Lonely way to die

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This article was published 05/05/2018 (2987 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For a death in which police do not suspect foul play, this case unleashed a storm of media attention.

It generated headlines around the world for one simple reason — the body was discovered trapped inside the wall of a women’s washroom in a busy downtown Calgary mall.

According to dozens of breathless news reports, the gruesome discovery was made about 9:30 a.m. Monday when a maintenance worker was called in to fix a toilet that wouldn’t flush on the fourth floor of the Core Shopping Centre.

When the worker removed a panel attached to a wall behind the toilet, he discovered a man’s body. The downtown mall has offered the employee counselling services and time off “to deal with whatever he may be going through.”

Calgary police said in a statement the cause of death has not been determined, but foul play is not suspected. It is believed the man had been crawling through a duct or a vent before falling and getting stuck behind the toilet.

While extremely unusual, it’s not the first time something tragically creepy like this has happened, as we see from today’s grisly list of Five Bodies Famously Found in Strange Locations:

5) The strange location: Frozen in a cryotherapy tank

The bizarre story: On an October night in 2015, Chelsea Patricia Ake-Salvacion was working a closing shift at the Rejuvenice spa in Henderson, Nev., a suburb of Las Vegas. About 7:30 p.m. that night, the 24-year-old spa manager sent a text message to her boyfriend, telling him that her body was aching and she was going to hop in one of the spa’s cryotherapy chambers in hopes the -110 C temperatures would help her recover.

“That was the last she texted him,” her uncle, Albert Ake, 48, told the New York Times. She was found by co-workers the following morning, frozen to death inside one of the tanks. The coroner’s office told her uncle that she had died just minutes after getting into the chamber.

Said her uncle: “Something went wrong. What she told me is that there is nothing dangerous about doing this. That the only thing that could happen is you’re there a little too long and you get frost nip on your fingers.”

The strange death raised troubling questions about cryotherapy, a controversial but popular treatment that exposes the body to nitrogen gas at sub-zero temperatures. It gained traction in Europe in the 1990s as an alternative pain treatment in health spas, and spread to North America around 2011 thanks to use by high-performance athletes and pro sports teams.

Advocates say the freezing cold assists muscle regeneration and improves skin tone. They claim three minutes in a cryochamber is all that’s needed to enjoy the same benefits as a long, uncomfortable stint in an ice bath.

But it has also sparked skepticism and warnings from health experts who question its effectiveness and safety. In Ake-Salvacion’s case, the coroner determined she died accidentally from the asphyxia caused by low oxygen level and her death was due to an “operator error.” Practitioners say no one should be in a chamber alone.

“She must have been really sore,” office manager Hailey Cap told the Times. “I don’t know why she would go in there alone. We don’t do that.”

 

4) The strange location: Under a sofa for 10 years

The bizarre story: Alan Derrick, a resident of the southwestern British city of Bristol, lived in his apartment for 10 years with an unusual companion — a dead body under his sofa.

According to news reports at the time, Derrick had invited drinking partner Dennis Pring, 73, to crash on his couch because the homeless man had nowhere else to go. What Derrick, who reportedly has learning difficulties, didn’t expect was that his friend would unexpectedly drop dead on the sofa.

An inquest heard that Derrick didn’t want to tell authorities about his friend’s death because he was worried he would be evicted, so he apparently turned the sofa over and eventually forgot about the corpse.

Here’s what neighbour Reggie Asking, 76, told the Daily Mail newspaper in 2008: “The pair had met in the local pub. They were around the same age and would have a good laugh. I know that the guy (Pring) was struggling to find somewhere to live and that Alan offered him a place to sleep on his sofa. But when they came home one night, the other guy died. Alan was scared to tell anyone about it. He knew he shouldn’t have had a lodger… So, he just turned the sofa over and forgot about him. When I was talking to him after the body was found, he said, ‘I can’t believe it. I just forgot he was there.’”

It is believed that Pring died at some point between April and June 1998. During the 10 years after his death, neighbours complained to the council about foul smells from the flat but, although council officers visited twice, the body was never found.

“Mr. Pring’s skeleton was discovered in January 2008 when cleaners were brought in after Mr. Derrick was evicted from the flat following a county court order,” according to the Telegraph newspaper. “Council officers who visited the flat believed the smell came from the lavatory.”

One council official told the inquest she had walked past the overturned sofa without noticing the body underneath. No charges were laid against Derrick, though procedures for caring for vulnerable people were improved.

 

3) The strange location: A hotel’s rooftop water tank

The bizarre story: When guests at the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles complained about low pressure and a strange taste in their water, they had no idea about the source of the problem. It took more than two weeks for maintenance workers to investigate, and, on Feb. 19, 2013, they made a chilling discovery — one of the four rooftop water cisterns had been clogged by the body of Canadian tourist Elisa Lam, who had apparently drowned inside.

It is believed her body had been in the tank for as long as 19 days. Lam’s body was found floating naked, her clothes, watch and room key in the water beside her. Her cellphone was never found. The mysterious circumstances surrounding her case have become a part of pop culture, inspiring episodes of a number of TV shows, including Castle, How to Get Away With Murder and American Horror Story.

According to CBC, Lam made internet reservations to check into a shared room for three nights on Jan. 28, 2013. She was moved to a private room when her roommates complained of her “odd behaviour.”

According to the coroner’s report, Lam had a history of bipolar disorder and, while medication was found among her belongings, tests were inconclusive as to the presence of meds in her bloodstream.

The search began when her parents reported her missing after she failed to contact them on Jan. 31. Five days prior to the discovery of her body, L.A. police released a video of the last time she had been seen — on elevator security camera footage that went viral.

In the footage, Lam is seen exiting and re-entering the elevator, talking and gesturing in the hallway outside and sometimes seeming to hide within the elevator.

“If Lam had a manic episode, it’s possible she thought someone was following her, perhaps causing her to hide in the water tank for safety,” notes howstuffworks.com.

Her death was ruled an accidental drowning by the Los Angeles County coroner. But, conspiracy theorists are fuelled by the hotel’s macabre past, which includes being home to a number of well-known serial killers, such as Richard (Night Stalker) Ramirez, over the years.

 

2) The strange location: Inside a rolled-up gym mat

The bizarre story: It’s a strange case that is still reverberating in the southern United States. In January 2013, the body of 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson was discovered inside a rolled-up wrestling mat in the gymnasium of Lowndes High School in Valdosta, Ga.

His body was reportedly found by students who had climbed up to the top of a cluster of mats, each of which stood nearly six-feet tall and three-feet wide.

State and local investigators concluded Kendrick died from “positional asphyxia” (he suffocated) after getting stuck inside the rolled-up mat while trying to retrieve a pair of sneakers and was unable to get out.

“We never had credible information that indicated this was anything other than an accident,” Lt. Stryde Jones, who led the investigation for the county sheriff’s office, said at the time.

But the boy’s parents, Kenneth and Jackie Johnson, refused to buy the official line, maintaining their son’s death was not a freak accident, alleging he was the victim of a vast conspiracy. The parents filed a US$100-million lawsuit against dozens of local and state officials and named two former schoolmates, and their FBI special agent father, as defendants in a wrongful death claim.

That lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in 2017. This March, a judge dismissed an appeal from Johnson’s parents of a ruling, ordering them to pay nearly US$300,000 in attorney fees to those they accused of killing their son and the parties they alleged covered it up. In a ruling ordering the payment of attorneys’ fees, the judge accused the Johnsons and their attorney of fabricating evidence to support their claims.

“Their testimony shows they had no evidence… that the (classmates) killed Johnson or that any of the other defendants engaged in a conspiracy to conceal the cause of manner of Johnson’s death,” the judge wrote.

In a Facebook post in March, Jackie Johnson wrote: “I don’t care where I go nor what I do I cannot stop thinking about my baby … IT’S NOT OK ALL OUR KIDS ARE DEAD WITH NO JUSTICE.”

 

1) The strange location: The sets of CSI: New York and CSI: Miami

The bizarre story: Talk about life imitating art. Or maybe we should say death imitating art. Whatever, producers of the hit TV crime shows CSI: New York and CSI: Miami — which highlighted the sleuthing skills of forensic scientists and police crime scene investigators — no doubt strived for realism, but probably never expected their sets to become crime scenes in real life.

But that’s what happened in 2006, when unscripted real dead bodies popped up during a single eventful week of filming on the wildly popular shows, now available in re-runs.

In the first incident, in September 2006, a mummified corpse turned up in a building that was being used as a set for an episode of CSI: New York. It seems a building engineer discovered what turned out to be the mummified remains of a long-dead tenant “and not the body of a forgotten production assistant who never returned from a curiously prolonged Starbucks run,” according to gawker.com.

The show was being shot in downtown Los Angeles, which was subbing for the streets of New York. According to People magazine, a source said “the remains were found on the fifth floor of the building — only two floors below the actors and film crew… Making matters weirder is that the show has already shot an episode revolving around the discovery of a mummified body.”

Just a week later, things got scarily realistic on the set of CSI: Miami, which starred David Caruso, when a dead body floated up just a few yards from the set’s location in Bicentennial Park in Miami, which film crews were using as a helicopter staging ground for aerial shots of a fictional offshore investigation.

“A homeless man spotted the body and alerted an off-duty police officer who was working security on the set,” CBS News reported. “The body had no signs of injury, and the death was not considered suspicious, according to authorities.”

And, no, the bodies were NOT used as props.

 

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca