Jay J. Armes, Private Eye With a Superhero Story, Dies at 92

With steel hooks for hands and a flamboyant personality, Mr. Armes captured the attention — and scrutiny — of reporters across the nation.

Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator who lived on an estate with miniature Tibetan horses, traveled in a bulletproof Cadillac limousine with rotating license plates and had steel hooks for hands — including one fitted to fire a .22 caliber revolver — died on Sept. 18 in El Paso. He was 92.

His death, at a hospital, was caused by respiratory failure, his son Jay J. Armes III said.

Described as “armless but deadly” by People magazine, Mr. Armes appeared to live the life of a superhero. In the 1970s, the Ideal Toy Corporation even reproduced him as a plastic action figure, with hooks like those he began wearing in adolescence after an accident in which railroad dynamite exploded in his hands.

Mr. Armes (pronounced arms) catapulted to investigatory stardom in 1972 after Marlon Brando hired him to find his 13-year-old son, Christian, who had been abducted in Mexico. Working with Mexican federal agents, Mr. Armes said he found the boy in a cave with a gang of hippies.

He told other daring tales of triumph: flying on a glider into Cuba to recover $2 million for a client; helping another client escape from a Mexican prison by sending him a helicopter, which he said inspired the 1975 Charles Bronson movie “Breakout.”

The national media was enthralled by his detective skills.

“He is an expert on bugging, a skilled pilot, a deadly marksman and karate fighter and, perhaps, the best private eye in the country,” Newsweek wrote in 1975. “All he lacks is a pair of hands.”

What he didn’t lack, apparently, was expertise in spinning stories.

After Newsweek, People and other national publications chronicled his adventures, the Texas Monthly writer Gary Cartwright went to El Paso to write a profile of Mr. Armes. His article — headlined “Is Jay J. Armes For Real?” — is widely regarded as a classic of magazine writing.

“I have killed people,” Mr. Armes told Mr. Cartwright. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s sad.”

He also said, “Almost every day of my life, there is some violent or potentially violent incident.”

And he said, “It’s funny, but when I get shot, I seem to get super strength.” (He said he had been shot six or seven times.)

Mr. Cartwright visited Mr. Armes’s backyard of exotic animals, including cheetahs and lions, a place he said was “right out of a Tarzan movie”; toured the extensive crime lab in Mr. Armes’s office; met his bodyguard, a former potato chip salesman; and witnessed his proficiency with firearms.

“It is true that Jay J. Armes drives around El Paso in the damnedest black limo you ever saw, armed to the teeth,” Mr. Cartwright wrote. “That pistol in his hook is the real McCoy; I watched him fire it. So is the loaded .38 on his left hip.”

But not everything Mr. Armes said about his life appeared to be true.

Mr. Armes said he graduated from both U.C.L.A. and New York University; the schools “never heard” of him, Mr. Cartwright wrote. He did not, as he claimed, have a pilot’s license. And as for the Brando story, Mr. Cartwright wrote, “Law officers in El Paso believe that Armes did bring Marlon Brando’s kid out of Mexico, though they believe the circumstances were considerably less dramatic than the tale Armes spins.”

Mr. Armes’s son said in an interview last week that Mr. Cartwright’s article was a “hatchet job” and that it was retaliation for his father’s unsuccessful campaign for sheriff of El Paso County against a friend of the writer. Mr. Cartwright died in 2017.

In 2016, the public radio program “Snap Judgment” revisited the Texas Monthly article and the puzzle of Mr. Armes.

The private eye couldn’t tolerate even hearing Mr. Cartwright’s name.

“He’s got a wilted hand, and I guess he had an inferiority complex,” Mr. Armes told “Snap Judgment.” “He saw Jay Armes had accomplished all this. So, he had to write a cutthroat story. Don’t tell me about anything about this corrupt Gary Cartwright. Don’t even mention his name to me.”

Jay J. Armes was born Julian Jay Armas on Aug. 12, 1932, in Ysleta, Texas, which was later annexed into El Paso, to Pete and Beatrice (Rodriguez) Armas. His father was a butcher.

In May 1946, Julian and an older friend were horsing around one afternoon with a teenager who had a pair of railroad blasting caps. Julian was holding them when they blew up, shooting him into the air, mangling his hands and nearly killing him.

A few months later he was fitted with prosthetic hooks.

“By October of that year,” The El Paso Times reported, “he was back at Ysleta Grammar School, using his hooks to write, play sports and play the bugle for his Ysleta Boy Scout Troop 95.”

He had aspirations to become a surgeon.

“But after my accident, I had to be practical,” he told the newspaper. “I knew people wouldn’t want me operating on them. So I had to find something else to do.”

After graduating from high school, he moved to Hollywood to become an actor and changed his name to one that sounded less Hispanic at the suggestion of an agent, who was worried that racism would stunt the young actor’s career.

He told interviewers that he appeared in more than three dozen movies and television shows. But he is credited as an actor with just one TV appearance on the Internet Movie Database — a 1973 episode of “Hawaii Five-O” in which he played an assassin.

Mr. Armes became a private investigator, he said, out of frustration with the way the profession was portrayed in popular culture.

“I wanted to clean up the image of the profession,” he told Mr. Cartwright. “In TV and the movies, private detectives are usually pictured as crooked ex-cops who keep a filing cabinet of booze and work both sides of the street.”

He had some notable successes and seemed to earn enough money to support his lifestyle. In 1991, he was credited by authorities with tracking down the body of Lynda Singshinsuk, a Northwestern University student who had gone missing. Mr. Armes also persuaded the suspect, Donald Weber, to confess to killing her.

“Without Mr. Armes’s assistance, there is a significant possibility that Mr. Weber would not be brought to justice,” a prosecutor told The Chicago Tribune.

Mr. Armes’s marriage to Blanca Rosa Ontiveros ended in divorce in 1964. He married Linda Chew in 1966. In addition to his son Jay III, from that marriage, she survives him, as do two children from his first marriage, Marlene Dodd and Debra Ferrell; two other children from his second marriage, Tracy and Michael Armes; a sister, Eva Boone; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Tom Zito, who wrote about Mr. Armes for The Washington Post in 1981, said in an interview that “characters like him are so interesting because there is enough feeling of authenticity.”

“It makes you wonder,” he added, “whether all these crazy stories they tell you are true.”

Four decades ago, he recalled, he wondered himself while having breakfast with Mr. Armes.

“It was one of the most bizarre moments in my career as a daily journalist,” Mr. Zito said. “You couldn’t make this guy up, because if you did, people would tell you it was such a fabulous construct that it was totally not believable.”