An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  The roof of the Belvedere

  * * *

  When someone leaps from a height, they can travel a significant horizontal distance even without a running start, if their initial velocity is strong enough. This fact was observed in the early hours of Wednesday, May 29, 1929, about two hours before sunrise, when a motorist driving north on Charles Street saw a man dressed only in his underpants leap from an open window of the Belvedere and land on the far side of the trolley tracks. The motorist pulled over, ran into the hotel lobby, and told the night clerk what he had seen. The night clerk called an ambulance and summoned the hotel detective, who had the Nabokovian name of Harry Shade. The jumper was taken to Mercy Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. According to the coroner, he was killed instantly from the terrific impact. Almost every bone in his body was smashed.

  The room with the open window was on the eighth floor. From the guest register, Shade learned that two Yale students, Leigh Marlow and Robert Phillips, had checked into the room two days earlier, on Monday, May 27. When the detective investigated further, he interrupted two young men packing in haste. One was Robert Phillips; the other gave his name as James Mayfield, and confessed he was not a registered guest. The two men were taken to the police station for questioning, and admitted that their companion, Leigh Marlow, had either jumped or fallen out of the window. They had no idea why he would have done such a thing, but, terrified they would be held responsible, Phillips and Mayfield had been rushing to leave the Belvedere before Marlow’s body was found.

  Leigh Miltz Marlow came from one of the most prominent families in Helena, Montana, and had been given the best of everything. He and Robert Phillips were seniors at Yale; as freshmen, they had both been students of high standing, fraternity members, and members of the university polo team. They had quickly become close friends and had both been doing well until their junior year, when things had started to change. To the surprise of their friends and families, neither Marlow nor Phillips had been elected to any of Yale’s senior societies. Right before Christmas 1928, Marlow was placed on academic probation for skipping classes.

  He was reinstated at Yale in the spring semester of 1929, but friends said his “spirit seemed broken, and he had lost all interest in his studies.” That semester, he and Phillips had begun drinking heavily and cutting classes again. In the third week of May, he was summoned by the dean and warned that if he missed one more class he would be immediately dismissed. The following week, he missed another class, considered himself expelled, and rather than waiting at Yale for the official letter, decided to spend the weekend in Baltimore with Phillips, hoping to get together with two girls they knew at Goucher College, a private school on the outskirts of the city. Marlow was extremely upset about the situation at Yale, which he had not revealed to his parents. He was especially anxious about what his father would say. Thomas A. Marlow was president of the National Bank of Montana; until his retirement from politics several years earlier, he had been the oldest member of the Republican National Committee.

  Marlow and Phillips checked into the Belvedere around six p.m. on Monday, May 27, 1929, and were given a room on the eighth floor that had twin beds and two windows, both overlooking Charles Street. Nobody knows what the boys did on Friday night, but on Saturday, around six p.m., they were turned away from the home of one of the Goucher girls by her father, who told the boys she would not be permitted to see them. Disappointed, they returned to the Mount Vernon neighborhood where, around seven thirty p.m., they ran into a Yale friend, James Mayfield, who joined them for the rest of the evening. Although it was the age of Prohibition, alcohol was not difficult to find in Baltimore, which was known to be a center of resistance; liquor continued to be sold, distributed, and consumed in the city, often even under the auspices of government.

  At eleven p.m., Mayfield accompanied Marlow and Phillips to their room at the Belvedere, where they continued drinking heavily. A bellman was called at three a.m. to bring up ice water. He later described seeing three young men in the room; he said one of them was in “a highly nervous condition, pacing the floor and threatening to jump out of the window.” Another of the young men, according to the bellman, told him not to worry, as his friend was perfectly well, and they promised to look after him closely.

  Sometime after the bellman left, the three men retired for the night, with Mayfield sleeping on a blanket on the floor. After he had been asleep for about half an hour, Robert Phillips was woken by the sound of Leigh Marlow getting out of bed and stumbling around the room. Phillips sat up and switched on the bedside lamp just in time to see Marlow, in his underwear, climbing onto the ledge of the open window, pausing for a moment, then plunging out.

  When police searched the room, they found a pint of gin and nine empty wine bottles that had also contained gin. Phillips and Mayfield were detained on the charge of violating the Volstead Act, and a Prohibition agent was summoned to discuss the provenance of the contraband liquor with the two young men. Family connections no doubt played a part in the outcome of the case, since Phillips and Mayfield were released without charges, and the coroner decided that an inquest into Leigh Marlow’s death would not be necessary. Since Marlow was under the influence of alcohol at the time, the coroner concluded, it was impossible to be sure that he intended to take his own life. Perhaps he was looking for the bathroom and, drunk and disoriented, stepped out of the window by mistake. The verdict in this case was not suicide, but accidental death.

  Leigh Marlow, plunging from a lower height than Rey Rivera and launching himself from a standing position from the window ledge, still landed halfway across Charles Street, a distance of at least twenty feet from the side of the building. While such a distance certainly suggests a high velocity upon takeoff, it is not enough to require a running jump, nor to preclude a push.

  * * *

  According to Dr. Melissa Brassell, the assistant state medical examiner who conducted Rey Rivera’s autopsy, he had been dead for at least a week when his body was found. There were no signs of a struggle and no evidence of foul play, though after eight days of decay, it was impossible to be sure. No drugs were found in his body, and the small amount of alcohol found could easily have been produced during the process of decomposition. “Injuries at the time of the autopsy were consistent with the fall from a height,” concluded Dr. Brassell in her report. “Because the circumstances surrounding the incident are unclear, and it is not known how the deceased came to have precipitated from a height, the manner of the death is best classified as undetermined.”

  To a medical examiner, deaths fall into one of five categories: natural death, accident, suicide, homicide, and undetermined. A death is ruled undetermined when, after a careful investigation, even if the majority of the evidence seems to point one way or another, the cause cannot be conclusively ascertained.

  The role of the medical examiner is to record the verifiable facts. The ME’s report is based entirely on the condition of the body rather than on who or what caused the lethal injury. It is not the business of the medical examiner to speculate or to offer personal opinions of what might have happened to the victim. Whether she was aware of it or not, however, by classifying Rivera’s death as “undetermined,” Dr. Brassell made things much easier for the police. The vast majority of Baltimore’s homicides are gang and drug related. In comparison to these deaths, the circumstances of Rivera’s demise are remarkably obscure. If Dr. Brassell had classed his death as a homicide, the resulting investigation would have required a huge investment of time and resources, with possibly little chance of the crime being solved, or of any arrests being made.

  Of the 4,323 bodies autopsied at the office of Baltimore’s chief medical examiner in 2006, 36 percent were concluded to have died as a result of natural causes and 23 percent by accident; 20 percent were ruled “undetermined”—almost as many as were ruled to be homicides (13 percent) and suicides (8 percent) combined.

  Stephen Janis, the only investigative j
ournalist in Baltimore who refused to let go of the Rivera case, believes it is possible Rey was killed by someone who chose to disguise the murder as a suicide. “The fact that the medical examiner has classed it as undetermined means nobody’s going to ask any questions,” Janis told me, when we met in the Owl Bar to discuss the case. “This is what they do rather than admitting that they’re out of their depth. They just have too much work to handle. I think there’s enough evidence with Rey’s death to call it a homicide. If they’d just done a little more work and ruled it a homicide, it could have been a whole different case.”

  * * *

  What convinced most people that Rey Rivera took his own life, however, was the announcement by police that a note had been found at Rivera’s home. It is true that Rey left behind a piece of writing, but this was a document rather than a personal note. It was, according to an FBI report on the case, “a piece of paper covered in printed type that had been reduced in size, most likely by a copy machine, placed in a transparent document protector, folded into a square, and taped to the side of Rivera’s desktop computer at home.” Is this why he returned home for a moment—to tape this paper to his computer? If so, why? Was it a message to someone, or a warning? Did he know he might not be coming back?

  Interestingly, Rey had left his computer running. On his screen was a site that showed the time at which the sun rose and set in Baltimore. This apparently unconnected piece of information led to the circulation of a rumor that Rey had been keeping a log on his computer of the best places to see the sunset in Baltimore. From this, a connection was made to the chair that was seen on the Belvedere’s roof. Some people speculated that Rey had been sitting on the roof watching the sunset when, for some reason, he made the decision to jump. This seems unlikely to me. I think the mysterious chair on the roof is, so to speak, neither here nor there. I imagine it was brought there by one of the bartenders at the 13th Floor who wanted to sit and smoke, and that it was later blown off the edge by a heavy wind.

  The cryptic document left behind by Rivera is addressed to “Brothers and Sisters,” refers to “a well-played game,” and begins and ends with the maxim “Whom virtue unites, Death cannot separate,” which is used by the Freemasons. Mel Blizzard, a former Baltimore police commander and a specialist in behavioral assessment, reviewed the document at the request of the reporter Jayne Miller, and described it as “a weird stream of conscious [sic] writing.” Blizzard also said that the document’s author “could be writing some kind of code to someone about something. That’s possible.”

  The note mentions “the current participants,” and refers to the actor Christopher Reeve (who had died the previous year) and the director Stanley Kubrick, as well as a long list of Rivera’s friends, colleagues, and relations, with a request to make them (and himself) “five years younger.” This is followed by a list of recent inventions and technologies: Portable Data Assistants, Flash Drives, the Human Genome, Genetic Engineering, Viagra-type drugs, the Fuel Cell, Bluetooth, Overnight Express Shipping, Airbags, Computer Operating Systems, Thermal depolymerization, Horizontal Drilling, Wi-Fi, the da Vinci Surgical System, Hybrid Engines, Muscle Milk, and Heads-Up Displays. It also includes a series of media-related abbreviations (VCD, DVD, HDVD, HDTV, jpeg, mpeg).Accompanying the document is a blank check, drawn on the account of Rivera’s video company, Ceiba Productions, which he had named after the official tree of Puerto Rico, whose firm trunk and spreading roots were once believed to connect the underworld, the terrestrial realm, and the spirits of heaven.

  Local detectives, confounded, turned the document over to the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit. The FBI report, which I obtained by means of a Freedom of Information Act request, has little to offer. Rivera’s personal risk of being a victim of violent crime is assessed to be “low.” There were “no guns available in Rivera’s residence,” Rivera “did not owe a large amount of money and appeared to be financially stable,” although he “had recently borrowed $15,000 to support his production company.” The document does not appear to be a suicide note, the FBI report concludes, since “legitimate suicide notes” (which are left in only 25 percent of cases) are generally left in a more conspicuous place or addressed to a particular individual, and they are written by the victim to explain the reason for their suicide.

  The statement that Rey “recently borrowed $15,000 to support his production company” is baffling to Allison Rivera. She knows Rey never borrowed any money because she bought the video production equipment on her own credit card, and she has the receipts to prove it. Nor was the equipment bought “recently.” Rey produced his first video in November 2005; Allison remembers him working on it when they went to Puerto Rico to get married. He finished the tape two days before the wedding, and the payment he received covered the cost of the production equipment.

  As for the mysterious note, Allison says that Rey was always working on creative projects and writing down whatever came to mind. Whenever they went out to dinner, he would jot down random thoughts and ideas on his napkin. Allison still has boxes full of Rey’s notebooks, small and large, as well as other scraps of paper on which he noted things he wanted to remember. His handwriting was so bad that there are many she has never been able to decipher. However, the note in question—typed, and laid out in an unusual way—is bothersome to Allison in that it seems different from Rey’s usual spontaneous scribbles. She thinks it may be a communication of some kind, and that there may be a code in the allusions, the numbers used, or the layout.

  “It seemed really bizarre,” said Fred Bealefield, a former commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, of the Masonic references contained in Rey’s note. “Based on what we’ve seen, his interest in the Masonic order was not necessarily to do charitable work. Somehow, it was linked to the movie industry, and this theory that somehow there was some control being exerted by the Masonic order.”

  Allison Rivera admits that, in the time leading up to his death, the Freemasons had become a subject of fascination for Rey. She recalls that he spent the weekend before his disappearance reading Joseph Fort Newton’s 1914 book The Builders, which connects the origins of Freemasonry to ancient Egypt and the early mystery religions. Earlier on the afternoon he went missing, Rivera purchased a book called Freemasons for Dummies, and kept an appointment with a member of a Maryland Masonic lodge, to discuss the possibility of joining the Masons. This gentleman said there was nothing unusual about the conversation at all, describing it as typical of someone who wanted to learn about the organization’s membership. Rey thanked him for the meeting and said he would be in touch.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, November 8, 2006, six months after Rey Rivera’s death, a partial solar occultation took place. In broad daylight, over a period of five hours, the planet Mercury began a leisurely westward creep across the face of the sun. If you had looked through a telescope, you would have seen the planet in silhouette, stealing by like a sly black moon.

  * * *

  For as long as I can remember, certain kinds of mysteries have enthralled me, especially those that contain an element of the uncanny—an odd coincidence; a mysterious stranger whose presence can’t be explained; an element of missing time; a prophetic dream the night before. To me, these wonders are dropped stitches in the fabric of the universe, windows left uncovered for a moment, permitting us a quick glimpse into the unknowable.

  All my life, I’ve wanted to experience something like this, something inexplicable. It does not have to be anything huge or dramatic. As Sherlock Holmes astutely observes to Dr. Watson, “The strangest and most unique things are very often connected not with the larger but with the smaller crimes, and occasionally, indeed, where there is room for doubt whether any positive crime has been committed.” Going in search of strange experiences is probably not the best way to find them, but I am tired of waiting. I have sat for hours with my fingers on a motionless planchette; slept alone in graveyards; crawled through the windows of abandoned asylums; followed a h
and-drawn map to an unholy megalith, where I observed a lunar eclipse. I have virtually handed myself over to be possessed, bewitched, abducted, or transformed, taken out of my everyday life, even if just for a moment. On my office wall, I have the poster made famous by the conspiracy-obsessed FBI agent Fox Mulder of the TV show The X-Files: beneath a grainy image of a UFO is the slogan “I Want to Believe.” My temperament, however, is more skeptical than Mulder’s. Before I can believe, something inexplicable must happen.

  And now it has. The circumstances surrounding the death of Rey Rivera—his disappearance, his presence on the roof, the bizarre note, the distance between his landing point and the hotel, the Freemason connection—are strange enough for an episode of The X-Files, and it feels as though the mystery I have been seeking all my life has fallen, so to speak, into my lap. Yet while I am intrigued by the secret that seems to be hidden somewhere in this series of bizarre events, I know I have to watch my step. I have a tendency—perhaps a need—to suspect that hidden forces are at work in any as-yet-unexplained circumstances. I’m too keen to think in cosmic terms, too eager to find connections between unrelated episodes, desperate to provoke an epiphany.

  But an epiphany can’t be provoked. An epiphany produces itself. A forced epiphany is not an epiphany; it is epiphany’s opposite. It is an apophany.

  The word “apophenia” (from the Greek apo, away from, and phaenein, to show) was coined in 1958 by the German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad to describe those revelations that appear to provide insight into the interconnectedness of reality but that turn out to be the second phase of delusional thinking in schizophrenia. The first stage of delusional thinking, according to Conrad’s system, is Trema (stage fright); at this point, the patient has the feeling that something very important is about to happen.