There’s something in an 11.18 Hollywood Reporter story by Daniel Miller about the state of the investigation into Ronni Chasen‘s murder that feels more than a bit surreal. It says that Beverly Hills police are going on a “working theory” that Chasen’s shooting death was “not the result of road rage or a carjacking gone awry” but “was planned in advance.”

Planned? Isn’t that what a hit is? The assailant who fired bullets through Chasen’s passenger door window, they’re saying, was following a plan that had been decided upon at some undetermined point earlier in the evening, or perhaps (go for it) even a few hours or days previously? An impulsive killing is one inspired by a sudden adverse emotional eruption of some kind, and the cops, as I understand this story, are guessing that this isn’t what happened.

I’m sorry but as one to another I feel I know/knew Ronni Chasen’s world, and this just sounds ridiculous. I don’t care what the Beverly Hills cops say. Ronni Chasen was not Michael Caine at the end of Get Carter or Tom Wilkinson at the end of Act Two in Michael Clayton. The sadness of this has made my knees buckle, but it also boggles the mind. The non-logic of it ties you up and wrecks you.

David Poland, whom I am gracious enough to recognize and whose opinion matters from time to time, wrote last night that “the audience that really cares about this story are people who knew Ronni… and it is seriously irresponsible to take one tiny piece of information (the the gunfire came from another car that pulled up next to Ronni’s car) and a working theory (that this was planned) and to spin it into a headline much more salacious than the facts.”