Anne Heche's final moments: How her deadly crash unfolded hour by hour

 has died – one week after her car came plunging into a house in , , while she was driving under the influence of cocaine. The actress is still on life support, however, she was pronounced brain dead on Friday.

Her rep confirmed to that life support machines are keeping her alive only for the purpose of preserving her organs for donations, however, the spokesperson said Anne has no brain function – which under California law is the definition of death.

The 53-year-old Hollywood starlet, who is best known for her roles in I Know What You Did Last Summer and Psycho, was seen speeding through the Mar Vista neighborhood last Friday morning, almost running over a pedestrian who was walking on the sidewalk.

She then crashed into the garage of a different residence, and hit another car, but was left unharmed and continued to speed off until she ultimately drove into the two-story home, which resulted in her car immediately bursting into flames.

Now, FEMAIL has recapped her final moments and unfolded the events of the crash minute-by-minute – from her strange shopping trip at a wig store to her attempt to flee from firefighters after they rescued her from the fiery ruble.

Anne’s early demise is a tragic endcap to a lifetime marred by trauma, mental illness, drug abuse, and sexual assault at the hands of her devout Baptist father, who gave her genital herpes when she was just a baby – before he became one of the first people in the United States to die of AIDS.

The actress moved more than 10 times during her child, while her ‘schizophrenic’ father struggled to hold a job. Anne’s dad led a bizarre duplicitous life – by day, he was a closeted homosexual and God-fearing choir master; but by night, he left Anne’s mother and four children at home while he cruised gay bars.

He molested Anne from when she was an infant up until she was 12 years old, with her later recalling in an interview a time he ‘put her on all fours’ and forced her to ‘have sex.’

In 1987, Anne received her big break after a talent scout discovered her in her local school play, and she was invited to star in the soap opera Another World. Seeing it as an opportunity to leave her tumultuous family life behind, the then 17-year-old packed her bags and headed to Hollywood all alone to star in the show.

While Anne’s career flourished in the ’90s, she soon faced more controversy after going through a very public breakup with comedian Ellen DeGeneres. The two started dating in 1997 – and while Anne had never been with a woman before, she soon fell for the TV personality.

But after three years together, they went their separate ways in 2000, and Anne struggled with a series of mental health issues soon afterwards. She later called herself ‘insane’ while reflecting on that time, during which she believed she had an alternative personality who was the reincarnation of God.

She once turned up on a stranger’s doorstep in just a bra – begging to use their shower and telling them she was going to take them to heaven with her in a spaceship. In her later years, Anne had turned things around with the help of therapy and was back to acting.

However, her life has now come to a tragic end. But what led to the horrific crash? From growing up in poverty with an abusive father and how she overcame her struggles to find fame to a moment-by-moment breakdown of the hours leading up to her deadly collision, here is a complete timeline of Anne’s lifetime of trauma and tragedy.

Tuesday, August 2: Anne drinks vodka with wine chasers while recording podcast 

It was rumored that Anne had recorded a since-deleted episode of the podcast Better Together on the day of the crash, during which she drank vodka and wine on the air – but producer Ryan Tillotson later stated that the episode was actually recorded days earlier, on Tuesday. 

During the episode, a slurring Anne joked about drinking alcohol with co-host Heather Duffy, as she admitted that she had been having a ‘very bad day.’

She explained that Refined – a vodka distillery which sponsored one of their shows – had provided them with free alcohol.

Heather then revealed that they were using wine to chase down the vodka, before Anne stated: ‘Today’s been a very unique day. 

‘I don’t know what happened, sometimes days just suck and I don’t know if you ever have them [but] some days, those no good, very bad days, and some days days just end up like this.

‘Sometimes days just suck and I don’t know if you ever have them, but you know some days, Mama says just gonna be like this.

‘Some days there’s those no good, very bad days. And I don’t know why some days just end up like this, and things don’t really rock me like that.’

August 5, 10AM: Anne is seen purchasing a red wig 

On the day of the crash, Anne stopped by Glass Hair Design salon in Venice, California, where she purchased a red wig.

The owner, Richard Glass, later told that he didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary with her behavior.

‘She wasn’t speaking in cursive, I say that when people are impaired,’ he explained. ‘They speak in cursive like slurring your words. But she wasn’t.

‘She was very, very cordial. Very personable and very polite. The whole encounter was maybe 10 minutes, it wasn’t huge, but it was strange all the same and random. It was an amazing, kind interaction.’

August 5, 10:30AM: Actress is seen speeding through Mar Vista, nearly hitting a pedestrian and crashing her car into a garage

After leaving the wig store, Anne started speeding through Mar Vista. She first crashed her car into the garage of an apartment building complex around 10:30am. 

At the scene of the first crash, residents of the apartment building attempted to free Anne from the car – but the star resisted, putting her car in reverse and speeding off.

Following the initial crash, Anne’s blue Mini Cooper was then shown on a doorbell camera zooming past a home along South Walgrove Avenue in the Mar Vista neighborhood around 90 miles per hour. 

TMZ reported that she narrowly missed hitting a woman on the sidewalk, before she crashed into a Jaguar. The driver of the Jaguar was uninjured and she sped off once again.

August 5, 11AM: Anne plunges through a two-story house, igniting a deadly blaze

Minutes later, Anne crashed into a 738-square-foot, two-story home along the same street causing the house and the actress’ car to become engulfed in flames. 

According to the Los Angeles Fire Department, the crash caused ‘structural compromise and erupted in heavy fire.’

In a tweet, the LAFD said that it took 59 firefighters 65 minutes to put out the blaze, adding that the home is now ‘uninhabitable.’ 

The owner of the home was unharmed as they were in the backyard when Anne careered into the front of the building.

DailyMail.com spoke exclusively with neighbor David Manpearl, who caught the incident on his doorbell camera. David’s home office looks out to his front yard on a quiet residential street about five houses away from where Anne crashed.

‘At about на котором работают специалисты со стажем более 10 лет.:50am, I heard a car go speeding by and looked out my window where I saw the car going about 90 miles an hour,’ he said.

‘Within seconds I heard a loud crash at which point I ran outside in my flip flops because I knew someone was hurt and boy was I right.’

David said he ran towards the intersection where the Mini had crashed into the home.

‘Before I approached the car, I saw the resident of the home standing barefoot in the debris. She was in shock and frantically asked me to help get her pets out of the house,’ he recalled. 

‘I was able to get the leashes for her two small dogs and escorted her out of the side of her house. She had her two dogs with her and a tortoise.’ 

David explained how he then went to the car to help the driver – Anne – who was wedged inside between the airbag and the seat. 

‘I tried speaking with her a few times, asking if she was OK, but she wasn’t responding so I had to get closer,’ he told DailyMail.com.

‘I was able to open the back door of the car and crawled half-way inside. This time when I asked her if she was OK, she said no.’ 

David said he asked Anne if she could raise her hand to see if she was OK and she said no and made some grunts. That’s when the hero neighbor felt water dripping on him only to realize another neighbor was squirting a hose at the car which had now caught on fire and was quickly spreading up the walls of the house. 

‘I tried to talk to her again and noticed it was getting smokey and the flames were now on my right and my left so I quickly made my way out of the car,’ he added. 

The engineer made his way to the front of the house and attempted to put out the flames with another hose but realized it was useless because the whole house was ablaze. By now nearly ten fire trucks had arrived on the scene.

‘I was positive that the driver was dead. That she had burned up,’ he said. ‘It took at least 30 minutes for the fire department to douse the flames, extract the car and pull her out of the car.

‘I was surprised to find out that it was Anne Heche. I think I knew she had had problems in the past.’ 

A witness told  that a crane was used to extract Anne from her car. Video from the scene shows her being carried away with burned clothes before being covered in a white sheet; burn victims are regularly wrapped in a sterile sheet doused in sterile water to cool the wounds. 

Anne was conscious, and at one point in the video, she could be seen sitting up on the stretcher and seemingly arguing with firefighters while trying to escape.

Authorities eventually determined that Anne had no alcohol in her system, despite being pictured with a vodka bottle in her cupholder, but she was high on cocaine at the time of the accident. 

The Psycho star was rushed to the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital. While she was communicative during the rescue, it’s been reported that slipped into a coma shortly after and never regained consciousness.

‘She has a significant pulmonary injury requiring mechanical ventilation and burns that require surgical intervention,’ her rep told ET. 

August 12: Anne is pronounced brain dead 

Her family will soon turn off life support after doctors officially declared Anne brain dead, and determined that her organs will be donated.

‘It has long been her choice to donate her organs and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable,’ they said in a statement. 

The actress is survived by both ex husbands, her two sons, her mother and sister. She was allegedly dating celebrity dermatologist Peter Thomas Roth at the time of her death. 

In the statement, her family added: ‘Anne had a huge heart and touched everyone she met with her generous spirit. 

‘More than her extraordinary talent, she saw spreading kindness and joy as her life’s work – especially moving the needle for acceptance of who you love. She will be remembered for her courageous honesty and dearly missed for her light.’

INSIDE HECHE’S TRAGIC LIFE AND DESPERATE ATTEMPTS TO OVERCOME HER CHILDHOOD TRAUMA 

1969 – 1981: Anne was molested by her father, who gave her genital herpes

Anne was born on May 25, 1969, in Aurora Ohio. She was the youngest of five children, but her sister Cynthia died as an infant of a heart defect.

Her mother, Nancy, was a housewife whom Anne once described as ‘eerily compliant,’ while her father, Donald, was a med-school dropout with a checkered professional life.

Her family constantly moved around throughout her childhood – relocating 11 times, and even living in an Amish community at one point – as her father struggled to provide for his family by working as a Methodist choir organist.

‘He was a choir director, but I don’t think he made much on that a week,’ Anne told  in 2001 about her dad’s profession. 

‘He said that he was involved in a business of gas and oil, and he said that until the day he died. But he never was involved in the business of gas and oil ever.’ 

‘We were poor, but we said we were rich. We were falling apart, but we said we were good Christians,’ she also revealed to The Tampa Bay Times. 

‘We had a father who lived a double life, but we pretended that we were absolutely fine. We lived on the streets but said we didn’t. Everything we did was a lie. Denial, denial, denial.’

Don was always hatching doomed ‘million dollar’ business schemes that were supposed to bail the family out of poverty, but Anne explained that she and her three siblings were forced to live off the kindness of strangers and neighbors. 

‘We all played this false game that we were a happy family,’ she added to Allure. ‘It wasn’t until we got kicked out of our last house that we all suddenly realized we’d been lied to.’

Anne said to  in a November 2001 interview: ‘My father was a schizophrenic. He lived two complete lives – one as a heterosexual man who directed the choir and had a family and one who went away. We didn’t know what he did until years later.’

The movie star was molested by her father from a young age, which lasted until she was 12 years old. 

‘He raped me, he stuck his d**k in my mouth, he fondled me, he put me on all fours, and had sex with me,’ she once said in an interview with , adding that the abuse started when she was an infant.  

In her 2001 memoir, Call Me Crazy, Anne recalled how her mother had trouble putting diapers on her as a baby because of rashes and sores that she had on her vagina. She didn’t know at the time that they were the result of genital herpes, which she had caught from her father.

‘My mother was a good Christian woman. She did not confront her husband. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t scream. She didn’t yell,’ the actress.

1983: Actress’s father dies of AIDS in March; her brother passes away in a car crash three months later

In 1983, Anne’s father, Donald, became one of the first people in the United States to be diagnosed with AIDS, which was how his family came to learn that the Baptist minister and choir director had been living a secret homosexual double life.

According to Anne, her father never admitted to being gay even after he was diagnosed with the disease.

‘He was in complete denial until the day he died,’ she told CNN’s Larry King in 2001. ‘We know he got it from his gay relationships. Absolutely.

‘I don’t think it was just one. He was a very promiscuous man, and we knew his lifestyle then. I think my father was a sexual addict.

‘I think he saw everybody as a sexual being. But I think at that time he was living a very flamboyant homosexual lifestyle. 

‘You know, at that time there were bath houses where the whole trick was how many can you do a night. You know, there is no question of what he was doing at that time.’

He passed away from the STD at age of 45, in March 1983 when Anne was 13, leaving the family destitute and homeless.

After his death, Anne lived in fear believing that her father might have transmitted AIDS to her, and was told by doctors that she wouldn’t know for a number of years if she had the disease. 

At the time, very little was known about how it was spread. Back then, medial professionals believed you could contract the illness ‘from touch’ or ‘if somebody kissed you.’

‘There was so much fear around his death. There was so much shame around his death,’ Anne told Larry King. 

Three months after Donald died, more tragedy struck for the family when Anne’s 18-year-old brother, Nathan, crashed his car into a tree after falling asleep at the wheel and was killed, in an act that Anne thinks was intention suicide. 

After the deaths of her father and brother, Anne, her mother, and siblings struggled to make a new life in Chicago. Nancy was forced to get a job to support her family, and she became a Christian therapist who lectured on the ‘evils’ of homosexuality. 

Anne also started working in an attempt to help make ends meet, but was often left looking after her distraught mother. 

‘My days were spent in school, my afternoons were spent working at Haagen-Dazs and other places and my evenings were spent holding my mother, who kept crying,’ she once said. 

‘We lived in a one-room apartment. My mom tried to keep it together, but at night she would break down. I didn’t cry about their deaths until five years later when I moved out.’  

1987: Anne is cast in her first show, Another World

Around that time, the family resettled in New Jersey and it was there that she began her acting career with her first professional role at a dinner theatre production of The Music Man. 

‘I got $100 a week, which was more than anyone else in my family. We all pooled our money in an envelope in a drawer and saved up enough to move out after a year,’ she recalled to the . 

‘I found heaven on that stage. I’d been given an opportunity to experience a life and a joy that was not in my family.’ 

Her first real chance at escape happened in 1987, at 17-years-old, when she scouted for a soap opera after a high school play performance.

She was offered to play twins on the show, Another World, but her mother didn’t want her to join the series. However, excited at a chance to make a better life for herself, she went against her mom’s wishes.

<p class="mol-para-with-fo, explaining that she felt her daughter's relationship with Ellen was 'a betrayal of an unspoken vow.' She that it was the 'first time she had my heart broken.'

‘She walked out the door and I haven’t spoken to her since, I don’t have the answers,’ she added. ‘I would love to have them myself. 

‘I would ask all of the questions that everyone else wants to ask … I’m left with everybody else wondering what happened. I don’t know.’

After the very public breakup, Anne said she was left feeling ‘diminished,’ claiming that she was black-listed in Hollywood due to her fallout with the comedian.

‘I fell out of my face, broke my nose, and couldn’t remember my name, but could remember that I had a girlfriend named Ellen DeGeneres. I was lost,’ she later said of that time of her life.

On August 19, 2000, the day after her three-year affair with Ellen came to an end, a dazed and scantily clad Anne made headlines after she knocked on the door of a stranger’s home in Fresno, California, and claimed she was ‘God.’

She later admitted that she had taken a hit of ecstasy before the incident. She walked over one mile in just a bra and shorts before showing up at the woman’s house and asked to use her shower.

She then declared herself to be God and offered to take the stranger’s children back to heaven in her spaceship.

She later explained to Larry King that she had created a fantasy world to escape the abuse she suffered as a child. In it, she believed she could speak to God since she said they shared a special language.

Anne said she had an alternative personality named Celestia, whom she believed was the reincarnation of God, spoke a different language, and had special powers.

‘I drove to the desert, still hearing voices of God, thought that I was going to find love on the planet that I was from,’ she told the TV host. 

‘And the planet that I was from that was all love was called the Fourth Dimension. And I went to get on my space ship and go there.’ 

However, she added, ‘I do not believe I am insane. I believe I went through a period of my life that was insane, and it lasted 31 years. I wouldn’t even be alive without my insanity.’

She said in her book that she spent a lifetime spent ‘searching’ – looking for peace, happiness and love, while chasing idle dreams, addictions, and toxic relationships, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagued her from an itinerant childhood and profoundly dysfunctional family.

‘I think everything I’ve done in all my insanity was to try to get my parents to love me,’ she wrote. ‘My father loved movie stars.

‘I decided I needed to become famous to get his love. My mother loved Jesus. That was her thing. So I wanted to become Jesus Christ.’

2001 – 2009: Anne’s first marriage to Coley Lafoon, the father of her first-born son Homer

In 2000, after Anne reportedly left Ellen, she soon started dating a guy named Coleman ‘Coley’ Laffoon – a cameraman whom she met the previous year on Ellen’s stand-up comedy tour.

The two tied the knot on September 1, 2001. They welcomed one son together, named Homer, who was born in 2002. However, the couple divorced after five and a half years together, in 2007. 

Throughout the early 2000s, Anne acted in a few independent movies, including Prozac Nation (alongside Christina Ricci and Jessica Lange), the thriller John Q (which also starred Denzel Washington), and Birth (opposite Nicole Kidman). 

She starred in the Broadway play Proof in 2002 and the play Twentieth Century in 2004. She also earned a Primetime Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the Lifetime movie Gracie’s Choice.

However, more tragedy struck for Anne in 2006, when her older sister, Susan Bergman, died at the age of 48 following a battle with brain cancer. 

Susan was a well-known writer who lectured at New York University, Northwestern University, and the University of Notre Dame.

Years later – in 2019 – Bergman’s widower, Jud Bergman, was killed at age 62 alongside his second wife, Mary Miller-Bergman, when the taxi they were traveling in was hit by a drunk driver.

 During the crash, Bergman was thrown from the car and died instantly. 

2007 – 2018: Second marriage to James Tupper, with whom she had a second son, Atlas

It’s been reported that Anne left Coley for her Men in Trees co-star James Tupper. They wed in 2007, soon after she split from Coley, and she gave birth to their son Atlas in 2009. The couple separated in 2018. 

During the 2010s, Anne continued to act in small roles, including a cameo in the Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg-led movie The Other Guys, the drama Rampart (alongside Woody Harrelson and Cynthia Nixon), the horror flick Nothing Left to Fear, USA’s Dig, and the post-apocalyptic drama Aftermath.

She also starred in the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical Opening Night in 2016, the biographical drama about Jeffrey Dahmer called My Friend Dahmer, and Chicago P.D.

In September 2020, she competed on the 29th season of Dancing With the Stars, but was eliminated third. Her last role was in the TV show All Rise, but she had a few new movies in the works at the time of her death.