ISDP: In the Bag

According to the fly-specked calendar from that Chinese take-out place in San Jose that hangs in the attic, it is once again the thirteenth of the month. We can feel it in our bones. It’s dead quiet up here in the north belfry. The hundreds of gas-powered generators that roared post-Sandy have gone silent. The Jamaican guy selling $10 bootleg gas has left town. A cold breeze pours through a hole in the window—the same hole that gives us a clean shot at the neighbor’s unsecured WiFi signal. Life is good.

Aficionados understand that Winter Is Coming and the pickings grow slim. Nevertheless, we have scraped together enough in the way of morbid olfactory reporting to deliver our loyal fans yet another edition of I Smell Dead People.

We begin with a headline from Houston, Texas, that is the epitome of newsroom directness: “Deputies find corpse in bag.” [The New York Times would have gone with “To law enforcement, finality lies within the mundane.”]

A foul odor led deputies to find the body of a person inside a bag in north Harris County. Deputies arrived Tuesday morning to Walters Road near Old Walters Road in response to a report around 10 a.m. of a bag with a foul stench. A deputy with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the body was of a human.

Is it just us, or are malodorous remains being found more and more often in cars?

St. Louis police identify man found dead in Cadillac trunk Police are investigating the gruesome discovery of a man's body inside the trunk of a Cadillac in the 9000 block of Edna Street. Police said they received a call at 8:30 p.m. Saturday about a foul odor coming from the vehicle. When they opened the trunk, they found the decomposing body of Deadrick Sawyer Jr., 27, of the 6900 block of Raymond Avenue.

And from Hayward, California:

The body of a decomposed man was found in an abandoned building in Hayward on Tuesday morning, a police lieutenant said. A construction worker detected a foul odor and followed the scent into the building that was formerly Perry & Key Body & Paint Shop at 28953 Mission Blvd. at about 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, Lt. Roger Keener said.

A week later, the body was identified but police had little else to go on:

Leads are scarce in the investigation into the death of a young man whose decomposed body was found in an abandoned building in Hayward last week, police said Monday. 

The body of 19-year-old Luis Calleros was found at about 9:30 a.m. Tuesday . . . Calleros, who had been reported missing by his father on Oct. 23, was identified on Friday through dental records.

Finally, an update to an item from the September edition:

SAN ANTONIO — A newly released autopsy report shows a construction worker who was found dead inside a smokestack at the Pearl Brewery was neither drunk nor under the influence of drugs when he died.

Well, that takes care of the easy theories. Wonder what really happened?