Mikita Brottman - An Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere

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In order to maintain privacy, I have changed the names and identifying characteristics of certain people. Conversations have been reconstructed to the best of my recollection, some from notes and recorded interviews, and others from court transcripts and legal documents.

Then I turned like a man, intent

on making out what he must run from

undone by sudden fear,

who does not slow his flight

for all his looking back:

just so I caught a glimpse of some dark devil

running toward us up the ledge.

Dante, Inferno, XXI, 2531

MY BULLDOG IS only ten months old. He still needs to go out early in the morning, while it is dark. I get out of bed, put on my sandals, pick him up, and, in my nightdress, quietly leave my apartment and press the button for the elevator. In the lobby, we slip silently past the concierge, asleep in his chair behind the desk, and out into the morning. Although the sun has not yet risen, the air is already warm.

* * *

I see strange things at this hour. Once I saw five rats walking toward me, one in front of the other, right in the middle of the street.

* * *

The poster is new. I notice it right away, taped to a utility pole. Beneath the word Missing, printed in a bold, high-impact font, are two sepia-toned photographs of a man dressed in a bow tie and tux. One shows a close-up of his face; the other is shot from medium distance, showing his head and shoulders. He looks like an old-fashioned movie idol. Under the images are the details. Name: Rey O. Rivera. Age: 32. Description: 65, brown hair, brown eyes, 260 lbs. Last Seen: Tuesday, May 16, six p.m. Leaving home (Northwood neighborhood) to run errands in his wifes car. Wearing pullover jacket, shorts, and flip-flops. Carrying $20 in cash, no bank cards. Theres the name of a detective in the missing persons division, a phone number to call, and a $1,000 reward for information leading to Rey Riveras safe return.

The poster intrigues me. Rey Rivera parts his hair on the left. He has a slightly bashful smile. In the medium close-up photo, you can just see the trace of a flower in his buttonhole. Not a rose or a carnation; something less traditionala sprig of jasmine, perhaps. Hes so tall and handsome I find it difficult to believe hes gone missing. But then I realize Ive rarely seen a Missing poster for an unappealing or angry-looking person. People on Missing posters generally look happy and beautiful because whoever makes the posters chooses the best pictures they can find. Often, theyre professional portraits taken at a prom, graduation, or wedding. To grab your attention, missing people have to possess a certain allure. They have to mesmerize you.

* * *

A student, Rachel, went missing when I was at college. I didnt even know she had gone until I noticed the posters. The last person to see her was her boyfriend, John. He told the police that after visiting Rachel, he went to the train station, and Rachel went with him. Waiting for his train, they ran into someone Rachel knewa friendly, long-haired young man who offered her a ride home.

It didnt escape notice that John had long hair himself.

* * *

The next time I saw my tutor, I asked whether there had been any news about Rachel. It seemed the polite thing to do, the way you might ask about someones sick mother. I was expecting a friendly platitude. Fingers crossed! But my tutors answer made me catch my breath.

They wont find her alive, she said.

My tutor was the kindest person Ive ever known. When I missed my tutorial because I had strep throat, she came to my dormitory, sat down on the bed beside me, and placed her hand on my hot brow.

The police gave us all the facts about missing people, she explained. They said its extremely rare that responsible people disappear the way Rachel did, without even taking their purse. But when they do, if theyre not found the same day, they have almost no chance of being found alive. The police said now its just a matter of finding her body. Theyre about to trawl the river.

She was right. Rachels body was found eighteen days after she first went missing. John, it appeared, had strangled her in a fit of jealous passion. Hed spent hours looking around her house for a place to hide the body. Eventually, hed found an eight-inch gap at the back of a closet under the stairs crammed with household junk. After emptying the cupboard of its contents, hed pushed Rachels body through the gap into the recess and under the floor. Hed then stretched out on his belly, pushed the dead body in front of him, and pulled himself along through the cavity until he was all the way under the floorboards of Rachels bedroom. After eighteen days in this small, hot space, Rachels body had partially mummified.

* * *

Full urban mummification is not as common as you might think. It requires a particular set of circumstances. Not only does the environment have to be either extremely hot or extremely cold, with low humidity and good ventilation, but also these conditions have to remain stable during the several years it takes for mummification to occur. Urban mummies are formed only when a person dies in a home with the right kind of atmospheric conditions, and only if the death goes undetected for a long time. In one recent case, the mummified bodies of a sixty-three-year-old German woman, her neurologically impaired thirty-four-year-old son, and their German shepherd dog were found preserved in their home in Florida. The cause of death was determined to be an overdose of benzodiazepines. The mother had administered the drugs, dissolved in liquid, first to her son and then to their dog, laying the pair out to die on twin beds beside each other. She left a handwritten note in German, which translated as Gods perfection now finds expression through my body. The trios mummified cadavers were found four years later. Mother was lying on the kitchen floor, clad in a dressing gown surrounded by insect larva cases, her eyeglasses adjacent to her head, a full brown wig resting gently on her bare skull.

* * *

The posters of Rey Rivera multiply. The reward has now been increased to $5,000. Walking down Charles Street in the morning, I point one out to D., who recalls how, as a young boy, he used to hear about men who went out to buy a packet of cigarettes and never came back. They usually turned out to be supporting another family in another town, he tells me. Either that, or they had just walked away from their wife and kids and gone to start life over again in another state. D. says you never hear about men doing that anymore.

I wonder: Why was it always a packet of cigarettes? What if they didnt smoke?

* * *

As soon as you go missing, according to the FBIs National Crime Information Center, the chances of your survival start to diminish rapidly. Still, there are miraculous exceptions. A small percentage of people who have been missing for years manage to reach out from whatever dark world they now inhabit and leave signs for friends and family to decipher: a garbled, untraceable phone call, a scrawled message on a dollar bill, a note scratched in red nail polish in the restroom of a public eatery. Kidnap victims have been recovered as long as eighteen years after their abduction. Often, theyve been both here and not here all along, living among us in a locked basement, a converted bomb shelter, a box under someones bed.