Fate, then, dealt Allison Rivera a most brutal hand. Not only did she lose her soulmate and her husband of six months in horrifying circumstances, but also she then had to pay off Rey’s work expenses as well as other costs that Rey put on the credit card, like the wedding ring and the ceremony in Puerto Rico. It has taken her ten years to clear the debt. All of Rey’s family have suffered, but for the first time, I am struck by how merciless the last decade must have been for Allison. In her place, I think I would have collapsed from sheer despair. But she appears to have come through with grace and dignity intact.
I asked some of the people who were close to Rey if they would agree that he was “terrible with money.” Rey’s mother, Maria, told me that he was very frugal, especially when he was living in Barcelona, where everyone lived cheaply, and Rey had very few needs. Allison agreed. “If he didn’t have money,” she told me, “he didn’t spend money and get into debt.” She also told me that Rey never had a credit card until about six months before he died; he always used cash. However, once he began to make money, he enjoyed spending it. “He would buy himself whatever he wanted, and he liked nice things,” said Allison. “He would not save for a rainy day.”
This does not surprise me. In Baltimore, comparing his own standard of living to that of Stansberry and his friends, who were starting to accumulate significant wealth, Rey may have begun to feel that he was falling behind in life, and decided that he deserved the same perks as his colleagues. I have often been surprised by the importance that even otherwise humble and reasonable men place on their reputation with their male peers, especially when it comes to the amount of money they make.
* * *
Almost everyone who hears the facts about Rey Rivera’s death comes to the assumption that it was “just” a suicide. They cannot seem to get beyond what they regard as two pieces of unshakable evidence: the cryptic letter and the running jump.
Why “just” a suicide? To me, suicide seems the most mysterious possibility of all. What could make a stable, gregarious, newly married man who had just made plans for the weekend suddenly jump off a building?
The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit prepared a report on the “suicide note”; I obtained a highly redacted copy. It is as bland as the note itself is cryptic, consisting of broad generalizations and suggestions for further investigation (for example, “BAU recommends requesting forensic analysis of the computer printer where the letter was found,” although no explanation is given of why anyone would forge such a peculiar document, especially since the report concludes that it is not, in fact, a suicide note). While confirming that Rivera “had no known physical or mental illness,” the FBI psychiatrists who were consulted about the note came up with this startlingly unhelpful theory: “In this particular case, the mental illness suffered by the author of the letter may go virtually undetected by family, friends and coworkers.” A little later on, the report continues, “The writer of the letter likely suffers from persecutory delusional disorder. This type of disorder involves believing oneself is being malevolently treated in some fashion.” Further: “The writing in this letter is also consistent with someone who suffers from a bipolar disorder. This assumption is based on the flight of ideas that could have been written by someone experiencing an untreated manic episode. The writing in this letter is disorganized, and, to a lesser extent, it is consistent with someone who suffers from schizophrenia.” Delusional disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or an untreated manic episode. All the bases are covered, but we are none the wiser.
Many people write notes, lists, texts, and memos to themselves that might seem equally bizarre if they turned up in sinister circumstances. Looking now at my own phone, I see a note that reads, “Eternal return and its opposite.” What if this memo were to be found after my dead body was discovered in bewildering circumstances? What conspiracy theories and psychological diagnoses might it engender? Yet it was just shorthand for a loose train of thought about an article I was reading that I did not want to forget.
* * *
And yet.
While others may clearly disagree, I believe the circumstances of Rey Rivera’s death make it impossible for anyone else to have been directly involved. Notwithstanding rumors to the contrary, I could find no evidence that any of Agora’s principals—not even Porter Stansberry—have ever planned or carried out an assassination.
The physics show that Rivera must have taken a running jump. He was making plans for the future, and nobody who knew him believed him to be suicidal. Using the logic of Sherlock Holmes, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth,” I believe I have covered every eventuality, and I have eliminated suicide, murder, and accident. What remains is, I think, the only plausible answer to the puzzle: that Rey was experiencing an episode of psychosis.
It is true that Rivera had no known family history of schizophrenia, which generally manifests itself between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five in men (slightly later for Hispanics), and that Rey was thirty-two. But schizophrenia can develop at any age. Rey’s friends and family say he never displayed any outward sign of mental illness, but this does not mean he was not mentally ill, just that he had none of the most familiar symptoms: He was not depressed, forgetful, or socially withdrawn; his personal hygiene did not deteriorate; he did not seem grandiose, or confused, nor did he exhibit extreme changes of mood.
But signs of schizophrenia vary dramatically from person to person, both in pattern and severity. Only one symptom reliably occurs in over 90 percent of cases, and that is delusions of persecution. Often, such delusions are the first sign of the illness. Those who are experiencing the onset of an episode may feel unsafe and afraid.
When a person feels that unspecified others are listening to them, spying on them, or trying to harm them, they will often behave in uncharacteristic ways. During the days leading up to Rivera’s death, he appeared to be increasingly anxious and frightened. He believed he was being watched and possibly followed, that someone was trying to break into the house at night. Even as long as a year before his death, he had begun acting differently, which Allison attributed to the stress of his job: he began to have trouble sleeping; he found it difficult to relax, staying up into the early hours of the morning playing video games to wind down; he seemed unusually tense and anxious; he was feeling guilty about The Rebound Report. He even began making odd and irrational statements, as in his phone call telling Stansberry he had “got it all figured out.”
Our expectations shape our perceptions; we see what we are looking for. Most people who suffer from schizophrenia are not aware that the symptoms have started. Changes in perception are difficult to know without feedback from other people. If Rey believed he had made enemies who were watching him, then Allison, knowing her husband to be rational and suspicious about Agora—remember that Stansberry, at this time, was being actively investigated by the SEC—naturally attributed his fears to external factors. Perhaps Rey and Allison, isolated from everyone they knew, unknowingly reinforced the cycles of each other’s paranoia.
Rivera did not manifest any signs of disorganized speech, but in spite of its broad generalizations, the FBI report on the “suicide note” is accurate in its description of the writing as “disorganized” and “a flight of ideas.” Although Rey did make a lot of notes and would often jot things down at random, Allison said his notes did not usually take this form or use this style. This particular note contains a series of loosely associated ideas and shifts rapidly from one topic to another with little apparent connection between one thought and the next. Typographically, the note exhibits features that are typical of the writing of schizophrenic patients (although almost all similar examples are handwritten): single spacing, narrow margins, capital letters, small font, and lists.
Since the document was found at Rey’s home, taped to his computer screen, he must have written it before he left the house, perhaps even days or weeks before. It would be intere
sting to find out when he wrote the note, how long it took him, and whether or not it was revised—all of which could easily be ascertained from a forensic analysis of his computer. If this was done, the information was not released, even to Allison. She told me that, when Rey’s body was found, homicide detectives came to their house, took everything from the home office, including the computers, and kept it for ninety days. If anything was discovered, she was never told.
The onset of paranoid schizophrenia can be scarily insidious; barely perceptible symptoms can occur so gradually that nobody, including the person experiencing them, knows anything is wrong. It may begin with something ordinary and apparently innocuous—the person may have trouble sleeping, for example, or find himself noticing things they never paid attention to before. They may start making connections between things that seemed previously unrelated—associations they might then forget or ignore for weeks or months, until they come to attention again. If this is what was happening to Rey, he may not have mentioned it; he may not even have realized there was anything unusual going on until a few days before his death, when he became noticeably paranoid. Perhaps his anxiety increased after Allison left town, leading him to experience a psychotic break.
For many people, schizophrenia comes on gradually and then suddenly. After the slow increase in symptoms, there is a sudden psychotic episode, and delusions can no longer be distinguished from reality. Those who have experienced such a break may believe there are people watching them; they may see things out of the corners of their eyes. Many people describe feeling an intense hostile pressure, as if the brain were seized by a sense of panic. Every encounter provokes the fight-or-flight response, as if everyone they met was carrying a concealed weapon and planning a secret attack.
There is an association between the first episode of psychosis and suicide by jumping. One study showed that nearly half the survivors of a suicide attempt by jumping were found to be suffering from a psychotic illness (no doubt the figure is even higher for those who did not survive). If Rivera was experiencing a psychotic break, it is difficult to know what might have been in his mind when he made his way up to the Belvedere. Perhaps he believed he was being chased and this was the only way out; maybe he thought he could escape his pursuers by leaping to the top of the parking garage opposite the Belvedere, or by landing in what he believed was a swimming pool. If so, his running jump would have indicated not a desire to take his own life, but the result of a terrifying delusion.
This is what Rey’s colleague Steven King has always believed. He thinks Rey’s death was caused not by suicide, but by a “mental break” as a result of which Rivera did not know what he was doing. King told me that he had a friend who, as he put it, “went off the rails” after a traumatic incident. She had to be hospitalized because she thought people were coming after her. “I know that kind of thing can happen,” he told me, “and I’ve always assumed it’s what happened to Rey.” After all my investigations, I have come to believe he is right.
* * *
It is not easy to accept that someone you loved might have taken their own life, especially when there are real motives for murder. The forensic physicist Rod Cross describes being contacted by the family of Father James Chevedden, a fifty-six-year-old Jesuit priest who plunged to his death from a six-story parking garage in San Jose in 2004. Chevedden had conducted a mass that morning at the Sacred Heart chapel in Los Gatos; he had spent the day on jury duty and appeared perfectly normal. Shortly after the jurors were dismissed, people in the building opposite a parking garage saw something fall from the roof. The priest’s dead body was found lying faceup on the ground. His death was determined to be a suicide; his family did not agree with the verdict, and asked Professor Cross to conduct an independent investigation.
Father Chevedden had begun experiencing psychiatric problems eleven years before his death, when he was hospitalized for anxiety and paranoia. He recovered with the help of medication, but became increasingly disillusioned with the Catholic Church. In 1998, at age fifty, he attempted suicide by jumping from a window-washing scaffold. He survived with many injuries including two broken feet, and was confined for a time to a wheelchair at Sacred Heart. To Chevedden’s great misfortune, the priest who was assigned to push him from place to place in his wheelchair had a history of sexual abuse; he took advantage of Chevedden’s immobility. Chevedden complained to the Jesuit fathers, who eventually paid his family $1.6 million in compensation but did not report the offenses to the police, nor did they remove the offender from Sacred Heart.
Chevedden’s family found it highly suspicious that the priest appeared to have landed on his back, and that there were no injuries to his head. They believe he was killed, and then dumped from the parking garage to make his death look like a suicide. To investigate further, Cross, who lives in Australia, sent a private investigator to San Jose to take photographs of the scene. From the photographs, Cross deduced that Chevedden neither fell nor jumped, but appeared to have lain down in a horizontal position and rolled off the roof. In the images taken by the private investigator, Chevedden’s foot and handprints were still visible, and Cross discerned that the priest had climbed out to a ledge on the top floor of the parking garage, lain down, and rolled over the edge, which had a downward curve. While at first this may seem an odd way to commit suicide, on further reflection it sounds like a practical alternative for those unable to face the plunge.
The launch speed was slow, and the victim landed ten feet out after falling fifty-seven feet. Unfortunately, Chevedden’s family was clearly hoping for a different result. “[They] refused to pay both my bill and the bill of the private investigator who travelled to San Jose to take the photographs,” Professor Cross reveals. In 2007, three years after Chevedden’s death, his family offered a new reward for information related to the case.
All the experts I spoke to about Rey Rivera’s death—Rod Press, Charles Tumosa, staff at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner—emphasized that they were trained to discover the facts, not the motives. “I always explain, when I’m teaching trace evidence,” said Dr. Tumosa, “I can tell you who, what, when, where, and how, but never why. You can reconstruct what happened. You can say that Mr. A. shot Mr. B. Now, he might have had a very good reason for doing it, but I don’t have a chemical that turns blue if he had a reasonable motive, and green if it was unreasonable.”
“Do you like thinking about those kinds of things: motives, why people kill each other?” I asked him.
“I went to a Jesuit school,” he said. “We thought about those things a lot. But as a practical concern, I’ve worked thousands of homicides, and I’ve learned that people will do inexplicable things. All we can show is what they did. Often there is no ‘why.’ We look to make sense out of them, but often they make no sense. None whatsover.”
Even the psychologists I know do not seem particularly interested in why people act the way they do; they seem interested only in which aspects of behavior can be regarded as symptoms that fit a particular diagnostic category. I suppose this makes sense; professionals want to get paid; they want to produce the facts then file away the case and move on to the next.
You can be an expert in ballistics or forensic psychology, but there are no experts in motiveless suicide, or impossible murder. In the overburdened police station or forensics lab there is nothing to be gained from asking why. It is only the amateur like me, with no one to answer to, who has time to be compelled by ambiguity.
XVI
I AM WALKING the dog one morning in November 2016 when I notice another “Missing” poster—the first I have seen in ten years. This poster, too, has appeared overnight on the utility poles of Charles and Chase Streets. Underneath the words “Missing Person,” there are two color photographs of a young man. His name is Michael Bagley; he is twenty-three years old. The photographs are both in color. The one on the left is a close-up of a man dressed in a gray shirt and black overcoat. He’s smiling for the camera in a manner that i
s jaunty and nonchalant. On the right is a long shot of the same young man with shorter hair, wearing a black-and-white-patterned short-sleeved shirt and cargo shorts. Originally, his right arm was around the shoulders of someone in a green T-shirt who has been cropped from the image. In this picture he looks younger, his smile more relaxed and sincere. Underneath the photographs are the words, “Last seen Sunday November 20 at 1230AM in Fells Point. Michael is diabetic and without his medication.” When I first see the posters, Michael Bagley has been missing for six days.
Later, a few blocks away, I see a different poster containing another close-up photograph and some more information. “Michael Bagley graduated from Loyola University in May with a double major in biology and psychology. He is interested in Animal Rights and Civil Rights. He was last seen in the 1700 block of Thames Street leaving the Waterfront Hotel bar with an unknown woman around 1 a.m.”
Five days later, Michael Bagley’s body is found floating in the harbor. An autopsy is to be conducted, but there are no obvious signs of foul play. Did his glucose level drop too fast, leaving him dizzy and disoriented? The mystery woman in the hotel bar sounds sinister—but it turns out she was just a girl Michael was talking to for a while. He left the bar alone, after his friends had gone home. If he was very drunk and walking in the dark, he could easily have fallen into the water. There are no pedestrian barriers on the wharf. Of all the bodies found floating in the harbor every year, at least two or three are people who have fallen in when drunk. (The rest are either suicides, homicides, or bodies that have floated from elsewhere and have been in the water so long it is impossible to tell.)
An Unexplained Death Page 23