Film Director Slain, Buried Under Home

In a macabre ending befitting one of his movies, a director whose horror film credits include “Satan’s Sadists” and “Halfway to Hell” was slain and his body buried beneath his dilapidated ranch house on an Indio, Calif. orchard estate, police said.

After digging for 18 hours, authorities discovered the body of Al Adamson last Wednesday. His partially decomposed body was buried under a tile floor where there once had been a whirlpool tub, police said Monday.

In Florida, police arrested Fred Fulford, a 46-year-old contractor Adamson hired last year in Las Vegas and who had been living and working at the Indio estate at the time the director disappeared.

Adamson, 65 at the time of his death, had been reported missing July 26.

Adamson’s work spanned four decades and his exploitation movies like “The Fiend with the Atomic Brain” and “Dracula vs. Frankenstein” were drive-in standards in the 1970s.

“If Roger Corman is the B movie king, Al Adamson was his Z movie equivalent,” said Paul M. Sammon, a film authority.