Two bodies. A trash chute. Did police miss something? | Land of the Unsolved

foreign one who watches crime dramas could reasonably conclude that when someone is murdered barring bizarre and extenuating circumstances the case is solved that is through high-tech forensics moral resolve or simply the near Mythic competence of American law enforcement killers are ultimately sent to jail but as an investigative reporter who has worked in one of those violent cities in the country for nearly 15 years I can

tell you this is not true and that is the point of this podcast because unsolved killings represent more than just statistics it's a psychic toll of stories Untold that infects an entire Community the final violent moments of a victim's life that remains shrouded in mystery I'm Stephen Janis I'm Taya Graham and we are investigative reporters who live in Baltimore City Welcome to the land of the

unsolved thank you [Music] foreign [Music] and welcome to the land of the unsolved the podcast that explores both the evidence and politics of mysterious deaths in Baltimore and Beyond today we will be exploring a case that actually goes beyond the normal theme of this show a case so mysterious so disturbing and with so many unanswered questions that we felt compelled to report on it even though

the police closed it fact the entire reason we decided to investigate was because the death of the young woman in an apartment building more than 12 years ago was a story that needed to be told simply because it hadn't been to be clear we are not arguing her death was a homicide or that what happened to this young woman was anything untoward but there is something

about this case that irks us a tale of a mysterious death that must be explored in all its disturbing details despite the assertions by police that what happened is nothing more than a highly unusual and I use this term lightly accident the first thing to understand about this case is that the questions surrounding the death we are about to recount to you are almost too numerous

to answer but also those same questions say much about the city itself a community as we have discussed on the show before that often buries the truth as easily and quickly as it disposes of the dead but today at least in one case we will try to give one person the attention Baltimore has failed to provide so let's begin [Music] foreign this is a story of

a promising young woman a story about someone who disappeared a person whose potential vanished in the bowels of an apartment building while the world slept ignorant of the tragedy that was unfolding how we got involved in why this story caught our attention started with a phone call a call to Stephen from former Baltimore homicide Lieutenant Stephen tabling A detective he had written a book with called

you can't stop murder tabling wanted to talk about a case he had taken on as a private investigator a death of a young woman that troubled him so much he wanted to share the details with Stephen tabling calls me all the time with cases that he's talking about or working on or something that you know to [__] about the police department and one day in 2018

I'm sitting at home and he calls me and he starts talking usually I got to be honest I kind of tune him out but he then he said a name that just hit me like a lightning bolt Emily house thank you foreign telling me about this case he was working on and I was like holy crap I know this case I remember this case I remember

writing about this case and I was it just kind of hit me like wow [Music] my name is [__] Lieutenant Baltimore City Police Department former Chief of Police in Salisbury Maryland well I was working for a private company and they we got the job to reinvestigate it and you know I I did the best I could with the case the the police department the officers that

investigated they they wouldn't talk to me thank you the case tabling was recounting to Stephen was the mysterious death of a young woman named Emily house her body was found at 8am on October 16 2011 in the dumpster of a basement of a Mount Vernon Apartment Complex called the Park Charles but how she got there and why remained at the time a mystery [Music] the recent

Loyola University graduate had last been seen leaving a downtown bar with an unknown man the next morning police found her body and Stephen remembers covering what happened next yeah I gotten a tip from a homicide detective who was on the scene and I remember thinking this is really weird like why would a woman be in a dumpster like a young woman who had you know previously

been out that evening I guess at a bar and why would someone go to a bar and disappear and then end up in a pile of trash in the bowels of a building without explanation and what made it even weirder is it from the start police said they didn't suspect Foul Play and that just struck me as really odd because I don't see how they could

come to that conclusion so from the beginning it was a weird story of course this just wasn't any dumpster not at all and its connection to the building and how Emily house died would not just haunt Stephen but race questions about one of the most mysterious cases he and I have ever seen all that coming up on the land of the unsolved [Music] foreign [Music] from

the land of the unsolved if you enjoy our podcasts and would like us to investigate even more cases consider supporting our work by either subscribing on our anchor page or you can also buy one of the books Stephen and I wrote that are available on Amazon and a variety of other websites why do we kill the pathology of murder in Baltimore written with former homicide detective

Kelvin Sewell and you can't stop murder truths about policing in Baltimore and Beyond also in collaboration with a former detective and guest on our show Stephen tabling or if you're in the mood for Effective take on how Baltimore struggle with violence and aggressive policing has affected the psyche of the city I recommend you pick up this dream Called Death a book Stephen wrote while he was

covering the city's failed attempt to implement Zero Tolerance policing and how he reveals the truly corrosive power of that policy by casting it into an alternate reality where the mind and our dreams become the New Frontier for government surveillance welcome back to the land of the unsolved before the break Stephen was talking about one of the strangest cases he had ever encountered as a reporter the

death of a young woman who was found in a dumpster on October 16 2011. so Stephen when did you first get an inkling of how strange this case really was well I guess it had something to do with that dumpster because it wasn't just a dumpster sitting in the basement it was actually attached to a shoot so can you tell me a little bit about this

height normally have what's known as a trash chute usually located somewhere on each floor there's a closet or a door and you walk inside and there's a container which opens up and has a spring and you open the door and you put the trash in and it kind of snaps in and the trash goes down and shoot and the Chute leads to the dumpster which is

of course at the bottom of the shoot that goes through the entire building so this trash you it opens up at a 45 degree angle and the shoot itself is only two feet wide it doesn't have any twists or turns in it and it drops directly into the dumpster below is that correct that's absolutely right and you know just describe it it's very small you know

it's just supposed to fit a bag of trash it's not something to convey a human body or a person it's really just meant to put your you know a piece of trash in and then make sure that it gets down to the basement and this is what they're Steven into a trash chute what could possibly prompt anyone to do something so strange and what was she

doing before this weird turn of events what led up to Emily apparently falling to her death turns out at the time he was writing the story there weren't many answers because for one thing police weren't talking and second no one else was either you know sometimes when you have a mysterious deaths you know there's a family or someone to Advocate or you know just someone to

raise questions so that you can raise questions as a reporter but at this point no one was talking about it and police weren't releasing any information because kind of from the get-go police were just kind of tamping down on any idea that there was something Foul Play that had happened so it was really hard to get traction with the story because nobody was talking not even

the cops and Stephen might have left it there except for one fact that came up as he and other reporters were researching the story something that made him suspicious turns out this wasn't the first time someone had fallen down the trash chute in that building in probably this had happened before so someone tipped me off and said hey there was another case same building different person

and I looked it up and I was like wow how is that possible that just a year before uh another Resident a year before Emily died fell down that trash chute and was found dead in the same exact dumpster indeed a year before Emily disappeared another Resident of the Park Charles had allegedly fallen down the trash chute police had ruled that case a suicide but again

the evidence was sketchy and there was just like Emily's case there was very little info about it nothing from police that they believed it might have been anything more than a suicide but I was like that doesn't make any sense I mean how often does this happen why would someone commit suicide in that way if you want to jump wouldn't it be easier just to jump

off a building if you live on the 25th floor but two cases a year that was just hard to ignore that man was named harsh Kumar and Johns Hopkins employee who had died after the medical examiner claimed he ended up in the trash chute accidentally an explanation Stephen found hard to comprehend you know when I was working on the story I thought back to my own

experience I had lived in New York in a tall building that had a trash chute and to me it was inconceivable that someone could purposely put themselves in it even get through the shoot so small and tight and Compact and then to think that two people had done this within a year it just couldn't I couldn't wrap my mind around this idea it just seemed to

me to be impossible I also lived in an apartment building in lower Charles Village and these trash shoots are really small and I was thinking about how difficult it would be to get your body through it without help they are small the industry standard has a dimension of two feet access or 24 inches and they're roughly about 15 to 18 inches deep and that is a

really small compartment and remember they're on a hinge that forces it shut once the trash is inside so this is a very unusual thing for one person to engage with on their own foreign wrote several stories for his then website called investigative voice with little to go on and not much information from police he really couldn't dig into the story and then came a ruling on

the case which would change everything a ruling from an agency Stephen was quite familiar with [Music] oh you know a critical backdrop in these cases is often obviously the chief medical examiner if the medical examiner rules at a homicide then the case cannot be ignored but if they rule it say an accident or natural well in a city like Baltimore that has more than its fair

share of homicides it's unusual for police to move in then of course there's the most difficult category called undetermined which puts everything in limbo and Stephen we both had a run-in with that office I remember when we were working on the Truth and Reconciliation podcasts for wypr we produced a show on the death of five sex workers which also remains unsolved and we talked about your

challenges investigating that case and we discussed the large number of cases ruled undetermined by the chief medical examiner Dr David Fowler and they didn't like our report because we specifically discussed them in the context that using that category was by comparison excessive to say the least and just a note for those who don't know undetermined deaths can be best described as unclassified deaths the medical examiner

has four options to rule a so-called manner of death accident suicide natural causes and homicide but again what was unusual about our then medical examiner Dr David Fowler was that he ruled an unusually high number of cases undetermined which we both raised questions about in our podcast and definitely prompted some pushback but before we go into depth about Dr Fowler Stephen let's talk about what happened

next so yeah we're kind of waiting for the medical examiner's opinion as journalists because that's what often determines what police will do next if the case is Rule the homicide they have no choice to investigate it but if it's ruled something else you know there's not much that's going to be done there's tons of murders in Baltimore so they'll move on but in this case that's

not what happened that's because the Office of the State medical examiner ruled Emily's death in accident Stephen tell us about the medical examiner rule in this case well it was a standard analysis of injuries saying that she fell from a height and you know that's obvious because she definitely fell from that trash shoot but what it didn't talk about was how she got there any of

the mystery surrounding it so it was your standard very I think yeah sure you can say that but why didn't you go deeper and I think that's the problem you know it talked about some of her you know scratches and on her hands and you know there were no the injuries were all related to a fall but it didn't ask you know how did she actually

get through that thing and and kind of like what you brought up what kind of injuries would you sustain if you've been pushed through a trash kind of thing and she also went through a compactor so it was a very very I think you know cursory examination of the case you know Stephen I has there any sort of toxicology report done yeah there was toxicology and

and she was she had alcohol in her system um but they only tested for like things like alcohol and cocaine and some you know narcotics but all she had was alcohol so she was at the time perhaps intoxicated although you know you can't always tell when the body is found and you know when things Decay but yeah she had alcohol so that's all nothing else and

so with the police and the medical examiners insisting that Emily died as a result of an accident the case was all but closed but story wasn't over because that phone call years later changed everything all that coming up on the next episode of the land of the unsolved [Music] thank you so much for watching The Real News Network where we lift up the voices stories and

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