem was reportedly paid more than $1 million a year for that hosting gig alone. He was getting rich in other ways, too: He was the voice behind NBC's network promos (another $1 million a year), and he did countless ads and cartoon voices (most famously as Shaggy on Scooby-Doo) that brought in millions more. In 1989, he secured a five-year deejay contract worth $15 million—reportedly about the same as CBS was paying nightly news anchor Dan Rather.
    This is about the time you'd expect to learn that Jean Kasem was a recently acquired trophy wife, a gold digger like, say, Anna Nicole Smith, who married a man sixty-three years older, then sought to collect a hefty chunk of his fortune when he died just thirteen months later. In fact, it's a lot more complicated than that. Jean and Casey Kasem were closer in age—now 60, she was twenty-two years his junior—and they'd been married for thirty-three years at the time of his death.
    They'd begun dating not long after Kasem's first marriage ended in divorce. Casey was lonely then, longtime friends say; he hadn't wanted to separate from the mother of his three children. "How many guys have we heard of who end up in a divorce that they don't want, and then, on the rebound, along comes somebody who appears to think you're the greatest thing on earth?" Mike Curb told me, recalling that Kasem and Jean met at Kasem's agent's office, where she was the receptionist. Jean disputes this, or so she told me when we met at her suggestion in a hallway at the Los Angeles courthouse. There she ominously called Curb "one of the accomplices" but refused to elaborate. However Casey and Jean met, they were married in December 1980, in a ceremony at the Hotel Bel-Air officiated by the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
    In 1989, Casey and Jean moved into a 2.4-acre gated compound in L.A.'s ritzy Holmby Hills neighborhood. The estate has seven bedrooms, ten and a half bathrooms, a motor-court fountain built around an ornate piece of the Brooklyn Bridge, a hair salon, a par-3 golf course designed by Bobby Trent Jones, and a heart-shaped pool with two bathhouses. They paid $6.8 million for it, and last year it was briefly on the market for $42 million. Since Kasem died, his estate has been estimated at $80 million.
    Hearing that, it's natural to assume that Kasem's elder kids are fighting with their stepmother and half sister over their father's fortune. Not so, says Kerri. "We've never asked for it once," she insists. The two sides are squabbling over a relatively small life-insurance policy, but there's no real dispute over the bulk of Kasem's wealth, most of which will probably go to Jean.
    So where does all the hostility come from? It's as if there's never been a moment of peace between the sides—as if acrimony were simply the Kasems' way of being. Who "started it"? Who knows. But the bottom line is that Jean Kasem and her stepkids disagree about, well, everything.
    • A tale of two families—or rather, one family hopelessly divided. From left, Casey and his first born, Kerri, in 1972; with his first wife Linda, Kerri, and Michael. Photos: Courtesy of Kerri Kasem
    ···
    At 42, Kerri Kasem is striking, with long dark shiny hair and the lithe build of someone who eats sparingly, if at all. For decades, Kerri—an L.A. radio personality who has also been an MTV Asia veejay, a UFC host, a Maxim model, a bungee-jumping instructor, and an actress—was a vegan like her father. (Then her hair started falling out. She's now a vegetarian.) Not eating meat was just one of many ways that she and her brother and sister—Mike, 41, and Julie, 39—connected to their father after their parents divorced, Kerri tells me when I meet her for breakfast in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley. "We loved our dad so much," she says. Their stepmother? "She's psychotic. And what she did to that man is unconscionable."
    According to Kerri, who was 8 years old when Kasem remarried, Jean couldn't stand her stepchildren from the start. Kerri, Mike, and Julie came to the house every weekend as kids but never felt welcome. "She would do weird things," Kerri says of Jean. "My dad would leave the room, and when he came back in, she would say we did or said something, so he would get angry." On one occasion, Jean blew up at Kerri and several of her friends: "She goes, 'Do you know what I fear? Liars!' I remember her crazy-eyed."
    The kids and their stepmother barely tolerated one another for decades, but Casey still managed to maintain his relationships with Kerri and her siblings. Kerri remembers her father often trying to explain Jean's behavior. "I knew he loved her," Kerri said. "He'd say, "'She's insecure. It's going to get better.' One time, probably fifteen years ago, he said it again—'It's going to get better'—and all of us, including him, started laughing. It was like: It's not going to get better. It's never going to get better."
    The kids were well into adulthood by the time their father started showing Parkinson's-like symptoms in the mid-2000s. Still, Julie and Kerri visited with him almost every Sunday. (Mike, who now lives in Singapore, where he is a deejay, would join the family whenever he was in town.) But the visits were never at the Kasem mansion; Jean had made it clear the kids weren't welcome there. Instead she would arrange for Casey to be delivered to Julie's home, Kerri says. Then, in the summer of 2013, Jean put a stop even to those visits, in part because Jean said his deteriorating health prevented him from traveling. "She blocked us entirely from seeing Dad," Kerri says. "Then she started spewing lies—that my dad had distanced himself from us, that we had borrowed money from him. Like: junk."