An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  We order coffee and talk for a long time—over four hours. Allison and Megan have both brought yellow legal pads, and we all make notes as we chat.

  Again, Allison tells me that Rey’s death left her frozen with grief. Then, she says, her sorrow turned into anger, and she grew obsessed with trying to find out how and why her husband was killed. But eventually she realized it was not helpful for her to be stuck in the past, and when she stopped thinking about the crime, she found herself starting to feel better. And the less she was consumed by the circumstances of her husband’s death, the more interested she became in how she could honor his life.

  Allison says there was a time at which she decided she wanted to write a book about Rey, so she joined a memoir-writing group. At their first meeting, the teacher, an older gentleman, went around the class asking everyone what they planned to write about. When it was Allison’s turn to speak, she said that she was going to write about her husband, who had been murdered in mysterious circumstances while he was working for a financial organization in Baltimore. After she had finished speaking, says Allison, the teacher asked her whether she would mind staying behind at the end of the class. When they were alone, he wrote something on a piece of paper, folded it in half, and handed it to her. Then he told her to open the piece of paper, look at what he had written, and tell him whether those were the people who killed her husband.

  Allison opened the piece of paper and saw the words “Stansberry/Agora.” For a moment, she was struck completely dumb. When she could speak, she asked the teacher how he knew. He told her he used to be a lawyer, and his work involved prosecuting white-collar criminals. He knew the kinds of things those people could do. He said others had spent years trying to prosecute those people but could not even get close. His advice to Allison was to stay away. If she wrote her story, he said, she would be putting her life on the line.

  Allison grows animated as she talks; her eyes light up and she brushes her hair away from her forehead. I start to wonder how often she has told this story before. It feels like a well-polished anecdote. I am also unsure why the man had to write down the name on a piece of paper, as if it were a magic spell that could not be said aloud. Nonetheless, it is a compelling narrative, and she tells it convincingly.

  The afternoon shadows grow longer. Allison continues to talk about sinister events connected with her husband’s death. She tells me that Michael Baier was thrown off the case for, as his accusers put it, “falling in love with her.” She also describes almost being hit by a car emerging at breakneck speed from a Baltimore street.

  I am not sure what to make of it all.

  Megan is a documentary filmmaker, born in Britain and raised in Canada. Along with her brother, she co-owns a documentary production company. Megan and Allison are thinking about writing a feature based on Rey and Allison’s story, with a strong female lead who goes in search of the truth behind her husband’s mysterious death. They feel it’s just the right time for a movie like this.

  “When I got your email,” says Allison, “it felt as though everything was falling into place. I thought: ‘This was meant to be.’”

  “Imagine the story,” says Megan. “The handsome young couple with everything going for them. The guy just wants to make enough money to buy a ring, have a dream wedding, and introduce his family to his beautiful bride. He takes up an offer from his former school friend to make a lot of money in a short time. The couple move to a city where they don’t know anybody, and it’s nothing like they think it is going to be. The husband thinks the job’s going to be one thing, but it turns out to be another. It’s like a deal with the devil. They find themselves completely isolated. The girlfriend is traveling all the time, and the guy starts to get lured into this dark world and witnesses some very sinister things.”

  We agree to keep in touch. When we stand up to say good-bye, Allison and Megan both give me a hug. Megan is tall and slim, but when she pulls the material of her dress tight against her stomach, I see a slight bulge, which she smiles and pats affectionately.

  “Yes, I’m pregnant,” she says. “It’s my second. I already have a little boy.”

  It strikes me as very ambitious to have a baby, write a screenplay, and make a film all in the coming year, but Allison and Megan both seem full of energy and vigor.

  In fact, the two of them radiate so much life that later, back in my room, I feel lonely and depleted. I return to the hotel coffee bar, which has a relaxed and welcoming mood, and position myself at the counter. Even though it is evening, I order oatmeal. The waiter who serves me, a Hispanic man, has an avuncular charm.

  “You like oatmeal? I like oatmeal, too,” he tells me. “People think oatmeal is just for breakfast, but no, not at all.”

  The television on the wall above the bar is showing a basketball game with the sound muted. The conversation around me is a gentle hum. On the other side of the lobby, someone plays a Cole Porter tune on the piano. The baristas are teasing one another in Spanish above the mechanical buzz of the dishwasher and the purr of the espresso machine. Every so often, the headwaiter will ring up someone’s check at the cash register, and every time he does so, he says the same thing:

  “Your signature right here, my friend, and we’re in business.”

  * * *

  When someone has committed a murder and wants to get rid of the corpse, they usually bury it, dump it in a body of water, burn it, cut it up and dispose of it piece by piece, or dissolve it in chemicals. Rarely do they hide it. When this happens, according to homicide investigators, particular attention should be paid, especially when the body is kept close by, as this suggests the perpetrator has the blind self-confidence of a Hitchcock villain, and may have killed before. The forensic literature includes, by way of example, a body discovered after ten years under the concrete patio of the killer’s house; a corpse encased in a concrete block and hidden in the murderer’s attic; two bodies buried in concrete on a local golf course; and a cadaver found after two years walled up in the basement of a house the killer had put on the market. The bodies of murder victims have been found within a mile of the perpetrator’s home hidden in wells, sewer systems, water tanks, pits, compost bins, elevator shafts, trash cans, dumbwaiters, barrels, air-conditioning systems, chimneys, the trunks of cars, and the sewage tanks of portable toilets. They have been found shoved inside mattresses and rolled up in carpets. One corpse spent twenty years in a deep freeze. Another spent ten years inside a sofa. Bodies have been hidden in the box mattresses of motel beds, and even under the beds themselves, in one case for as long as seven weeks, with no recorded complaints from guests although the rooms had been cleaned and rented several times in the interim.

  * * *

  Given his landing place—almost forty feet from the wall of the Belvedere—and the fact that he landed feet first, it seems impossible that Rey Rivera was pushed directly from the roof. I learn this from Rod Cross, a retired forensic physicist affiliated with the University of Sydney, and one of the world’s leading experts on falls from a height.

  “A feet-first jump usually results in a feet-first landing, unless it’s a low-speed somersault or a head-first dive,” Cross told me. “A push from shoulder height would result in significant rotation through the air.” For Rivera to land where he did, Cross concluded that he had to have taken a running jump.

  Experiments conducted by the authors of an article published in the Journal of Forensic Science show that “the two-hand push of a normal individual to other individuals (154lb of body weight) can generate an initial velocity of up to only 9mph.” These experiments were conducted in Taiwan, where 154 pounds is the average male body weight. Rey Rivera weighed 242 pounds; still, his initial velocity was around 11 miles per hour and, according to the authors, “an initial velocity exceeding 6mph or so becomes the criterion for the running jump that is distinguishable from being pushed or slipping before falling from a height.” The authors conclude that “an initial velocity of over 6mph in a voluntary
jump suggests that the attempt to commit suicide is considerable,” which is true only if we assume that a running jump has to be voluntary. Is this something we should take for granted, or are there circumstances under which a person could be forced to take a running jump against their will? If so, what would those circumstances be? If threats were made against the lives of the victim’s loved ones? If he was forced at gunpoint? If the alternative was something even worse?

  But if someone made Rey Rivera jump, even if they insisted he take a running leap, the layout of the back of the Belvedere is such that no one could have predicted exactly where he would land. If he had landed a few feet to either side, or closer to the building (and both seem far more likely than his actual landing place), his body would have been visible to everyone on the east side of the Belvedere and the parking lot on the other side of the annex. The moon was full that night, but even if we suppose that Rey’s body was not seen that evening, it would certainly have been noticed early the next morning, when those like us, with east-facing windows, went to open their curtains or blinds. If she had been able to examine the body within a day of death, the medical examiner could have given more precise estimates about things like Rivera’s blood alcohol level, the presence of drugs in his bloodstream, the wounds on his head, and other important facts that are currently unknown due to the extent of decomposition.

  Even if it had been possible to predict that Ray’s body would land on the swimming pool roof, no one could have predicted that the roof would give way under his weight, or that his corpse would lie for a week on the floor of an empty office. Even in the Belvedere, few people knew that the former swimming pool had been made into office space; even fewer were aware that this space had been divided into two rooms, and that the east one was empty. And if Rivera ran and jumped at gunpoint, the person pointing the gun must have been sure—since there was a strong chance that the falling body would be seen—that they could get down from the roof immediately and make their way through the Belvedere without being observed, or suspected, or caught on camera.

  More to the point, if someone was planning to force Rivera to jump at gunpoint, how could they be sure he would not simply refuse, opting to take a bullet (he was afraid of heights, after all) or—since he had nothing left to lose—try to tackle his assailant and take him down as well? With his huge height, strength, and athleticism, I imagine it would be well worth the odds. And who is to say that the two men would not be seen on the roof, or that Rey would not draw attention to them by crying out for help? He could not have been sedated; if he were, how would it have been possible for him to take such a determined and vigorous jump?

  The only other possibility that makes any sense is that Rivera’s body was dropped after dark from a helicopter; but again, it would have been impossible to predict how or where the body would land, and surely Belvedere residents would have seen or heard a low-flying helicopter on the night of Rivera’s death. Plus, airspace security would definitely have picked up on an unidentified aircraft flying in such close proximity to the center of Baltimore after dark, as the airspace above downtown Baltimore is subject to air traffic control, and any airborne vehicle must be explicitly cleared before it can enter. Of course, this does not exclude the possibility that the body was dumped from a helicopter that had already been cleared by air traffic control, but why take the risk of dropping a dead body into the middle of a busy city rather than, say, into the Chesapeake Bay? If weighed down, it might never have resurfaced. And even if it did resurface, drowning would seem a far more likely method of suicide for a man who feared heights and loved the water.

  The investigative journalist Stephen Janis told me he thought there was enough evidence surrounding Rey’s death for the medical examiner to have come up with an alternate conclusion. “If they’d just done a little more work and ruled it a homicide, it could have been a whole different case,” Janis told me. “All you have to do is to introduce a little ambiguity into a death, and it will be labeled ‘undetermined’ and remain uninvestigated, because the Baltimore police already have enough homicides on their hands.”

  In the world of Baltimore City homicide detectives, according to Janis, “unusual circumstances” is anything beyond a bullet wound to the head. He told me about an investigation he and a colleague did into five unsolved cases of women who were strangled in 2008. “Strangulation is just a little too esoteric for Baltimore City homicide,” Janis told me. “And then one of them had drugs in their system; others had criminal records, primarily convictions for prostitution or drug possession. So they were considered in ‘high risk professions,’ and that’s just kind of what happens. There are so many homicides that are just not even investigated.”

  Out of the 966 “undetermined” deaths reported by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in 2006, 718 were attributed to “narcotics” and 248 to “other.”

  High-profile murders are solved by eliminating the innocent suspects one by one, as in most detective fiction, until the murderer can be arrested and charged. In such cases, even apparent suicides are sometimes revealed to be disguised murders. But in reality, particularly in a city like Baltimore, victims and murderers are almost always part of the same culture and environment. Frequently, today’s suspect is tomorrow’s victim; often both have comparable criminal records.

  * * *

  If Rey’s death was a murder, there is another mystery to solve: cui bono?

  It is true that The Rebound Report had not been a great success, and those who chose to invest in the stocks Rey recommended no doubt lost more money than they gained. But he stopped writing the newsletter almost a year before his death. And all Agora’s investment newsletters—perhaps all investment newsletters in general—have their dissatisfied subscribers. If giving bad stock tips put one at risk of murder, the entire financial industry would collapse.

  More plausible is the theory that, after leaving Stansberry’s company, Rey had, whether intentionally or not, learned something potentially incriminating about Pirate Investor, or about someone working at Agora. Perhaps he was planning to take this information to the police or to the SEC; perhaps not. But when news got around that he and Allison were planning to move back to LA, did someone decide that Rey had to be silenced? Did this person hire a contract killer? If so, the crime must have been calculated to take place while Stansberry was out of town. And when Stansberry got back to Baltimore and learned about Rey’s death, was he rewarded for his silence? An anonymous comment on an article about the case by Stephen Janis posted at the Baltimore Examiner website puts this theory in a nutshell. “Rey was a very inquisitive man, a truth-seeker. He had information that threatened something larger than himself and was murdered for it.”

  Some have suggested to me that Rey’s death was connected to the death of a gentleman named Thom Hickling who worked at Agora. Rey had become especially close to Hickling, who was killed in a car accident while visiting his daughter in Africa. His death is often mentioned as a turning point for Rey, who apparently found it suspicious. Rey’s mother told me that Rey and Hickling were good friends. “Rey liked him very much,” she said. “He talked to me about him. He said he was a real person. Honest. And this guy died somewhere overseas—I don’t remember where. All I remember is that it was a very weird situation in which he died. And Rey got very concerned.”

  Others have suggested that Rey’s death may have been connected to developments in Nicaragua, where Agora owns a large stretch of coastline. Those who have studied the case often refer to “Nicaragua” in cryptic terms. Jayne Miller wrote in her notes that “Michael Baier thinks Rey’s death is somehow connected to the situation in Nicaragua.” In an email to me, Stephen Janis wrote, “I’ll never forget what police spokesman Donny Moses said when I asked about the case: ‘Don’t mess with the Nicaraguans.’”

  In fact, for those who enjoy conspiracy theories, “the Nicaraguans” are just the tip of the iceberg. I have now spent years of my life following Internet threads by angry sp
eculators, investors, muckrakers, and “independent thinkers” of dubious sanity, a bizarre path of loosely connected breadcrumbs that has led me to the edge of nowhere and back again. There are those who have “irrefutable evidence,” for example, that Agora is connected to everything from 9/11, to the “Jewish domination of Wall Street,” to the CIA, to the Rothschilds, to George Soros, to the Taiwanese triads, to the murder of African political leader Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1960.

  Yet officials obviously believe there is no smoke without fire, since they continued to harbor suspicions about Agora’s activities. In September 2003, Melanie Senter Lubin, the securities commissioner for the state of Maryland, served two subpoenas on Agora asking the company to produce its subscriber lists. When Agora refused, Lubin filed a motion to compel enforcement. A trial court denied the motion, arguing that the commissioner had failed to demonstrate a compelling need. The case went to the Court of Appeals of Maryland in September 2005, and the appeal was upheld.

  Rey Rivera was given two separate memorial services: one in Baltimore shortly after the discovery of his body, and one on June 6 in Santa Monica. When Allison returned to Baltimore after the service in Santa Monica, which Stansberry did not attend, she went immediately to his office on St. Paul Street to find out the latest in the police investigation. To her shock, Stansberry told her he would no longer be cooperating with the inquiry. He wanted nothing to do with the police, he said. Because of the SEC investigation, he felt they would be against him from the start. Allison could hardly believe what she was hearing. Porter had been Rey’s closest friend in Baltimore; the two of them had spoken on the phone the day before Rey’s death. Worse still, when she went to speak to the police about the situation, she was told by Marvin Sydnor that Stansberry had made himself inaccessible to them. “He’s five lawyers thick,” Sydnor said to her. “We can’t touch him.”