Unsolved Mysteries (2020) s01e01 Episode Script

So, what are your thoughts, Rey?
Uh, I'm really excited.
And I
can't wait to see Allison
come down the aisle.
We were both so happy.
My wedding in Puerto Rico
was just magical.
We got married in a town called Isabela.
And it was right on the beach.
It's one of the things that my brother got
from our parents, Puerto Rico,
and the respect and the love
that we have for Puerto Rico.
He made it a point
to honor that.
I want to welcome you here today.
This beautiful,
fairy-tale wedding was just the beginning.
-No matter what, Allison,
I'll love you forever.
Rey, take this ring,
as a sign of my love and fidelity.
That was probably
one of the happiest times, as--
as the Riveras, you know, that we--
we had as a family.
I present to you Rey and Allison Rivera.
I don't know why he disappeared.
When they said it was suicide, I was like,
he ran out of the house
like he was late for something.
Who sits there and says,
"Oh, you know what?
It's 6:30, time to jump off a big roof."
I kept saying there is something bigger,
there is something more going on.
I think he turned over some rock,
and he shouldn't have turned it over.
But I know that he didn't kill himself.
My hope is that there is somebody
that's out there that knows the truth.
Rey was 6'5, 260.
A water polo player, so,
broad shoulders, thin waist.
But also,
this beautiful smile, um,
that lit up a room.
Family was definitely
one of the key things with Rey.
Growing up, um, being Air Force brats,
uh, my dad was in the military.
When you're moving from city to city,
you become really tight,
because you're constantly making
new, temporary friends.
So the one constant is the family.
He was happy.
Always had us laughing.
Could always find the funny
in pretty much everything.
He had a hysterical,
awesome, keen sense of humor.
You know, just naturally,
you would gravitate towards him.
You know, that kind of energy.
His dream was to be a writer and director.
Film was everything for him.
And so,
we were living in Southern California.
But screenplays and all of that
was not bringing in money.
So Rey turned to a friend in Baltimore,
Porter Stansberry.
Porter was his high school buddy.
-They were both water polo players,
-and they stayed very, very good friends.
And Porter,
who was like a big finance guy,
and had a company, Stansberry Associates,
that wrote financial newsletters.
Porter had always wanted Rey--
it was for a long time,
um, Rey to come write for him.
Even though
Rey didn't know finance or stocks,
Porter's persistent
and really wanted to work with his friend.
So, Rey took a writing job,
writing financial newsletters
in Baltimore.
We moved to Baltimore for this company
and all we knew was Porter.
We made a pact that we were going
to live in Baltimore for 24 months.
We moved in in December of 2004.
We found this amazing home
and we found a church.
We found a community.
We were so happy.
May 16th, 2006,
I had a business trip.
And that morning, I was a little tired.
I had a three-hour drive.
And Rey got up with me
and made me breakfast.
It was such a beautiful morning
and I said to him, I was like,
"I love you so much."
And-- And he was like,
"Thank you for loving me so much."
He carried my suitcase down the stairs,
put it in the car for me,
and I was off.
I finished my day, like 6:00 or 6:30.
I check into the hotel
and I call him.
Please press one to leave me a message.
And he doesn't answer.
It was just, like,
"That's really strange."
We had a houseguest,
and her name was Claudia,
and she was a colleague.
-That night, I call her,
and she said around 6:30
she had heard a phone call come in
heard Rey answer
and then run out of the house in a hurry.
And she was like,
"Let me see if he came back."
So she walked around the house,
all the lights were on.
She said, "He's not here."
And then she called me
that next morning at 5:30,
and she was like,
"Allison, he's not home."
I'm not one to panic,
but there was just something
that wasn't right.
I'm like, "I'm headed home."
I'm driving up, calling everybody.
At the time,
we were living in Puerto Rico.
Uh, the phone rang,
and it was Allison.
She always call me "Mama,"
and she said, "Mama, I can't find Rey."
I was like, "Have you talked to him?"
She's like, "No."
After that, I called Angel, Rey's brother.
I instantly knew something was amiss.
You know, he's not the dude to disappear.
So, for him to go, you know, MIA
for any extended period of time,
and his wife not know about it,
it was so out of the ordinary.
By, like, 1:00 or 2:00,
I'm on a flight from Orlando to Baltimore.
I get to the house,
his car's not there.
And I walk in
and in the kitchen,
there was a soda can opened,
a bag of potato chips,
and his Invisaligns.
I ran upstairs.
Our bedroom light was on,
the office light was on.
He wasn't anywhere.
By seven o'clock, Angel landed.
Claudia had went back to New York,
and all our friends flew down.
We're just really, um,
you know, combing the streets.
And then, Maria, his mother, came in.
And my parents came in the next day.
Hi, um, I'm calling regarding a person
that we're looking for.
So I had cleared out
the entire dining room area.
Then it became work.
"Where do we have to go?
What do we have to do?
Here's the license plate number."
Approximately 6 foot 5, Hispanic.
I would be calling the hospitals,
you know, if there was a John Doe.
Porter put up a reward of $1,000,
because Rey and Porter were good friends,
and was able to get the media in there
and kind of get that all stirred up.
So we're just kinda
trying to think of places
that people would've seen him.
Coffee shops, uh,
different restaurants, that kind of stuff.
You know, you're hoping
that someone spotted him.
But you didn't hear anything.
There's no movement on credit cards.
The cell phone was dead.
There was no cash pullout
from our bank accounts.
You know, nothing.
And every step of the way in this,
I-- I couldn't believe that it was real.
Nothing. They--
They put the posters up, so
It starts getting get real scary. But
you feel that you gotta be strong
in front of everybody,
and not, you know, not lose hope.
Or sort of let those worst thoughts
come into your mind.
You're fighting that. I'm fighting that.
But, um it gets daunting.
Where is Rey?
Where could he possibly be?
Family and friends say
Rivera left the house in a hurry,
as if he was late for an appointment.
For the 11 News I-Team, I'm Jayne Miller.
My interest in Rey Rivera's story
was because it seemed just so unusual
to have a 32--
I think he was 32 years old at the time
popular,
no evidence
that he was trying to run from something
or distraught about something,
that he kind of just, poof! Vanished.
Baltimore City police are
searching for a missing 32-year old man.
Anyone with information should call
Baltimore City police at
So, we're now
six days into him being gone.
I'd come home from searching,
and my mom and dad wanted to go
to look for the car
in different parking lots.
They were on their own,
and Mom said, "Let's pull into this one."
And my dad was driving
and she looks over to talk to my dad,
and through my dad,
she's like, "Tom, that's the car."
And Dad said, "No, it's not."
She's like, "Tom, that is the car."
The search took a turn last night
when Rivera's car was found
behind a building on St. Paul Street.
My mother and father
found the car right here.
This parking spot, number seven.
By the time I got here,
which was about ten minutes, um,
there were cops everywhere,
uh, the media was everywhere.
When we found the car,
there was a ticket on it.
The parking attendant said
that the car must have been parked
the evening that Rey disappeared.
Because the parking attendant
had found the car
when he arrived at work the next morning.
So it's six days of him missing.
The sixth day, we found the car.
So we knew
the car had been sitting there six days.
I just like, looked around,
and I was looking, you know--
I was looking at these buildings.
I just-- I was like, "Why are you here?
Why are you here?
Why would you be here?
Why, why, why, why, why?"
When they found the car,
that really, you know,
accelerated the interest in the case,
because now you had a clue.
The area where the car was found
is a parking lot near the Belvedere Hotel.
It used to be an old hotel.
Now it's a condominium.
But it was also located
in the area of town
where the company that he worked for,
Stansberry, is located.
So it wasn't unusual, on its face,
that he would know that part of town.
But it became this mystery, right away.
It was like, "Where is he?
His car is here. What happened to him?"
Now, it really started
to have the appearance of
Hmm. Foul play?
His phone was missing.
Was his phone recovered in the truck,
or no?
No, there is nothing in the truck,
nothing of evidentiary value in the truck.
There is nothing to indicate
a theft of the vehicle.
There is nothing
that we've uncovered in his background,
up to this point,
that gives a logical reason
for him just to disappear.
We went down this block, about ten blocks.
Targeting a bunch of local businesses.
Couple of people said they knew him.
After the car was located,
all of these folks started to organize
these kind of searches
in that area around the car.
The next big thing that happened
is that
someone discovered this hole in a roof
of the Belvedere Hotel.
Three of Rey's co-workers decided to go
on the top of the parking garage
next to the Belvedere.
They looked over the edge,
and they spotted flip-flops
on the lower roof area, near a hole.
The only way to find the hole
was to be on top of the Belvedere,
or to be on top of the--
the parking structure.
It just looked like a black spot
on this white roof.
It's not a big hole.
You'd be just like, "Oh, well,
must've-- you know,
rain must've caused a leak or something."
And then, the three men
who found the hole called the police.
Detectives came in. They said,
"Where's the manager of the building?"
They said, "Gary, can you open up
this door for us?" You know.
And the space
was the old Racquetball Club.
We called it the old church space.
A lot of people probably wouldn't know
that it was used at all.
I open the door up,
and the first thing I did,
I smelled the-- this stench.
The smell was a dead body,
and you could see the wall
where the blood had came down,
and his legs were towards the door.
I looked up, and I saw outside.
That roof there was metal.
So he came right through the metal,
and right through the ceiling.
Still today, when I open up a door,
sometimes I still see that body.
It's just something
that I would never want to see again.
We get the call
to go down
to Baltimore Police Headquarters.
And that was the longest, quietest drive
I can ever recall.
This guy is sitting behind his desk,
and he's like,
"Would you like some water?"
So he gave me
a coffee mug full of water.
And that's when they confirmed
that the body that they had found
was Rey's.
My hands, they went like this.
Like, the water went everywhere.
You couldn't even, um
You couldn't even hold it.
And I was just like shaking, and I just
uh, I sat down and just screamed.
It was just
anguish
heartbreak.
Um
I mean--
It's your little brother, you know?
And so, I remember
everyone just starting to cry.
Um
Ah, man. And, uh
Trying to put, you know, putting arms
around each other and everything.
So
the reality-- reality of it
starts setting in at that moment.
Didn't
think about the who, what,
and the where, or how,
probably until later on when we got back
to Allison and Rey's place.
I was at their house, waiting,
and I, you know,
and I knew when they walked in
that
Yeah.
And I looked up at Allison
and she was crying rivers.
She was just crying rivers.
And, uh
I-- I-- I just held her. I just
We used to have a saying there:
"Meet me at the Belvedere."
And that was the biggest thing
that was going on in South Baltimore City,
was the Belvedere.
Real ritzy, high-class place,
you know, real nice.
Anybody that was somebody
stayed at the Belvedere.
I spent 30 years of my life there.
Started off as a, uh, busboy,
making $2 and something an hour.
And then when I left,
I left as a property manager.
A lot of great memories.
Lot of great memories.
But not that memory of Rey Rivera,
that was not a great memory at all.
We got that call on the 24th of May,
I believe, that a body was found in a room
in the Belvedere.
Um
So we, of course, responded out
to the room where the body was located.
The body, pretty much,
was in a prone position.
Decomposition was pretty extreme
at that point.
He had been missing for eight days.
That's what really hurt.
The decomp is gonna destroy
most of the evidence
that you could see instantaneously
if you got to that body right away.
Rey's autopsy,
it was some brutal reading.
Multiple, multiple ribs fractured,
punctured lungs,
lacerations, seven, nine inches,
damage to his skull.
The right leg
had two different breaks in it,
to the point where the bone
was actually protruding through the flesh.
With the extent of the injuries,
it seemed like
the man came from such great heights
when he went through that hole.
The hole was pretty clean
and it wasn't that large.
I could fit through the hole
with only a little clearance around me.
So that's how small the hole was.
It wasn't this massive cave-in of a roof.
He came vertical through that thing
like a projectile.
The biggest question is:
Where did he come from?
How did he get through that hole?
The first theory was that he jumped off,
or fell off, or was pushed off,
but came off the very top roof
and then went through that lower roof,
ten or eleven stories down.
The very top of the hotel roof,
at best, maybe from point-to-point,
was maybe a 40-foot open area.
Of course, there's air ducts,
there's air conditioning units,
there was a lot of different structures
up there.
The hole was quite a distance out.
The rough angles I could get were 45 feet
from the Belvedere to where the hole was.
Even to attempt a jump, a running jump,
to get to the point where the hole was,
was, in my mind, virtually impossible.
He's a tall, fit man,
but he also was in flip-flops.
The hole never made sense,
like where it was.
So my dad and I went up on the roof.
I'm afraid of heights,
Rey was afraid of heights,
and being up on the roof
scared me to absolute death
because there's no railing up there.
And it's very far down.
I couldn't imagine
why he would be up there.
Immediately, nothing about the evidence,
at that point, felt good to me.
The rooftop, the location of the hole,
I didn't believe
that Rey went off that top of the roof.
So after that,
we went over to the parking garage,
right adjacent to the building.
From the perspective
of the garage, the hole is too far away.
I mean, he'd have to, like,
go way out there
to reach that area where the hole was.
The top of the garage roof
is only 20 feet.
So, to me, it seems feasible
a man could survive that,
even with going through the rooftop.
Now, the extent of the injuries
to the body
were pretty-- pretty intense.
So, that theory went to rest pretty quick.
There was theories
that he came off the 11th floor.
There's a ledge
that wraps around the building.
From there, it's possible.
But to get to those ledges,
you had to go through
somebody's personal property.
You had to go through an office.
You had to go through a room.
You had to go through a condo.
None of the hallways
just left out to the ledge.
And the windows are half windows,
which barely even open
if they opened at all.
And then, the ledge,
it's not a catwalk.
It's a ledge.
And this is a really old building,
so, it's ornate.
You'd really have to be pretty nimble
to maneuver that
without falling off the building.
So, that hole still is a mystery.
Which part of that building
he came off of.
During the investigation,
around the hole on the rooftop,
we find his cell phone.
The phone was in totally working order.
This is his cell phone
that was found on the roof,
and there is not
a crack in the screen, um
which I find really strange.
The phone is one of those things
that I will never forget.
I mean, you can go anywhere right now
and drop your phone from three stories,
and something's gonna happen to it.
Even from the garage roof.
His eyeglasses, when they were found,
there wasn't a scratch on them.
His injuries were severe
and fatal.
And it's just odd that,
for the force it took for him
to go through that roof,
that the cell phone and glasses
would survive that force.
It's odd.
None of these objects are damaged,
yet he is brutal.
One flip-flop was broken.
The other flip-flop--
They both were laying on the rooftop.
These are his flip-flops
that were also, um, on the roof.
There's drag marks here
that are pretty fresh.
And then this one is, you know,
this one is-- is broken.
I don't know how that
how all of this-- how this even happened.
The flip-flops, phone, his eyeglasses,
they were almost like--
Just to me, it looked staged.
It raises that question:
Well, did they really fall with him
or did someone put them there,
after the fact?
What wasn't found with Rey was, um,
the money clip I bought him
for a wedding gift
and then engraved his initials "R.R."
on it.
He would have, you know, his IDs,
money, all that kind of stuff in it.
You know. Um
So, yeah, he like--
It was his thing, his little
signature piece.
That has never been recovered.
When I got the car back
from the police department,
I turned that car upside down
for that money clip.
'Cause there was just
something that I was like,
that-- that doesn't seem right
that that's just gone.
Naturally, you think, right,
if this guy fell off the building,
someone's gonna have seen something.
So, shortly after Rey's body was found,
I literally, like, wandered
throughout the hotel,
and just tried to talk to anybody,
and asked them the same question:
Did you see him?
Did you hear anything?
I mean, this happened in a public building
where people are going to a restaurant.
You know,
Mount Vernon is a bustling neighborhood.
There are people all over the place.
And this guy just ends up
dropping out of the sky
and ending up in a conference room,
and no one knows anything?
You have all those windows
in the building,
and no one came forward and said,
"Oh, I saw, I heard,
I looked down, I was like,
"What is that?'"
Nothing. I mean, there just--
It seemed to happen
without anyone seeing anything.
There's no way my brother
just walks into the Belvedere Hotel,
walks through the lobby, and you
get to the top of that building.
I tried to do it.
I tried to walk up there.
I tried to walk through that lobby.
It's not something that just
anyone casually can do
walking off the street.
You have to go through, like,
these back stairwells that lead up,
that in some cases are locked,
or are not open to the public.
And then you go, sort of,
navigate this labyrinth
to then get out through a door
that's usually locked,
to get to this roof area.
So, in order to get there,
you would have to know how to get there.
At the beginning of the investigation,
I tried to determine whether Mr. Rivera
was in the hotel at all.
So, I checked the cameras in the hotel,
and there was no footage of him anywhere.
The camera on the rooftop was not working.
It was disconnected.
I was like, are you kidding me?
You know, that night,
the night Rey is supposed to have been
wandering up in the hotel,
and there's no video?
Like many elements of this case,
it's just like another roadblock.
No one could give us any indication
that Rey was inside that building.
No one saw this man that night.
No witnesses,
no phone calls,
no jailhouse snitches.
We had nothing.
Here's a look
at the morning's top stories.
Baltimore Police say
Rey Rivera jumped
from the roof of the Belvedere
and crashed through a lower roof.
This was a solid running story
in Baltimore
for about seven to ten days,
and then it was kind of
"determined"
um, to be suicide,
so the interest in it faded.
Police, from the jump,
were leaning to suicide.
The circumstances, the-- the evidence,
the hard evidence that we have,
really point to this, uh,
probably being a suicide.
But there wasn't a lot of evidence.
He wasn't shot in the head.
He wasn't stabbed.
There was nothing suggesting
he'd been beaten,
or he'd been strangled.
He ended up in a hole,
and he fell off a building.
What else do you want to say about it?
It was, you know, "He committed suicide."
That was the posture of the--
of the police department.
That part of it was very disheartening.
They don't know Rey.
They don't know my brother.
And they're not, obviously,
listening to us.
We're telling them,
"No, he wasn't under any mental duress.
No, he wasn't under any kind of
psychoactive medications or anything.
None of those things."
You know, the drug test comes back,
indicates that, you know?
Um, so
there's no reason for that
to be the first thing that you go to.
They wanted to, like, big guy,
off a building, through a roof.
You know, like, he-- he jumped.
And I'm the grieving widow
and I wouldn't want to believe
my husband would commit suicide.
He just got married.
No indication of, you know,
someone that was sour at life.
Typically, people that commit suicide,
there's plenty of markers along the way.
There's none of that in my brother's life.
He is not a guy
that would jump off a roof.
He's not a
Especially where we were in our lives.
He was so excited.
He wanted a baby so bad.
He wanted a family so bad.
No one will accept suicide,
we know that.
But this case just didn't have
it-- it just didn't have that
specter about it.
Because there just wasn't any evidence
that he was
somebody who was ready--
ready to take his life.
Part of my trying
to figure all of this out
is that I wanted to talk
to the medical examiner.
I had a whole list of questions
on how Rey died
or the possibilities.
I met with the medical examiner,
and she closed the door,
and she said,
"I know what they're trying to do
and we are not closing this case."
They said that,
what wasn't consistent with the fall
was the way that his shins were broken.
And that's all she would say.
They did not say anything
of what would cause the breaks.
They just said it was inconsistent.
So, with the questionable incidence
of how Rey came through the hole
and the unusual circumstances behind it,
the medical examiner decided
to declare it undetermined.
When you rule a case undetermined,
what you are saying as a medical examiner
and a forensic examiner is,
"We don't have enough information
to conclude
this person took his or her own life
or someone else took their life."
And so, you can't close the case.
When Rey was missing,
I just went through the entire house
trying to figure out any clues
of where he might be.
We were looking through the office,
and that's when we found a note
that was behind the computer.
Often in a suicide, you have a note.
Most people who contemplate suicide
and commit suicide,
they don't want to leave their family
in the lurch.
They want them to understand
what happened.
The note was probably about,
you know, this big
um, in all.
So it was shrunk down
really, really small.
And I know that he wrote the note
the day he disappeared,
because there were scraps
in the trash can.
The note starts out,
"Brothers and sisters."
"Brothers and sisters,
right now, around the world,
volcanoes are erupting.
What an awesome sight.
Whom virtue unites,
death will not separate."
It was a very unusual note.
It had different names on it,
some movie star names on it,
family names on it.
It was very unusual.
There's a whole page of people he knew.
But he's missed some significant people,
so that seemed strange.
There were movies,
and the movies were the ones
that really stuck to him.
I know what all of these things were,
nothing was really a surprise.
It was just why they were all compiled,
and in the format they were compiled.
"I stand before you a man
who understands the purpose and value
of our secrets.
That's why I cherish them as secrets."
Because it was so weird,
I just took that first sentence
and laid it into Google search.
And the first thing that came up
was Freemasons.
He definitely was, you know,
kind of curious in, just secret societies,
the Freemasons, um
And-- And maybe he was looking
to do a screenplay.
I would describe the letter as cryptic.
It's kind of like reading tea leaves.
In fact,
someone I used as a consultant
when we were doing this story said,
"You know, maybe it's written in code."
"That was a well-played game.
Congratulations, to all who participated."
Rey was a prolific writer
and he wrote all sorts of stuff,
everywhere.
A lot of what he wrote down
was just random thoughts
that didn't necessarily connect.
It could be from a phone number
to a philosophy idea
of why the sky is blue, or work.
Um, and all in one pad of paper
can be all of those things,
with not any rhyme or reason.
"Life is a test
to see if you can control your spirit.
Take care and enjoy the festivities."
I, uh, didn't know what to do with it,
gave it to the police immediately.
We actually sent the note to the FBI lab.
They came back
and the FBI kind of cleared the note as
just an unusual note,
but not suicide intent.
This note I hate
because I don't understand it.
But this is definitely not a suicide note.
I do know that.
One of the other
interesting elements in this case,
was on the day that he disappeared,
whatever happened
seemed to happen in a hurry.
Yeah, he left the house in a hurry,
he seemed to park in a hurry,
he didn't have much with him.
It just seemed that whatever sent him
to the Belvedere Hotel building
seemed to happen in a hurry.
This room is where, um, Claudia,
my business colleague, was staying.
She had heard the phone ring
and she just heard him push off
from-- from this room over here, his desk,
and run down the stairs
and then out of the house that night.
Based on what we're hearing
from that friend of the wife,
it was a brief conversation,
uh, concluded with an exclamation of "Oh."
Like a surprise type of response.
This guy was working at home,
received a phone call,
left out his house quick.
The police traced the call,
and found out the call came from
Stansberry & Associates,
where Rey worked.
But there was no way to figure out
who made the call
because the call
came from the switchboard,
and they couldn't track down
the caller's extension.
The phone call was critical
because it seemed like
the phone call caught him by surprise,
and he was like," I gotta go."
Like kind of in a panic.
Unfortunately, the company
he worked for, Stansberry,
the minute the body was located
and I started inquiring about it,
put a gag order on all their employees.
Now, every possible person that knew Rey,
worked with Rey,
or had any answers for me,
weren't allowed to legally talk to me
according to their company lawyers.
That's within hours
of his body being discovered.
His friend, Porter Stansberry,
and Porter's offices
of Stansberry & Associates,
have lawyered up.
This type of case,
we need a task force
with grand jury powers
to subpoena people,
and to require them to testify
and give statements.
But for a homicide detective
to try to break those walls,
if somebody doesn't want to talk to ya,
I can't force you to talk to me.
And Rey's best friend, Porter Stansberry,
would not even return our calls,
would not talk to us,
would not give us any answers.
So, to me, as a homicide detective,
I think to the normal person,
to me, that's really suspicious.
Porter and Rey were
very good friends for a very long time.
Rey has known Porter since he was 15.
They-- They were pretty thick.
They were in the same swimming team,
the same water polo team.
They went to prom together.
Now I'm mad.
We move out here for him,
and Porter was not going
to speak to the police.
And that's when it started
to get really strange for me.
He's your friend and you have no comment?
Why?
At the time Rey disappeared,
he was a freelance videographer
working for Stansberry & Associates,
producing documentaries
or producing videos of conferences.
Prior to that,
Rey was working on a newsletter
called the Rebound Report,
which is a newsletter that, uh,
gives you stock tips to buy stocks
that are like, you know, not doing well,
that are going to rebound in the future.
Now before Rey came out to join Porter
in his business and work with him,
Stansberry puts out a letter
under a firm called Pirate Investors
that touts the investment
in a Russian firm
that's going to, like,
discover uranium or something.
The tip didn't work out
and investors complained.
And subsequently,
the SEC filed fraud charges
against Stansberry,
and fined Stansberry
over a million dollars.
The company said that, you know,
it was absolutely
their First Amendment right
to make-- give this advice.
But, according to the SEC,
the advice was fraudulent.
The SEC thing with, um, Stansberry,
it's part of what Rey needed to do
when he came out initially,
was, a little bit,
clean up Porter's reputation
while he was also
writing financial newsletters.
About two weeks before he died,
there was something that was worrying him.
At that time,
I didn't really think much of it.
But then,
that Monday before he went missing,
the alarm went off.
It was, like, 1:00 a.m.
And that thing had never gone off.
That's the master bedroom window,
-so it was blaring.
And I went down,
um, I went down the stairs
and around the corner,
and Rey came flying out with this big bat.
And the fear in this man's eyes
scared me to death.
That guy was never afraid of anything.
The police,
even though I brought them out,
said it was a squirrel.
Then again,
the following Tuesday at 1:00 a.m.,
it went off.
It was this window right here,
um, and all of this foliage,
none of this was here.
You could walk directly
up to the window, um, with screens on it.
And it was this window that was kinda--
it was tampered with.
Somebody was trying to get in the house.
I believe that it was connected
to his death,
because it was-- that evening is when
he never returned home.
I just think something foul
happened to Rey.
Somebody or something got a hold of him
and did something horrible to him.
I believe that Rey had
some kind of information.
He may have stumbled on it,
maybe didn't know that he stumbled on it.
I believe Rey was murdered.
What I can't get in my head though is,
what would that information be
for somebody to kill him?
The motive, in my mind,
is probably about money.
Rey's publication gets put out,
someone lost a lot more money
than they were anticipating.
And ultimately, I think, you know,
money makes people
do really bad things.
We always considered
all these different possibilities.
Did someone push him off?
Did someone force him to go off?
Gun to his head?
Did he do something on a dare
with someone?
Was it some kind of game?
It never felt to me like,
oh, he jumped off the roof
and killed himself,
and that was the end of it.
It felt like
this was some much darker story
that, honestly,
there are probably a lot of people
who would have a great interest
in keeping it quiet.
When I met with Rey's wife, Allison,
I advised her
that she needed to be careful.
'Cause she was working as hard as I was,
if not harder, to investigate this.
She was determined to turn every stone
that can be turned.
All the way to his company,
to his friends, every aspect of it.
And if she's this afraid
of what might have happened,
she needed to be very cautious
about who she talks to,
when she talks to them,
and how she goes about it,
and just, she had to watch her back.
I was probably the only one
on the homicide floor
that did not believe
this thing was suicide.
And I believe there is-- was enough
to investigate it as a homicide.
And then, unfortunately,
three weeks into the investigation,
I was reassigned.
I was being detailed
to the FBI Safe Streets Task Force,
so I was, uh, off this case.
The week that I got back
from the memorial,
I called Detective Baier, and he said
he was being transferred off the case.
He says,
"I'm no longer your lead detective."
I said, "Are you on the case at all?"
And he said, "No."
It was very frustrating
and I was angry.
After a while, I called the police station
to follow up on the case.
They were like,
"You need to get through your head
your husband committed suicide."
And then I got pissed and I said,
"I'll get that through my head
when you show me evidence
that that happened."
I was just talking to someone
in the police department the other day,
"Oh that's suicide!"
So
the posture of
the Baltimore Police Department is
that Rey killed himself.
The fact that the medical examiner
left the case open,
in terms of manner of death
as undetermined,
is what the case is all about,
is that it doesn't have
a firm conclusion to it.
There are a lot of open cases,
but they aren't open
like this one is open.
To solve this, somebody
somewhere has to come out.
Somebody that knows Rey.
Somebody that knows
who that phone call was.
Somebody that worked with Rey
is gonna have to come out of the woodwork,
and give police somewhere to start with.
In losing somebody,
there's a lot of people around
immediately.
And then, um
And then, you know,
it's kind of your world,
and you have to pick up the pieces
to figure out what's next and
I came into this city with everything,
and I left with nothing.
I just remember saying to my mom,
I was like, "You know, Mom,
I know God only gives you
what you can handle
and somehow, I'm supposed to handle this.
I don't know how I'm gonna do it."
But I think that Rey continues
to give to me in ways that
his strength will always wrap around me.
When somebody you love that much,
that they're so young
and they have a whole life
ahead of them
dies
a part of you dies too.
Trying to deal with Rey's death
has probably been the single
most difficult thing I've had to do.
Period.
We're not the same family.
The pain is still so raw
that it gets in the way of
us really feeling for each other
as a family unit.
Life has moved on for us.
You know, I have a couple kids,
my sister has a couple kids.
And there should be a lot of joy in that,
and there is,
but right behind that,
you know, I'm thinking,
you know, Uncle Rey.
He is missed in everything.
I didn't watch the wedding video
for six years after he died.
I had seen stills of him.
But when you see him move,
it becomes a little more real, so
Sorry.
-No matter what, Allison,
I'll love you forever.
As sad as it was,
there was also this magic
to remember how much love
there was between us.
I loved him
more than anything in the world.