What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [58]
SALLY (MEG RYAN): Amanda mentioned you had a dark side.
—When Harry Met Sally…(1989)
Harry was definitely on to something. The “New York death” is a staple of tabloid journalism. The basic story is always the same: police respond to a neighbor’s complaint about a foul odor and discover the body of someone who died alone and unnoticed days or even weeks before. What gives these episodes a typical New York edge is the undertone of alienation and impersonality in a city where people literally live on top of each other—you have to rot before anyone notices your absence. The New York death reveals the city at its worst. In the Bronx in 2004, neighbors heard the sounds of a “battle royal” coming from the apartment of an ex-con who abused drugs, alcohol, and women. Nobody intervened. Nobody called the cops. Two days later the building superintendent phoned police “to report a foul odor.” They found the ex-con and a woman dead inside the apartment. Call it the Eau de Kitty Genovese effect.
A New York death can happen anywhere. In Chicago an elderly couple committed suicide with vodka and sleeping pills in a posh Harbor Point Towers apartment. Their bodies were discovered by police only “after residents complained of a foul odor” days later. Near Houston, police found an elderly couple dead in their home “after a neighbor reported a foul odor coming from the house.” They had died several weeks earlier, around the time that Adult Protective Services had visited but left when no one answered the door.
The key elements of the New York death are so ingrained in our national consciousness that they have the potential to create embarrassing misunderstandings. After being acquitted in the slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend Ronald Goldman, O. J. Simpson moved from Los Angeles to Florida. In 2000 and 2001 he made the news there for various run-ins with the law. He also began dating an attractive young blond woman named Christie Prody. In January 2002, a next-door neighbor noticed “a foul smell” emanating from Prody’s apartment and realized she had not seen the woman in about a month. She put two and two together and called the Miami police. They too feared the worst, and had firefighters break into the apartment. Inside, they found no sign of Prody, but they did discover the badly decomposed body of her pet cat. The missing-persons unit was notified and Simpson was questioned. When he reached his girlfriend on the phone, with police present, the matter was resolved. Prody had been out of town for a month and a half, and her cat had starved to death.
One story of stinky corpses has taken on mythic proportions. The “body in the bed” urban legend involves motel guests in Las Vegas who complain of a foul odor in their room, only to discover the next morning that they’ve slept in a bed with a corpse hidden in or beneath it. Sadly, there is very little mythical about it, other than its being set in Las Vegas. In the past twenty years, odor complaints by motel guests have led to the discovery of murder victims in Atlantic City, New Jersey; Pasadena, California; Alexandria, Virginia; Mineola, New York; and Kansas City, Missouri. Everywhere, it seems, except Sin City.
A common feature of body-in-the-bed incidents is that the telltale odor doesn’t appear until several days after the murder. A typical case, for example, involved Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski, the hit man immortalized in an HBO television documentary. According to crime writer Katherine Ramsland, Kuklinski killed one of his victims in a by-the-hour motel on Route 3 near the Lincoln Tunnel in North Bergen, New Jersey. Kuklinski fed the man a cyanide-laced hamburger, and his accomplice strangled him with a lamp cord for good measure. They hid the body under the bed, where it wasn’t discovered until the fourth couple to rent the room complained of an odor.
Why does it take motel guests so long to recognize the stench for what it is? Part of the answer lies in biology. In the early 1960s, a Clemson University graduate