LAND OF THE UNSOLVED - The last days of Rey Rivera 
Monday, 10 August 2009 08:10

By Stephen Janis

It looks like a quick repair job, a six-foot rectangle of metal grafted atop a broken roof. 

But the patch over the bituminous paving atop a second-floor office at The Belvedere hides a secret the widow of filmaker Rey Rivera thinks may forever be sealed.

Looking down from the top of a parking garage adjacent to the hotel, Allison Rivera gazes on the spot where police said her husband crashed through the roof to his death more than three years ago.

For a moment she is calm, analytical, pointing out the ceiling of an empty office on the second-floor concourse of the historic Belvedere to several relatives who had accompanied her on a trip back to Baltimore last summer.

“This is where they say he jumped from,” Allison says evenly, pointed to the top of the roof. “And then he is supposed to have landed all the way out there.”

But then, as she retreats into the parking lot, a wave of grief overwhelms her, tears stream from her eyes she covers her face. Standing alone, she turns to face the building, gazing at the historic structure like an impenetrable wall; unyieldingly and silent.

It is an illustrative movement for Allison Rivera, the successful saleswoman who had been married to Rey just six months before he was found lying face-up wedged next to a wall on top of a threadbare red carpet.

Allison, despite an outpouring of grief from friends and family, has shouldered the burden of keeping hope alive that the clues to what happened to Rey on that fateful day will someday be found.

Police believe Rivera killed himself in May of 2006, jumping off the roof of the former hotel to his death. But Alison has been unrelenting in her search for clues to what she believes is ultimately a story of foul play, sticking to the assertion that her husband did not commit suicide. That something, or someone, lead him to his death, forced him off the roof; in short, that he was murdered.

“It's so frustrating because my word means nothing to them,” Allison later said in a phone interview of the attitude of Baltimore police.

“ 'You have to get it through your head that your husband jumped off the roof himself',' ” she recounts of a conversation she had with a homicide detective a year after Rey died.

“That’s what I have to deal with.”

Still, Allison Rivera is not the only one who has questions about how her 32-year-old husband ended up dead on the floor of an empty office.

His family, including brother Angel, isn’t buying the suicide theory either.

“Not my brother, “he asserts. “It’s ironic, because he was terrified of heights.”

A copy of the autopsy report obtained by Investigative Voice also shows that the medical examiner who examined Rivera’s body had doubts.

“Injuries at the time of the autopsy were consistent with the fall from a height,” Medical Examiner Melissa Brassell wrote in her May 2006 report. “Because the circumstances surrounding the incident are unclear, and it is not known how the deceased came to have precipitated from such a height, the manner of the death is best classified as UNDETERMINED.”

Some employees of the condo building have told Rivera the security camera malfunctioned on the night he disappeared, when someone programmed the hard drive that stores the images from the camera in the stairwells where Rey would have had to pass to get to the roof to record over itself.

And there is possibly the last man who spoke to Rivera before he died, who said Rivera was not behaving like a man contemplating suicide.

But most importantly, there is his widow, the woman to whom he pledged his heart at an outdoor wedding in Florida just months before he died.

“This is not a man who was closing down shop,” she argues. “He was on cloud nine, everything he had sacrificed for was coming to fruition,” she said.

“If that's the answer [suicide], I'm okay. But more needs to be done, not every stone has been turned over,” she said pausing.

“And if in the end that’s what they find out I will really be okay with it.”

SOMEONE PEOPLE NOTICED

Anyone who ever laid eyes on Rey Rivera would not easily forget the tall, handsome Florida-born Cuban athlete.

A water polo standout during college in California, Rivera stood over 6'5" and weighed more than 250 pounds. He was, to say the least, hard to miss.

“All the women noticed him,” said a friend, who did not wish to be identified. “He was someone who stood out.”

“That’s why I don’t buy this whole thing," said his brother Angel Rivera, who stands 6”8 himself. “Rey is someone people notice. How could he walk into The Belvedere and no one would notice or remember anything, a big 6-foot-5 guy? It’s not possible,” Angel said in a phone interview from his home in Florida.

Despite his imposing stature, to Allison, Rey was her soulmate – a charming, sensitive writer, and aspiring moviemaker and a romantic who moved to Baltimore so he could buy her ring.

“I truly believe it was a soulmate thing. This is your life; this is the guy who has been in my dreams. I can’t say exactly what it was that connected me to him, but that was how it was.”

They started dating in 2000 after meeting in a Los Angeles bar, then moved in together in 2002 while Rey worked on a burgeoning career as a screenwriter.

But when a high school friend, Porter Stansberry, urged Rivera to join him in Baltimore as a copywriter and editor at Stansberry Associates in 2004 – a firm that publishes financial newsletters – he jumped at the chance.

“He wanted to make enough money so we could get married," Allison said. “He wanted to buy me a ring."

The couple relocated to Baltimore in 2004 and Rey went to work as a writer and editor, overseeing a newsletter called “The Rebound Report,” a stock-picking guide that identified distressed stocks with a significant upside potential.

But Alllison said the job was not a good fit for her husband.

"He didn't like to the 8 to 5 period,” she said. “He wasn’t a desk guy, and he just didn't believe in what he was doing.”

So in early 2006 the Riveras made the decision to move back to Los Angeles, where Rey would begin to pitch his screenplay “Midnight Polo,” the story of young female polo player who makes it to the Olympics. A move that Rey would not live to make.

“That is what is so crazy about this: We’re planning on moving and starting a new life. He had a future; why would he decide just then to kill himself?”

LATE NIGHT BURGLAR ALARMS

In the spring of 2006, the couple visited Los Angeles to plan their move back. But when they returned to Baltimore, Rey began behaving oddly, Alison recalls. He was edgy and nervous, uncharacteristic behavior for her usually self-assured husband.

“It started then,” Allison said. “He started going everywhere with me, he wouldn’t let me do anything alone.”

The couple was close, often spending a great deal of their free time together. But Allison said Rey’s behavior was unusual, insisting that he tag along anywhere she went.

“He was even more protective than usual.”

Allison recalls that about a week before he disappeared in May, she wanted to go running at a nearby track. Rey insisted he accompany her.

“I was like, 'Rey, I’m okay," but he said he would come along.”

As she jogged and Rey sat in bleachers reading a book, a man appeared. Her husband, she recalls, freaked out. Even though the mysterious interloper left without incident, Allison says Rey seemed unnerved.

“It was not like him.”

And then, a few days later, the alarm in the couple’s Northwood home went off, sending her husband bounding out of bed.

When she joined Rey in the basement, she recalled seeing something in her husband’s eye she had never seen before: fear.

“It literally made me sick,” she recalls.

“He had a look in his eyes I had never seen before,” she said.

“Rey was scared, he's a big Latin guy and he's macho; it wasn’t him.”

The next evening the alarm went off again, and again Rey flipped out.

“It really hit me because I just wasn’t use to seeing Rey like that,” she said. “It really hit me then.”

After Rey’s body was found, Rivera said she told police about the attempted break-ins, but said detectives told her it was probably squirrels that had tripped the alarms.

“They came a week later and fingerprinted the bottom sill, but said it was probably a squirrel," an explanation Alllison said she does not completely buy.

“You had to push in the screen back to trip the alarm, I don’t think a squirrel could do that.”

Still, despite his unusual behavior, Rey never shared with his wife what – if anything – was bothering him.

“If he had told me anything, whatever it was, I would have shared it with the world. I have nothing to hide.”

A FATEFUL DAY

The morning of the day Rey disappeared, May 16, was uneventful. Leaving for a business trip to Richmond, Alllison recalls only that her husband was on a deadline to complete a video project for Stansberry, work he had started after leaving his full-time position at the firm.

But sometime that afternoon Rey left the house with his keys, cell phone, $20 and a credit card in his shorts pocket. In a hurry, he left without saying a word to a houseguest, contrary to what was reported.

“She was involved in her own drama – that was one of the things that were reported that wasn’t true.

Alison Rivera would never see her husband alive again. Eight days later, after a frantic search that received much media attention, his car was found in the parking lot of The Belvedere. Several hours later, his former co-workers spotted a hole in the roof of the second-floor concourse, a discovery that led police to the grisly find of Rey's body in an office.