On May 24th 2006, Rey Rivera’s body was found in a disused room annexed to Baltimore’s Belvedere, a beaux-arts hotel and Baltimore landmark that had been converted to a condominium in the nineties. According to NPR, he was last seen on May 16th. Sometime in between, he had crashed through the roof of the room.

As Esquire recounts, the 32-year-old aspiring filmmaker had recently married and moved to Baltimore, where he’d taken a steady job writing financial newsletters for his friend’s strategic investment research firm. The day after his wife Allison left for a business trip, a friend staying at their home reported that Rivera received a phone call, ran out and disappeared. Later, a cryptic note was found attached to his computer addressed to his brothers and sisters, including a wish to make a list of acquaintances five years younger, and using phrases from the Masonic Order. After a week of searching and nothing turning up, someone noticed a strange hole in the ceiling of the Belvedere meeting room. They investigated and found Rivera’s body, the obvious deduction being he plummeted from the thirteenth floor of the Belvedere, though the manner with which he entered the Belvedere remains unknown because a problem with the security system rendered videos from that day inaccessible.

The police believed the case to be a suicide. However, the coroner’s report classified his death as “undetermined.” Later, a book written by Mikita Brottman, a psychoanalyst at the Maryland Institute of Art and resident of the Belvedere, revealed that the case was still listed as an unsolved murder.

Pick your side: homicide or suicide?

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