In the early 2010s, two people fell down a trash chute in a Baltimore apartment building and died. Police say both incidents were “accidents.” In the latest installment of Land of the Unsolved, investigative reporters Stephen Janis and Taya Graham explore the evidence in both cases, raising unanswered questions about the odd circumstances of both cases and clues police might have missed.
Pre-production/Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Stephen Janis:
Anyone 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 the most violent cities in the country for nearly 15 years, I can tell you this is not true.
Taya Graham:
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 remain shrouded in mystery.
Stephen Janis:
I’m Stephen Janis.
Taya Graham:
I’m Taya Graham.
Stephen Janis:
And we are investigative reporters who live in Baltimore City.
Taya Graham:
Welcome to The Land of the Unsolved.
Hello, my name is Taya Graham, 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.
In 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.
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 and 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.
Stephen Janis:
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 then he said a name that just hit me like a lightning bolt, Emily House.
And he started 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 it just kind of hit me like, wow.
Steve Tabling:
My name is Steve Tabling. I’m a retired Lieutenant, Baltimore City Police Department, former Chief of Police in Salisbury, Maryland. Well, I was working for a private company and we got the job to reinvestigate it. I did the best I could with the case. The police department, the officers that investigated, they wouldn’t talk to me.
Taya Graham:
The case Tabling was recounting to Stephen was the mysterious death of a young woman named Emily House. Her body was found at 8:00 AM on October 16th, 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. 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.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, I gotten a tip from a homicide detective who was on the scene, and I remember thinking, “This is really weird.” Why would a woman be in a dumpster, like a young woman who had 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 and the bowels of a building without explanation?
And what made it even weirder is that 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.
Taya Graham:
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 raise questions about one of the most mysterious cases he and I have ever seen. All that coming up on The Land of the Unsolved.
Hey, this is Taya Graham from The Land of the Unsolved. If you enjoy our podcast 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 fictive take on how Baltimore’s 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 16th, 2011. So Stephen, when did you first get an inkling of how strange this case really was?
Stephen Janis:
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 chute.
Taya Graham:
So can you tell me a little bit about the chute?
Stephen Janis:
Well, first I have to describe the building itself. It’s an apartment complex called the Park Charles. And it’s sort of on the edge of Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood. A somewhat hip community that includes a lot of med students. People who work at Hopkins and employees of a university here called University of Baltimore. But the building is tall. It’s roughly 25 stories.
So buildings at that 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 a chute. And the chute leads to the dumpster, which is of course at the bottom of the chute that goes through the entire building.
Taya Graham:
So this trash chute, it opens up at a 45 degree angle. The chute itself is only two feet wide. It doesn’t have any twist or turns in it, and it drops directly into the dumpster below. Is that correct?
Stephen Janis:
That’s absolutely right. And just to describe it, it’s very small. 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 a piece of trash in and then make sure that it gets down to the basement.
Taya Graham:
And this is what bothered Stephen. Why would a young woman crawl 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.
Stephen Janis:
Sometimes when you have, Taya, a mysterious death, there’s family or someone to advocate or 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.
Taya Graham:
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. And probably this had happened before.
Stephen Janis:
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 another resident, a year before Emily died, fell down that trash chute and was found dead in the same exact dumpster?”
Taya Graham:
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.
Stephen Janis:
And 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 wanted 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.
Taya Graham:
That man was named Harsh Kamar, a 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.
Stephen Janis:
When I was working on this 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 chute, it’s so small and tight and compact. And then to think that two people had done this within a year, I couldn’t wrap my mind around this idea. It just seemed to me to be impossible.
Taya Graham:
I also lived in an apartment building in Lower Charles Village, and these trash chutes 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.
So Stephen 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.
Stephen Janis:
A critical backdrop in these cases is often The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. If the medical examiner rules it 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. And then of course, there’s the most difficult category called undetermined, which puts everything in limbo.
Taya Graham:
And Stephen, we both had a run-in with that office. I remember when we were working on the Truth and Reconciliation podcast 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.
Stephen Janis:
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 ruled a homicide, they have no choice to investigate it. But if it’s ruled something else, there’s not much that’s going to be done. There’s tons of murders in Baltimore, so they’ll move on.
Taya Graham:
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.
Stephen Janis:
Well, it was the standard analysis of injuries saying that she fell from a height. And that’s obvious because she definitely fell from that trash chute. But what it didn’t talk about was how she got there or 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. It talked about some of her scratches on her hands. And the injuries were all related to a fall, but it didn’t ask how did she actually get through that thing. And kind of what you brought up, what kind of injuries would you sustain if you’d been pushed through a trash kind of thing. And she also went through a compactor. So it was a very, very, I think, cursory examination of the case.
Taya Graham:
Stephen, I have to ask, you noticed that there could have been a deeper analysis. Was there any sort of toxicology report done?
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, there was toxicology and she had alcohol in her system. But they only tested for things like alcohol and cocaine and some narcotics. But all she had was alcohol. So she was at the time, perhaps intoxicated, although you can’t always tell when the body is found and when things decay. But yes, she had alcohol, so that’s all, nothing else.
Taya Graham:
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 the 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.
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