In two separate incidents in separate years, Emily Hauze and Harsh Kumar were found dead at the bottom of a trash chute in the Park Charles apartments in Baltimore. Police ruled both incidents to be accidents, but could this truly just be a coincidence? Land of the Unsolved returns to the case, now with crucial evidence previously withheld from the public by police.
Production: Stephen Janis
Audio engineering: David Hebden
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. Welcome back to the Land of the Unsolved, the podcast where we explore both the evidence and the politics of unsolved murders in the City of Baltimore and beyond. Before the break, we told you about the mysterious death of a young woman in 2011. Her name was Emily Hauze, and she was a recent graduate of Loyola University who left a party with a young man and was found dead the next morning in a dumpster. Now, before we move forward, Stephen, can you tell me a little bit about the victim in this case, Emily?
Stephen Janis:
Well, a lot of her friends talked to police after her body was found, and what we gleaned from that was that she was a energetic, bright young woman with a bright future who had gone to a local university, Loyola, studied education and was waiting to get placement as a teacher either in Baltimore or somewhere else. She was a world traveler, someone who had traveled during her studies and done a lot of exciting things, and a very vivacious person and someone that was deeply loved by her friends. So it was very sad to read some of the statements they made about her because you could tell this was a woman who was going someplace and had a passion for teaching and things like that, and so just tragic.
Taya Graham:
So what made her death even more troubling is how she got there. That’s because the dumpster was at the bottom of a trash chute, a chute that was connected to every single floor of the 25-story building, a fact that raised an even more mysterious question: where was she before she went down the chute? Who was with her before she died? And what, if anything, could the trash chute tell us about how she died? And then even more complicated, did she fall down the chute at all? These are questions that my reporting partner Stephen Janis had tried to answer, but was thwarted when the medical examiner made a crucial ruling.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. I mean, the medical examiner did what they always do, and we see it in cases. They wrote it up as an accident without doing, I think, an adequate investigation. And so that pretty much put the case on a back burner because no police, homicide detective who handle understandably a large amount of cases is going to work on something that isn’t ruled a homicide, because it’d just be a very difficult case to bring to court if nothing else.
Taya Graham:
But there was also very little public information released by the police. Where was she before she was found? Who was she with? What had she been doing just before she vanished? And was she spotted in the apartment building? With little to go on, Stephen stopped writing about the case even though he wanted to continue. And there was one other fact about the case that bothered him as well, something that really made him wonder if the police were truly being above board.
Stephen Janis:
As I said before, pretty early on in the case it came out that there was another death in the building of a person who fell down a trash chute, which always made me think I had to keep working on this case.
Taya Graham:
That’s right. A year before, a man named Harsh Kumar had also fallen down the trash chute and died. His case was ruled a suicide. Police never gave a reason that the 30-year-old Hopkins technology specialist died other than that he had been drinking and had taken a strong anti-insomnia sedative just prior to his death. And for Stephen, it was just too much of a coincidence to ignore.
Stephen Janis:
And I think that’s why the case always stuck in my mind, because sometimes things in Baltimore happen and you just can’t rationalize them, but you also can’t solve them. So they just stick around in your head like, “Someday, I’ll get to this. Someday, I’ll try to tell this story.” But once there were two deaths, it was just too weird to let go of.
Taya Graham:
Still, even with the new information, the police weren’t talking. And so the case became another dead end in a city that has many, a frustrating tale untold that Stephen couldn’t write about, but also could not forget, an impasse that would change with a single phone call. And what was said, and why, changed everything.
Steve Tabeling:
My name is Steve Tabeling. I’m a retired lieutenant Baltimore City Police Department, former chief of police in Salisbury, Maryland. And after retirement, called back to the police academy to teach for about seven years.
Stephen Janis:
So Steve is a great investigator, as I said before, and he often shares information. But when he started talking about a young woman found in a dumpster, I was like, “Wait. Hold on a second. I need to hear about this.”
Taya Graham:
It turned out that Tabeling was not only familiar with the case, but had actually been involved. That’s because he’d been hired to look into the case by a relative of Emily’s.
Steve Tabeling:
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. I saw some discrepancies in the case, but without getting any additional information, I wasn’t able to prove anything.
Taya Graham:
Tabeling told Stephen not just about what he learned working the case, but his concerns over how it was handled.
Steve Tabeling:
Part of the theory is that she wanted to go to the bathroom and she left the apartment. And when she came back, she couldn’t find the apartment. Finally, she opened the door and she saw… This sounds silly. And she saw what she thought was a dog entrance to the building, and she opened the door and jumped in. Now, that’s impossible because I checked that and you can’t hold that open. You could’ve never done it yourself.
Stephen Janis:
I mean, Steve is a really thorough investigator. And if he has a litany of concerns about the case and questions about the case that he couldn’t answer, to me it was like a sign that I needed to look into the case or that we needed to cover it.
Taya Graham:
He even spoke to the medical examiner, a conversation that left him with doubts.
Steve Tabeling:
I talked to the medical examiner and asked the medical examiner. She called it an accidental death, and I could never get this medical examiner to explain to me how it’d be accidental. And she said she interviewed all the police and all, and she felt confident that she did this herself.
Taya Graham:
So the fact that Tabeling had actually looked into the case and had serious questions about how it had been investigated only made Stephen more adamant that he wanted to report on the case. But the most troubling aspect of what Tabeling said was their theory of how Emily ended up where she did, an explanation that both found difficult to believe.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, I mean that just sounded absurd to me that a young woman would leave an apartment and walk around naked in a hall and then climb through a hole like she was going through what he described as a little door that you would have for a pet. I really couldn’t wrap my mind around it. It didn’t make any sense to me.
Taya Graham:
But even with Tabeling’s impression that the investigation was flawed and the fact that the veteran homicide detective had doubts about how investigators had interpreted the evidence, there was little new information to go on. That was until Tabeling revealed something else, something he had in his possession which would open up a whole new chapter in the story. All that coming up next 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 Tabeling. Or if you’re in the mood for a 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, the podcast that explores both the evidence and the politics of unsolved murder. Today, we are recounting the mysterious death of Emily Hauze, a 23-year-old Loyola University graduate who was found dead in a trash dumpster of the Park Charles apartment in 2011. Police said little about the events leading up to her death. The Maryland medical examiner ruled it an accident. So with very little to go on, Stephen had stopped covering the case. But then a phone call from former Baltimore homicide Detective Stephen Tabeling changed everything. He told Stephen he was actually investigating the case. But there was more to it because as a part of Tabelings investigation, he had come into possession of the actual criminal case file, two binders full of documents that recounted every element of the investigation and, for the first time, a depiction of the events leading up to her death.
But he didn’t just read it for himself. He also asked a friend, legendary investigative reporter Jayne Miller, to review the case as well. Jayne, thank you so much for joining us.
Jayne Miller:
Happy to be here.
Taya Graham:
And now, for the first time here, is the story of Emily’s last hours on Earth, taken from witness statements from the case file itself. The night of October 15th, 2011 was like any other for Emily and her friends from college. Emily had attended and graduated from Loyola just a year earlier and was waiting on a job in her chosen path of education.
Jayne Miller:
So we’re talking about October 15th, 2011, which was a Saturday. So a Saturday night. Like many, many, many young people, all people, Emily was out partying with friends not in the part of town where the apartment building is, but in another part of town. And in the course of this socializing, et cetera, and the partying, she met this particular individual who was a medical student who happened to live in the Park Charles apartment. So after drinking and having a good time, she ends up going back to his apartment, which is in the Park Charles. And so that’s what puts her in the building sometime late at night on the 15th or early on the morning of the 16th.
Stephen Janis:
And one thing that’s interesting to note about what was said by her friends later on, or after the case began with police, was that this was a new acquaintance for her. This was not someone she had known before. This was someone she met at the party and was introduced to for the first time. So this was not someone she knew. It was a person that she had met the party. And that’s where this all begins.
Taya Graham:
So after an evening of socializing, Emily left the party with a man her friends later told police she had just met. The pair left, but Emily had not told her friends where she was headed. The next morning, friends could not get in touch with Emily. And that’s when the frantic phone calls began.
Stephen Janis:
Now, we know from the police reports, from what this young man eventually told police, that her friends had been calling her cell phone and it had not been answered, which started a panic with them because they didn’t know where she was headed that night. So they didn’t really know where she was, and so that’s why they kept calling.
Jayne Miller:
That’s also not unusual for friends to keep track of one another, check up on one another, especially if initially they don’t know exactly where she went.
Taya Graham:
And so that was the very first indication that something was terribly wrong, because the young man on the other end told her friend that Emily had left his apartment and had not returned.
Jayne Miller:
8:13 in the morning, this is now Sunday morning, the maintenance worker in the Park Charles apartments, in the apartment building, finds a really grisly discovery in the dumpster on the ground floor of the building, and it’s the body of a young woman, no clothes on, in the dumpster. Kind of partially in the dumpster, partially out of the dumpster, but obviously suggesting that she had come down the trash chute.
Taya Graham:
Police began investigating, but were stumped. For one thing, they had no way to identify the body. And two, this task was made particularly difficult by the fact that the dumpster was connected to a trash chute. Jayne, can you describe for us how this trash chute system works?
Jayne Miller:
Well, this is a tall apartment building, first of all. It’s actually two towers, and it’s really downtown Baltimore. And so the trash chute goes all the way through the building, and each floor has access to it. But the access to the trash chute is a really critical part of the questions about this story, because this isn’t some big opening to get into the trash chute. But that’s how it works.
So all of the trash comes down through that chute from each floor. Everybody uses the trash chute and dumps the trash in it. So she’s down there, I mean in the dumpster, and obviously people keep putting the trash down the chute.
Taya Graham:
But then a chance encounter between a police officer on the scene and a resident changed everything.
Stephen Janis:
From the notes in the case file, a patrol officer or a uniform officer on the scene talks about observing a young man in the lobby carrying a plastic bag and according to the note says, “This man was observed exiting the lobby.” I’m not exactly sure what that means.
Jayne Miller:
It turns out the encounter was with the medical student who lives in the apartment that Emily was visiting. So this is how police were able to… begins the process of how they were able to identify the body in the trash chute. The medical student in the lobby tells the officer that he’s searching for the woman who had been in his apartment. And I think we are to presume from the case notes that what was in the trash bag were her belongings. But this is critical in terms of identifying her, and quickly identifying her I might add. I mean, this wasn’t a case that went days and days and days without being able to identify her. They were able to identify her that day.
Taya Graham:
The police officer in the report writes that she encountered the man after she asked what he was doing. The man explained to her that a visitor had left his home last night and had not returned. That’s when the officer discovered what was in the bag.
Stephen Janis:
So it’s my understanding from the police notes that there was belongings of a woman in this bag, as Jayne mentioned, and it soon was… Those belongings were able to determine, or police were able to link those belongings to the woman in the dumpster, is my understanding.
Jayne Miller:
In the bag that the resident medical student of the apartment was carrying was, this is according to the case notes, female clothing, a purse, cellular phone and photo ID. And he advised the officer that friends were looking for the woman that he was with. And so he was… At that point, obviously this is somebody the police wanted to talk to. So he became a person of interest just in terms of being able to get information about what may have happened here.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, I think that the fact that he had her belongings told police that he was probably the last person to see Emily alive. And that, of course, as Jayne mentioned, made it very important, I think. It made him probably the central interest in their investigation because you always want to talk to the last person to see someone alive when they end up dead.
Taya Graham:
The report about how police came to possess Emily’s belongings differed from what was written in the summary. The summary says a white male contacted police in the lobby, but the officer wrote that the male was observed exiting the lobby. However, the actual police report, to quote directly from the report, “A white male was observed exiting the lobby carrying plastics containing various articles of female friend’s whose whereabouts was unknown,” the officer wrote. Nevertheless, police took the young man in for questioning, an interview that we have obtained the transcript of. But before we get to it, the police also served a search warrant along with knocking on the door of residents both above and below the apartment where Emily had apparently entered the trash chute.
Jayne Miller:
So they executed a search warrant in the apartment which Emily was visiting, in the apartment of the medical student, and found some lidocaine in the apartment. Now, this was explained… I think we need to point out that the medical student had a roommate, and the roommate also confirms that Emily Hauze was in the apartment because he saw her. He was actually getting up. He worked in the medical field as well and was getting up early in the morning to go to work, and saw her come into the apartment and saw her for some period of time. Very short period of time.
Anyway, the lidocaine in the apartment was described as being used to… Somebody had an abscess in their ear. One of the two had an abscess in the ear, and was used for that procedure. That these are medical students, so medical people, and it was used as they were treating that particular problem.
The case notes also reflect that there were a number of used condoms in the trash in the bathroom along with some suspected blood and hair in the trash can, which certainly sets off alarms, et cetera, and that there was a scalpel with some blood in the sink. But again, there’s an explanation here that one of the two men who lived in the apartment had a problem with an ear and that there was some treatment going on, just how you treat cuts or whatever yourself, that that may well be what would explain at least that, the blood and the hair, and the scalpel, et cetera, would be used for treating some kind of a problem.
Stephen Janis:
And Taya, also police did some door knocking because they wanted to see if anyone had heard or seen anything. And they went from floors below the floor that Emily was on to the floors above Emily was on and knocked on all the doors. And those records are in there, and they probably talked to a couple dozen people. And according to the notes in the case file, police got nothing from that. No one said they’d seen anything or heard anything. Only one person mentioned, again, that this had happened before, and so that was all they gleaned from that.
But no one had actually seen Emily, no one had heard anything and no one knew anything about what had happened. Also, it should be noted, and this is important to note, that there were no security cameras in the floors going up from the residential area up to the top.
Jayne Miller:
At least in 2011.
Stephen Janis:
At least in 2011. There were no security cameras. There was security cameras in the lobby, which confirmed that Emily had entered and confirmed some of the stories about when they had entered the building, but there was nothing on the floor that she was on at that time or anything that would allow people to see how she had gotten from where she was to the trash chute. That was pretty much a preliminary part of the investigation, which is why it turned to the young man she’d been with.
Taya Graham:
Records show police tested the DNA of both young men who lived in the apartment. So Jayne, although the records show that police tested the DNA of both young men, did they actually perform any tests on Emily Hauze’s body?
Jayne Miller:
Not that is evident in the case file that we have in terms of if there was… Well, part of the story here is that she and the medical student had sex, so there’s not a whole lot additional rape kit testing or anything like that might reveal. There could be, but it’s already acknowledged that she and the medical student, they were in the apartment together and they had sex together.
Taya Graham:
But it could be of interest to look for the DNA of the roommate, perhaps, on Emily Hauze’s body.
Jayne Miller:
Or anything else that might… Exactly. But no, as far as you can tell from the case file that that kind of testing was not performed.
Taya Graham:
However, there was some key missing evidence as well.
Stephen Janis:
Well, I think it’s interesting because if you look in the case file, phone records weren’t pulled as far as I could tell. So there’s no indication of who he might’ve been calling or who might’ve been using her phone or even tracing where her phone was. So that was something that struck me as odd because I would’ve thought they would’ve pulled phone records to get a sense of what calls were made at what time and who might’ve been trying to get in touch with her or who she might’ve been trying to get in touch with. It’s a way to figure out where people are at the moment, but nothing was pulled.
Taya Graham:
But for police, all these questions would boil down to the interview that took place the day Emily’s body was found with the last person to see her alive. All that coming up on the next episode of the Land of the Unsolved.
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