An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  It is very unfortunate that Allison Rivera received nothing at all from Agora by way of compensation for Rey’s death. While compensation may not have been required, since Rey was no longer working for Stansberry except on a freelance basis, it does seem heartless to deny her anything, especially given the fact that, a few weeks after Rey’s death, according to Allison, Stansberry began to act coldly toward her.

  The discreet, low-profile, high-profit nature of Agora undoubtedly gives the company a secretive, cultlike feel. It employs at least a thousand people in Baltimore alone, and seems to make a baffling amount of money for a company that produces little more than emails. It is constantly advertising for new employees, indicating a very high rate of turnover, and is always looking to hire young people ready to work for entry-level salaries. In November 2016, the company purchased two more buildings in Mount Vernon: a five-story office building at 1125 N. Charles Street whose acquisition and renovation have been estimated to have cost at least $11 million, and the offices at 1001 Cathedral Street, above the popular City Café.

  From this perspective, the story of Rey Rivera at Agora is a tale of David and Goliath: the huge, mysterious corporation versus the good, honest man seeking the truth.

  * * *

  Is it possible, however, that we can expand our imaginations widely enough to embrace both sides of the story? I have spoken to Agora employees who tell me that working for the company is the best job they have ever had.

  “It’s a great place to work,” one employee, G., told me. “Everybody’s young and full of energy. There are no strict work hours, no dress code, and you’re encouraged to think out of the box. It’s totally unique.” The old mansions are beautiful places to work, and though their offices are physically separated, all the employees come together for social events like summertime receptions in the Mount Vernon parks, wine tastings, music recitals, and the end-of-the-year holiday party at the Belvedere. The company, moreover, offers a great benefits package, and encourages radical and independent thinking. And this is not a minority opinion. Agora is regularly included in the Baltimore Sun’s annual poll of “Baltimore’s Best Places to Work.” One year, every employee was given an iPad as a token of the company’s appreciation. Employees praise the work environment and say there are lots of opportunities for anyone who fits the company model. Agora has contributed generously to the upkeep of the parks, fountains, and statues in the Mount Vernon area, as well as to the renovation of Baltimore’s Washington Monument. It has established a health clinic/hospital on the tract of coastal land it owns in Nicaragua, for both the residents of Rancho Santana, its resort and residential community, as well as the local workers.

  If Stansberry was involved in anything illegal, why would he invite his honest and ethical friend Rey to come work for him? No one has denied that, as soon as Porter learned that Rey had gone missing, he was terribly anxious; he offered a reward for any information about his friend’s whereabouts and was eager to help with the search. And once Rey’s body was found, is it really so surprising that Stansberry felt uncomfortable around Allison? After all, it was Porter who had brought Rey to Baltimore, where he was reportedly unhappy. If he had stayed in California, he might still be alive today.

  It is natural that Stansberry should have been traumatized by his friend’s death, and it is well known that people grieve in different ways. Some reach out to friends for comfort; others grieve in private, avoiding social contact, often to the extent of appearing cold and distant. There are even those who behave irrationally by going on spending sprees, for example, or buying an expensive new home. It is also natural, perhaps, that Stansberry should fall under suspicion, partly because of the way he avoided the police after Rivera’s death, but also because he is so wealthy and successful. He is clearly the object of a great deal of envy among those who know him, or have worked for him. Those who are too conventional or not brave enough to take the kind of financial risks that Stansberry has taken might well resent him for his accomplishments, and feel that he must certainly be guilty of something.

  For in some regards, Porter Stansberry is an accomplished man. In a small way, he is a public figure. Often, in Baltimore, I see people carrying bags or folders bearing the name and logo of Stansberry Research; I see cars bearing Stansberry Radio stickers on their back bumpers. Porter Stansberry himself has weathered the SEC fraud charges and emerged with his company not only intact, but thriving. No longer the cigar-chomping show-off of Pirate Investor, he has become more thoughtful and self-aware. On his podcast, the Stansberry Investor Hour, he takes nuanced and surprising positions, chatting to his guests with a cheerful confidence, describing himself as “a family man.” He occasionally refers to his wife, their stable marriage, his two young sons, his dog. Longtime listeners of the podcast have heard Stansberry talk about his charter boat, a sixty-five-foot-long Viking Sportfish called Two Suns, which he keeps docked in Miami. They have heard him talk about his world travels, his many friends, his sailing and surfing trips, and they have heard him grow passionate about his favorite hobby, deep-water marlin fishing. While Porter Stansberry may be seen by some people as a braggart and a blowhard, to his thousands of followers, he is a hero and a role model.

  Stansberry and his team, “Two Suns,” at the 2017 White Marlin Open

  * * *

  When I ask the Baltimore homicide office yet again for their files on Rey Rivera, I am told nothing is available, because the case is still open as a homicide.

  This is baffling. I watched the police retrieve Rey’s phone and flip-flops from the swimming pool roof in May 2006. They tossed the items down to one another very carelessly. There was no sense that they were working a crime scene. According to police guidelines, personnel at a crime scene should be kept to a minimum: only the investigating officers and those who have a necessary role in collecting and preserving evidence should be present. At Rey’s death scene, a whole battalion of police cadets marched through the Belvedere. Viewing the body was part of a training exercise. How could the security and integrity of the scene be safely maintained when at least twenty people were present?

  Around six hours after Rey’s body was removed from the Belvedere, the disused office where the body had been lying for a week was empty, the door unlocked and propped open, the room accessible to anyone who happened to be walking by. There was no crime scene tape, no chalk outline of a body on the ground. The scene was not secured. The medical examiner did not attend; the body was not studied at the site of death. The police obviously assumed Rey’s death was a straightforward suicide.

  In an article on death scene investigation, the forensic medicine experts Serafettin Demirci and Kamil Hakan Dogan advise officers arriving at the scene of any death to always be assiduous:

  Remember that onlookers, including the decedent’s family, and news media may be at the perimeter of the scene, so do not say or do anything that would reflect poorly on yourself and the organization you represent. Trash (discarded gloves, etc.) should be placed in bags designated for investigators’ refuse, and not in the garbage cans that are part of the scene because in actuality, they are evidence. Never remove items from a scene for souvenirs.

  “It has been my experience that when police officers or detectives hear the word ‘Suicide,’ they go into what I describe as the Suicide Position,” writes Vernon K. Geberth in Practical Homicide Investigation. “Suicides are non-amenable offenses that are not recorded in the UCR [Uniform Crime Reports] and therefore are considered less important than other events.… I have reviewed many suicide cases where it was apparent that the investigators did not take each point to its ultimate conclusion.”

  “I talked to some people in Homicide who knew about the case,” Dr. Charles Tumosa told me in his office in the University of Baltimore’s forensic studies program, “and they were of the opinion that it was a suicide.” At what point, then, did Rivera’s death become an “open homicide investigation”? Has it been one all along? If so, why was the scene o
f death allowed to be contaminated? Was this just a sloppy investigation? Why have Baltimore homicide detectives not apologized to Rivera’s family for their thoughtless attitude to the crime? Why has there never been any active investigation of the case? If calling Rey’s death a homicide was intended as a way of pandering to the Rivera family, it has not worked.

  * * *

  Many of the Belvedere’s residents are concerned that restaurant and banquet waste in the loading-bay dumpsters is attracting rats. I am a concerned resident, but I am not concerned about the rats. I am concerned about the rodenticide.

  It is wrong to generalize about rats. Their personalities are as individual as those of human beings. Anyone who has come to know a rat will tell you that these small creatures are surprisingly intelligent, playful, and affectionate. In a group, rats are sociable, altruistic, and have excellent instincts; they will take care of weaker members of their pack; they will lead around the blind and sick; they will stick together to avoid danger. Rats will tickle each other, emitting unique ultrasonic chirps that, when amplified, resemble human giggles.

  Contrary to popular belief, rats are extremely clean. Like cats, they have rough tongues with the texture of sandpaper, which they use to wash themselves and each other, removing dust and dirt from their fur at least twice a day, taking care to clean behind their ears with their front paws, and tending to one another’s nether parts as a quid pro quo. Clean rats have a subtle, sweetish aroma. I have never smelled it myself, but rat lovers I know describe it as reminiscent of grape soda. Others say it reminds them of fresh strawberries.

  Rats carry no health risk to human beings. If you do not believe me, or want to get rid of them regardless, the only way is to remove any traces of food. Nothing else will work in the long run. You will only end up causing these friendly creatures to die in agony. Rats caught in glue traps will often break or chew off their own limbs in their struggle to escape. Snap traps are supposed to kill quickly, but rarely do so, often leaving the prisoners screaming in pain for hours.

  The Baltimore Department of Public Works has a “Rat Eradication” page on its website informing citizens that if they have a “rat problem,” they may call 311 and request a visit from the “Rat Rubout Unit.” The page features an illustration of a nasty-looking rodent in a circle with a red line through it. The city employs fifteen full-time “Rat Rubout Workers.” When called to a rat sighting, the worker will coat the outside of the rats’ homes with brodifacoum, so it will catch in the creatures’ fur as they come and go. Since rats groom themselves frequently, the poison is ingested quickly.

  Imagine how it would feel to die alone in terrible pain, the way these poisoned rats die, in public, far from those who loved you, who fed you, who licked your soft fur until you smelled of strawberries.

  The private exterminator who comes to rid the Belvedere of rats does not use poison, but live traps. Whenever I see him, I ask him how many dead rats he has “found” (i.e., killed) that month, and he always replies the same way—by asking me, with a ghoulish grin, “Why, do you want me to bring you a couple?” He reminds me of the “fat boy” in The Pickwick Papers, who says, “I wants to make your flesh creep.”

  * * *

  Poisoning is the most common suicide method worldwide, no doubt because it is easily available to the average person, especially in impoverished countries, where the toxin most commonly swallowed is paraquat, a weed killer that is readily obtainable at low cost. A mere two teaspoons of paraquat is enough to kill a person of average size. However, in sundry times and places, among different social classes, other poisons have come in and out of fashion as instruments of suicide, including hemlock, aconite, belladonna, digitalis, mandrake, strychnine, arsenic, mercury, cyanide, phenol (carbolic acid), mercuric chloride, battery acid, and Lysol. In general, self-poisoning has always been used predominantly by women, which is not to say that it is painless; despite widespread assumptions, deaths by poisoning can take hours, even days of violent agony.

  For example, in a case reported from 1920, a doctor treating a case of self-poisoning by bichloride of mercury, an extremely toxic substance, wrote the following of his patient one week after she took the poison: “Up to this time she appeared almost normal, but from that time she seemed to undergo a molecular or cellular death. The mind was clear but it seemed as if she were decomposing while still living. The odour from the body was nauseating, greyish pallor increased, and at the end of about two and a half weeks from the onset, she died.”

  Bichloride of mercury was also the poison of choice for Mrs. Winifred van Schaick Reed Tredwell, the wife of the American ambassador and diplomat Roger Tredwell. In 1914, Tredwell was stationed in England; in 1915, it was Italy (Turin, and then Rome). In 1918, he was imprisoned in Russian Central Asia by Bolshevik forces, and for a few months, he was famous all over the world. He was released in May 1919.

  Mrs. Tredwell’s life was far less exciting, although before her marriage she, too, had traveled widely. After going to finishing school in Switzerland, she studied art at the University of Florence, the University of Geneva, and Wellesley College. She was a talented art critic and historian; in 1915, six years after her marriage, she published Chinese Art Motives Interpreted, a book that was considered the authoritative source on the subject for many years to come. Yet while her husband’s name was going down in history, Winifred Tredwell’s world was growing narrower. While Roger was involved in dramatic adventures, his wife, along with the couple’s four-year-old adopted son, went to stay with her widowed sixty-three-year-old father in Cincinnati, and it was here that, at age thirty-seven, she fell into her most serious episode of melancholia, a condition from which she had been suffering for several years.

  In April 1921, Mrs. Tredwell informed her husband that she had arranged a trip to Baltimore to visit the Phipps Clinic, where she would be treated for depression. On April 17, she took the train from Cincinnati to Baltimore, but upon arrival, instead of taking a taxi to the Phipps, she checked in to the Belvedere. In the guest book at the reception desk, she gave her name as “Mrs. Royal Travler,” and her provenance as Frankfort, Kentucky, a frail disguise that suggests she had already lost hope. However, that evening, she seems to have rallied. She made a call to the Phipps Clinic to let the staff know that she had arrived in Baltimore, and would be checking in the next day.

  In the bleak morning light, however, Mrs. Tredwell’s courage must have failed her once again. When a housemaid arrived to change the linen, assuming the guest had left, she was surprised to discover “Mrs. Travler” lying on the bed, clearly very ill. The hotel doctor had her brought to the Maryland Women’s Hospital. Here, during intense interrogation by the doctors, she confessed that she had no desire to live and had taken 126 tablets of bichloride of mercury, whose effects are almost invariably fatal.

  Mrs. Tredwell suffered in great pain for a week, during which time she confessed her true identity. When she died, around four thirty on April 24, the superintendent of the hospital, Miss Stella Sampson, called the police; Patrolman Herman Rosenthal arrived and spoke to the hospital staff about their patient’s cause of death. At Mrs. Tredwell’s request, Miss Sampson also called her brother, General C. Lawson Reed, an influential Cincinnati businessman, who came to Baltimore immediately and insisted that no one in the hospital say anything about his sister’s death.

  Mrs. Tredwell died in the Northwestern police district. When the district coroner, Dr. J. Tyrrell Hennessy, arrived at the hospital to fill out the death certificate, he asked Miss Sampson how the patient had died. Miss Sampson replied, “This is a very peculiar case and I cannot discuss it. We promised her brother not to give out any information.”

  After an initial examination of the body, Dr. Hennessy at first issued a certificate giving the cause of death as “acute nephritis with broncho-pneumonia as a contributory factor.” He later said there was no evidence of Mrs. Tredwell having taken poison, but also admitted that certain poisons might have the same symptoms as acut
e nephritis.

  The police were still suspicious. Detective John Day was sent to investigate further. Dr. Hennessy must have realized there would be more inquiries, because when Detective Day retrieved the death certificate from the coroner’s office, he noticed that Hennessy had jotted on the back that Mrs. Tredwell “was a victim of dementia praecox (melancholia) and while in a state of excitement took 126 grains of poison.” Opposite this statement was the word “suicide.”

  Detective Day went to ask Dr. Hennessy about his unconventional method of filling out the patient’s death certificate. The doctor replied,

  When I saw the body of Mrs. Tredwell, there was no evidence of suicide. Later, however, when I made a further inquiry I was informed by hospital authorities that the woman had taken poison before she came to the hospital. Further investigation indicated that when she swallowed the poison she was not in her right mind, and so I stated my conclusions on the back of the death certificate. I wrote that she had been suffering from “dementia praecox,” and a person suffering with such a disease is not responsible for his or her act. When the officials of the health department talked with me I told them frankly what my investigation had disclosed, and when they asked me if the death could be classed as suicide, I said yes.

  “Would you term Mrs. Tredwell’s act one of self-destruction?” asked the detective.

  “Well, yes,” said Hennessy.

  “Then the case is one of suicide?”

  “Well, yes,” the coroner agreed.

  From this report, it seems that Mrs. Tredwell’s brother attempted to persuade the coroner to fudge the death certificate. It is important to remember that until the 1970s, when they were replaced by medical examiners, coroners in Baltimore needed no qualifications whatsoever, rarely had any training, and were usually elected to the position. This was true in many places across the United States until much later than the 1970s. In fact, there are places where, even today, coroners are elected officials with no qualifications to deal with the deceased. The state of South Carolina, for example, only recently required that its coroners be high school graduates.