How Maryland’s Medical Examiner Helped Conceal Suspicious Deaths |
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Nearly 20 years ago, I stepped into the downtown Baltimore office of an obscure state official named Dr. David Fowler. He was lanky, affable, with an Afrikaner accent that alluded to his South African roots. He was also the state’s chief medical examiner, the man who determined the fate of all cases of suspicious deaths across the state.
I had no idea at the time, but roughly two decades later, he would become one of the most infamous pathologists in the world, his work and reputation fodder for national headlines after his stunning testimony on behalf of Derek Chauvin, the cop accused and eventually convicted of murdering George Floyd on camera in May of 2020.
Perhaps I should have expected it based on what transpired that day in Fowler’s office.
I was visiting to question him about the death of a man in police custody that occurred after he was struck with a Taser. Fowler had ruled the cause of death the result of a condition called “excited delirium.” I had never heard of it, so I wanted an explanation.
The autopsy had listed cardiac arrhythmia as a key contributor to the victim’s death, so I was curious why the Taser wasn’t identified as the primary cause. It seemed logical that the shock of thousands of volts of electricity emanating from the allegedly non-lethal weapon could have been definitively responsible for the victim’s demise. Fowler, however, didn’t think so. He was adamant that the now-discredited excited delirium theory, not the Taser, was key to explaining the fatal incident. In fact, he gave me a book on it.
“Excited Delirium” Is Pseudoscience. Police Often Cite It to Justify Brutality.
The theory seemed absurd. And, indeed, it was.
That was the beginning of what would turn into decades of often contentious coverage of Fowler by me and my reporting partner, Taya Graham. Reporting that included stories concerning the massive number of unclassified deaths Fowler’s office left undetermined, the death of young men in police custody that an audit showed were wrongly decided, and women caught in the throes of addiction whose suspicious deaths were overlooked.
Along the way, we found cases that still haunt us. Mysterious deaths with gaping holes of missing evidence and unexplained circumstances. Tragic tales of innocent people who expired under dubious circumstances that—in light of a scathing audit that found Fowler’s office was plagued by investigative lapses and discredited science—might have otherwise been resolved.
That’s why we have compiled relevant facts of each case in the story that follows.
Much of this reporting is personal for us; though, as always, we do our best to remain objective. But it’s our exactitude as reporters and our need for truthful answers that also drives our conviction that the cases we recount here—cases we’ve spent years investigating and reporting on ourselves—might have had different outcomes if someone other than Fowler was in charge.
And that is the point of this piece: to reveal what happens when a bureaucrat weaponizes incompetence. To reckon with how the government can be an unwitting accomplice to murder, not by acts of commission, but through many mundane and concerted acts that entrench a state-sanctioned system of willful indifference.
— Stephen Janis, 2026
In May 2011, a young woman named Emily Hauze attended a party in Fells Point, a waterfront neighborhood in Baltimore known for its lively bars and cobblestone streets.
The recent Loyola College graduate had been living with her parents in Pennsylvania, but she often returned to the city to spend time with her college friends. She even had something to celebrate — a new job as a teacher.
At the party, she met a young man. He was a Johns Hopkins Medical School student who, attendees later told us, was not a friend of anyone at the party. In fact, no one could recall who invited him.
The pair left together and ended up at a Mount Vernon apartment.
The next day, police received a call that a maintenance worker at the same apartment building had made a gruesome discovery: A body was lying in a dumpster attached to a compactor at the bottom of the building’s trash chute.
Police arrived to find a naked female corpse in the dumpster. The position of the body indicated that it had traveled down the chute and into the compactor. At the time, the deceased could not be identified.
Minutes later, an officer stopped a young man in the lobby who was carrying a bag of clothes. He explained they belonged to a young woman who had vanished from his apartment early in the morning and had never returned.
He identified the woman as 23-year-old Emily Hauze.
One would think, given the questions raised by circumstantial evidence alone, Hauze’s death would require an extensive investigation.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, an inconspicuous government agency quizzically ruled Hauze’s death an accident — a determination that ended the investigation, according to police records we reviewed. According to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), the official conclusion was that Hauze ended up naked and dead at the bottom of that trash chute by some fatally unlucky accident she caused herself.
But how could she have thrust herself through a roughly 24-inch-wide trash chute? What would prompt anyone to crawl into a stinking metal contraption attached to a shaft traveling 25 stories? And why was a young man carrying her clothes through the lobby instead of calling the police?
It was a process we had become accustomed to after reporting on death investigations over the past two decades: A mysterious death in Baltimore, a cursory look by police, and an even more questionable ruling from the OCME that shuts down the investigation entirely.
At the time, that determination marked the end of the road for Hauze’s case. Until now.
In recent years, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has come under renewed scrutiny for lax and often questionable practices. Much of that scrutiny has focused on one man who played a central role in shaping how the office operated: former Chief Medical Examiner Dr. David Fowler.
Fowler’s work remained largely obscure until he testified in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer whose knee pressed into George Floyd’s neck for over 8 minutes. The downward pressure caused asphyxiation and ultimately killed him. Floyd’s death prompted national outcry and widespread protests.
Called by Chauvin’s defense, Fowler testified that Floyd’s death was caused not by police restraint, but by underlying heart disease, drug use, and carbon monoxide exposure — conclusions sharply at odds with the jury’s verdict and later medical consensus.
Even with Chauvin’s conviction, the world erupted in outrage at Fowler’s manifest incompetence. Roughly 450 doctors penned a letter calling for his work to be examined. The Maryland attorney general responded with an extensive audit of police custody deaths for which the OCME conducted autopsies. It found Fowler had ruled incorrectly on 41 deaths involving police restraint.
Many in the public were shocked at these findings; we were not.
That’s because we had covered Fowler’s work on a variety of mysterious cases for almost two decades, including police-involved deaths, questionable suicides, murky drug overdoses, and even a home invasion that Fowler ruled did not contribute to the death of the homeowner.
We wrote stories on all of these cases, calling into question the rulings of the OCME. But nothing happened. His role as an obscure bureaucrat went unexamined by the government that appointed him.
But much has changed since Fowler’s testimony. A formerly inscrutable agency is in the spotlight. And families who believe Fowler erred in cases involving their loved ones are speaking out.
That’s why we are going to explore in detail some of the most vexing cases we covered during Fowler’s tenure. In each case, we will compare the findings of the audit with gaps and failures in the investigative process that seem to raise more questions than answers.
“Routine deficiencies in case files — including missing photographs, absent scene analyses, and inadequate investigative follow-up — compromised accuracy across the board.” — Maryland OAG Audit, 2025
The highest profile case from the Fowler era is the alleged suicide of Rey Rivera. The 26-year-old aspiring filmmaker’s mysterious death became a national story after a Netflix reboot of Unsolved Mysteries highlighted the case.
Rivera was found on the floor of an empty office in May 2006. The space was the home of a former storefront church, which had recently been vacated, behind the historic Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood.
A hole in the ceiling over Rivera’s body suggested he had jumped from the roof of the Belvedere with the intent to commit suicide. But a series of bizarre and seemingly contradictory facts belied those conclusions, all of which became even more questionable when the Unsolved Mysteries episode aired.
Like many of the cases we covered, it wasn’t just the medical evidence that made Rivera’s suicide tough to accept for his family and friends. It was also the narrative bolstered by police and accepted without pushback by the OCME that somehow Rivera — just married and planning to move to Los Angeles — suddenly decided to jump off the top of a building.
The case files do little to explain why he would have made such a fateful and out-of-character decision.
Instead, what we know about Rivera’s final hours reveals less of a path to a spontaneous suicide than a series of mysteries that don’t evince a simple explanation.
The morning he disappeared was routine. He kissed his wife, Alison, goodbye before she departed on a business trip to Richmond, Virginia. He made a last-second visit to an Apple store to rent some equipment for an editing project he was wrapping up for a client.
According to a guest who was visiting the couple, Rivera returned home briefly, then suddenly left again shortly after receiving a mysterious phone call. He departed with just his keys, a credit card, and a cellphone. He was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt.
And then he just disappeared.
When Rivera failed to check in, friends frantically searched Mount Vernon, where his car was found in the parking lot next to the Belvedere Hotel. Three employees of the firm where Rivera worked ventured to the top of a nearby parking garage adjacent to the building. There they spotted a hole in the roof, and eventually police found Rivera’s body underneath.
Since the case was featured on Netflix, an entire subreddit has emerged, filled with theories about how Rivera ended up on the floor of that empty conference room. Fueling that speculation is a bizarre note found taped behind his computer shortly after he died. It was written in florid prose, heavy on metaphor. It mentioned his high school friend, Porter Sansbury, and the firm where they worked together, Agora.
The FBI concluded it was not a suicide note. It was certainly a message of sorts, though difficult to dissect. Something about it always felt like a........