A sudden glimpse into the ultimate interconnectedness of everything sounds like spiritual revelation, not psychopathology. When does a metaphysical vision become a medical problem? If you are so convinced by a private revelation that you no longer care whether anyone else shares your beliefs—when, in other words, you are no longer a part of conventional social structures—have you achieved a heightened state of wisdom, or are you experiencing the first stage of a grave mental illness? If revelation and delusion turn out not to be opposites, but the same thing, then what might come next?
It might be a vision of the True God.
Or it may be Conrad’s third and final stage of delusional thinking:
Apocalypse.
VI
JAYNE MILLER OF WBAL-TV is a local reporter who, I am told, is known for her tough approach to cover-ups and corruption. For some reason—perhaps the “y” in her name—I picture her as a glamorous blonde in her thirties, and I am slightly surprised to hear the voice of a hard-boiled professional when we talk on the phone.
Miller tells me Rivera’s death is one of the most mysterious cases she has ever encountered in all her years as an investigative journalist. She gives me the number of a woman named Jennifer who was one of Rey’s closest friends. I call Jennifer, who is fielding inquiries from the media, and she talks to me on the phone for a long time. She speaks quickly, in a slightly manic way, as if she were speaking in headlines, leaving me no chance to interrupt her or to ask questions.
Jennifer tells me she is unable to give out contact information for Rey’s wife or his parents, as they are severely traumatized and are not ready to speak to anyone about the death of their husband and son. She warns me that if I continue to investigate, I could find myself in very serious trouble. She says the situation is very dangerous. The people who killed Rey will stop at nothing, she tells me. She mentions a local reporter who has been investigating the case. He came home one day and found his house had burned down. When he went to the police, they said it was probably an accident. After that, says Jennifer, he wanted nothing more to do with the case.
Jennifer strikes me as one of those people who enjoy inserting themselves into the center of a disaster. Her monologues are like a long strip of land bearing a sign that says “No Trespassing.” When I ask for the name of the reporter whose house burned down and the name of his news organization, Jennifer says she can’t remember any of the details. She has spoken to so many people over the last couple of weeks, she says.
Inwardly, I dismiss this anecdote as an exaggerated rumor. While Jennifer’s paranoid digressions never reach the level of a fully formed rant, she tends to talk in circles, rambling and repeating herself in the style of those who post on Internet conspiracy forums, where the death of Rey Rivera is attributed to the Freemasons, the New World Order, the CIA, or the FBI.
Yet in some ways, Jennifer tells me just what I want to hear. Her story feeds my compulsion to question the consensus version of events. It is impossible for me to believe that someone who has just booked an editing suite for the upcoming weekend would suddenly throw himself off the roof of a fourteen-story building, especially if he has a well-known fear of heights. Like almost everyone else caught up in the case, I feel there has to be something more sinister going on. Rivera’s death would make far more sense if he had made himself the enemy of a powerful underground cabal. When an event has far-reaching consequences, we assume its causes must be equally momentous, just as when we want to roll a higher number, we shake the dice harder, and for a longer time.
* * *
I do not believe that I will solve the mystery of Rey Rivera’s death; nonetheless, I cannot help wanting to go deeper. I feel that my invisibility, humbling as it is to my vanity, may be useful to my inquiry. It will, I hope, give me the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved. But of course, there is more to it than this. Invisible or not, I am unable to look away.
Since we first met, seventeen years ago, D. has given me three framed cartoons from the New Yorker. Two are George Booth bulldog prints; the third shows a group of people standing around an accident victim in the street. A bald, bespectacled, official-looking man with a large briefcase is pushing his way through the crowd. The caption reads: “Let me through—I’m morbidly curious!”
The gift was intended as an affectionate joke at my expense. Those who know me well are aware of my dark side, although these days I try to keep it under wraps. Over time, I have learned not to talk about violent death at social gatherings. Just as the child who enjoys cutting the tails off cats and dogs may grow up to be a great surgeon, I have managed to sublimate my interests into such socially acceptable pursuits as reading and writing about true crime.
Still, those who get close to me eventually learn that I’m fascinated by suicides, accidents, death scene photographs, forensic accounts of bizarre fatalities. I am not alone. I have encountered many others who find these things alluring. My dermatology nurse, my hairdresser, two of my graduate teaching interns, and a cosmetologist friend—all women—share my secret passion. We recommend podcasts and documentaries, exchange books and movies. We are like a secret sisterhood.
A colleague of mine, F., a philosopher, cannot understand my interest in the macabre. He constantly presses me to explain myself, as if he is looking for some moral reckoning. Whenever I remind F. that I am hardly alone in my pursuits, he insists, “Yes, but with you it is different. With you, it is an obsession.” He finds it difficult to leave the subject alone. Every time he brings it up, his voice gets louder and his face grows slightly flushed. He seems to think I am refusing to confront something about my personality; perhaps he believes me to be a misanthrope, a brute, or a sadist. He may be thinking of Nietzsche’s comment that “in all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty.”
One might argue that my fascination with accounts of violent death signals a desire to contemplate the pain of others—my revenge, perhaps, on those who find me invisible. On the other hand, such interests are not unusual for one born, like me, with Neptune in Scorpio. Such types tend to be deep thinkers who are often fascinated by secrets, mysteries, and dark subjects—death, murder, violence. They may be fixated on the occult.
In an 1811 lecture titled “On the Pleasures of the Mind,” the famous Philadelphia surgeon Dr. Benjamin Rush described “persons who take delight in seeing public executions” as affected by a kind of “moral perversion.” According to Dr. Rush, these instances of moral depravity “do not belong to the ordinary character of man. They are as much the effects of morbid idiosyncrasy, as a relish for fetid odors, or putrid meats is, of the same state of the senses of smell and taste.” Dr. Rush is wrong to dismiss morbid curiosity as a vulgar, uncivilized impulse. There is more to this urge than is suggested by his disdainful sketch of the gleeful crowd at an execution, but we rarely consider its more refined variations: the subtle shades and nuances of that which makes the flesh crawl. And why should we? The English language has no aesthetic vocabulary for these refinements beyond the medical lexicon of the coroner, the euphemisms of the police, and the black humor of the cleanup crew.
Let me share an example I recently came upon. The retired police detective Vernon Geberth, in the fourth edition of his handbook Practical Homicide Investigation, refers to the scene of a suicide he once investigated in which the victim had shot himself in the head with a long-barreled shotgun. The ceiling, we are told, is a bloody mess. To make his point, Geberth includes a picture taken at the scene, drawing attention to a feature the reader might otherwise easily overlook. “In this photo,” he notes, “the victim’s dental plate has been driven into the ceiling along with the blood and brain matter.”
This sentence stopped me in my tracks; the detail was so unexpected that it gave me an almost physical jolt. The scene engaged my imagination so much that when I went to bed that evening, I could not stop thinking about it, and had to get up in the night to write down my thoughts. What touched me so much was not only the shock of the u
ncanny (the familiar dental plate appearing in a place where it should not be), but the way this unpredictable image suddenly materialized in the formal prose of the police report. It was like discovering a ghost orchid growing in a gravel driveway.
My interest in these things is not an obsession, as F. believes. Obsessions are an impediment to life, not an enrichment of it. I believe that if I were feeling suicidal, thinking about that dental plate driven into the ceiling could re-engage me with the world, giving me a reason to go on. If my pursuits appear unhealthy to the modern eye, that is simply because they are no longer fashionable. Mine is the unhealthiness of the modern-day ascetic, the anchorite, the mortifier of the flesh. These moments I seek are my mementi mori, ritual injunctions reminding me that my own death is a little closer every day.
I am not a gawker; I am a connoisseur.
* * *
I take my investigation to the next level by learning everything I can about Rey Rivera. Mostly, I gather this information from public records, newspaper archives, and Internet forums, where I find the email addresses and Facebook profiles of some of his friends in Maryland, Florida, and California. I make contact online but speak only to one or two people. Two things get in my way. The first is that the idea of telephoning a stranger out of the blue to ask personal questions about their recently deceased friend makes me sick with anxiety. So, I conduct most of my interviews by email.
The second difficulty I have is that nobody will go on the record. Everybody is afraid. Most of Rey’s friends appear to believe that he was murdered by a group of people so wealthy and powerful that they can kill anyone with impunity, and will not hesitate to kill again. It is not just one or two people who believe this, but everybody I contact. Some are convinced of it; to others it is merely a suspicion; still, nobody seems to believe that Rey’s death was a suicide.
* * *
Rey Omar Rivera was born on Sunday, June 10, 1973, in the U.S. Air Force Base hospital in Madrid, Spain, where his father, Angel Rivera, an Air Force officer, was stationed at the time. His mother, Maria, was so certain she was having a girl that she had no name ready when the baby turned out to be a boy. The Riveras, who both came from Puerto Rico, already had one son, Angel Junior, so Rey’s name was chosen virtually on the spot. The daughter Maria had been expecting, named Elena, arrived two years later, when the family was stationed in Arkansas. There they lived for a few years before Angel retired, at which time they moved to Winter Park, a northeast suburb of Orlando.
Rey, a typical Gemini, was creative, cheerful, outgoing, and extremely friendly, even as a young child. He grew into a tall, smart, good-looking kid who loved sports; he had an aptitude for basketball and a special talent for swimming. He also had an impressive memory and a love of learning. When Elena took piano lessons, Rey learned to play by ear just by listening to her. When visiting family in Puerto Rico, as a young man, he impulsively decided he wanted to learn to play the cuatro, a small guitar used at parties and other gatherings, and soon became a practiced player. As his mother said, when Rey wanted to do something, he just went right ahead and did it.
In his junior year at Winter Park High School, Rey won a place at an Olympic swimming camp in California. That was the year he discovered water polo.
In the Orlando Sentinel of January 13, 1991, when Rey was eighteen, the sportswriter Bill Buchalter wrote, “I’ve had the opportunity to watch Winter Park get better and better at the sport and watch Rey Rivera become a budding national caliber junior performer. He’s a complete player.” The Winter Park High School water polo team, the Wildcats, was highly competitive right from the start, but within the team itself, according to their coach, there was no jealousy or competition.
In only their second year playing the game, the Wildcats went to Miami and won the state championship. Rey scored four goals, including a breathtaking clincher that changed the game and brought Winter Park to victory with just thirty-nine seconds to go. Coach Jack Horton kept in touch with Rey, who served as Horton’s groomsman at his wedding; he remembers Rey as outgoing, funny, and quick-witted, exactly the opposite of the depressive, neurotic type who might be prone to suicidal thoughts. “Everybody liked him,” recalls the coach. Rey was sensitive and thoughtful, he adds, not a “life and soul of the party” kind of guy. “The last time he came over to my place, you know what he did?” Horton asks me. “He alphabetized my record collection. He just sat down on the floor and that’s what he did. He was just a super guy.”
In his senior year, Rivera was offered a full water polo scholarship to the University of the Pacific, in Stockton, California. He left for Stockton in 1992. At college, he majored in English, since he also loved to write and had a talent for it, though his heart was in water polo. His name is still in the Pacific Tigers Water Polo Hall of Fame—he scored a hundred goals in Stockton during his college career. But his ambitions went beyond the college level. Rey wanted to play on the U.S. water polo team, and he came tantalizingly close. In 1994, in his junior year, he was chosen to compete in the Summer Olympic festival in St. Louis, an event dedicated to developing up-and-coming U.S. athletes, many of whom would go on to be selected as team members at the next Olympics. After Rey graduated from college in 1996, the Royal Spanish Swimming Federation hired him to play in Barcelona.
P., a teammate of Rey’s there, told me about the atmosphere. Rey loved the tough training and the competitive games, said P. After matches, the guys would stay out late, drinking and exploring the city’s nightlife. Rey’s Spanish developed a Castilian accent, and since his family was rarely able to send him extra cash, he earned drinking money by giving English lessons. P. described Rey as a smart guy with a big smile and a great sense of humor who loved to tell jokes. He teased and kidded around a lot, according to P., but he was also tough and had a reputation for getting into fights when he drank.
Rey left Spain when he got the call he had been waiting for his whole life—he had been chosen as a contender for the U.S. water polo team at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. At twenty-three, he returned immediately to LA to begin training. Unfortunately, he was still young enough that his temper often got the better of him. The way P. described it, Rey had a falling-out with the coach around two weeks before the men were due to leave for Atlanta, and was cut from the team. Those who knew him say it was the biggest regret of his life.
* * *
A few years after Rey’s death, at a Yahoo group forum for the California water polo community, I find an archived email announcing his memorial mass, which was held on Friday, June 2, 2006, at two p.m., in Santa Monica (“The service will be approximately an hour. Dress attire is neat and casual—khakis and a nice shirt are good—ties and jackets are not necessary”). The email was sent to around twenty people, mostly men. I look a few of them up online. Each seems to be more handsome, charismatic, and successful than the last. One is head coach of the U.S. women’s water polo team. Another was featured in a People magazine “Olympic Beauties” issue. Yet another is head water polo coach at a major university in California. I email them and eventually, hear back from five. They all write affectionately about Rey. But they prefer me not to mention their names here.
Rey Rivera
Looking at the profiles of these striking, athletic men, I cannot help wondering whether Rey would have been one of them, had he lived. For the most part, his peers in the world of water polo have, it seems, worked hard and achieved their dreams. From what I’ve learned about Rey, he was also a hard worker, driven and ambitious; he must have been devastated at being dropped from the team.
It is hard to think of Rey Rivera as a has-been. But the world of professional athletics is cruel; the brute-force, raw-power strength that comes with youth is still the benchmark, and once you’re past your peak, if you want to stay in most sports, the only decent jobs are as coaches and commentators, and they’re almost as difficult to get as spots on a team. Rey had already moved over into teaching, screenwriting, and film production. Did he to a certain extent
feel as though he had missed the main chance?
* * *
This sense of one great chance missed is not uncommon. It is perhaps the most comfortable way of explaining why a life hasn’t lived up to its youthful potential. It is, no doubt, why Mary Louise Dean ended her life in a room in the Belvedere at the end of February 1945.
When Mary Louise was a child, the world was always on her side. Her family connections had meant she was almost royalty. Mary, who was known as May, was a direct descendant of Elijah Dean II, who served in the Revolutionary War under George Washington. Like many young ladies of her class, May was sent for a year to finishing school in Switzerland. Upon her return, she married John Marvin Gates, a law student at Yale. And this was when the charmed life came to an end.
The marriage ended in divorce, after which May never managed to regain her youthful spirit or artless joy. In time, however, she did begin to recover her need for activity. She trained as a nurse and accompanied a Christian mission to Labrador, where she tended to the suffering and distributed humanitarian aid to the poor. Eventually, she began to rally and regain her interest in life, and on October 17, 1941, at age thirty-seven, she married again, this time to Frederick Frick of Baltimore. As Mrs. Frick, May continued with her nursing, working as a recreational supervisor at the Phipps Clinic.
In the middle of February 1945, when she was forty-two, Mrs. Frick unexpectedly gave notice at the clinic and took a trip to visit her mother and sister in Putnam County, New York. She returned to Baltimore on Wednesday, February 28, but rather than returning home, she checked into the Belvedere. Two days later, her sister, Elizabeth, received a disturbing letter from May written on Belvedere notepaper, and, becoming alarmed, wired May’s husband, who, until he received the telegram, had assumed his wife was still in Putnam County, not in a nearby hotel room with a .38 in her purse.
When Frederick Frick called the Belvedere, the desk clerk confirmed that May Louise had checked in two days earlier. The clerk called up to her room. When the call went unanswered, a chambermaid was sent to knock on the door. This failed to rouse Mrs. Frick, so two bellmen entered the room with a passkey. There, lying on the floor with a bullet hole in the left breast and a .38 caliber pistol by its side, was the body of Mrs. May Louise Dean Frick. She had left two notes, one addressed to her husband and the other to the hotel staff, apologizing “for the necessity of causing this trouble.”
An Unexplained Death Page 8