It's only a "little" weird? Guess someone's seen too many CSIs.

I'm no scientist or forensic specialist, but doesn't dry ice sublimate pretty quickly? It's hard to see how the body could have been in that state for more than a few hours.

Although I recall something similar being done to Harrison Ford in one of those movies about star wars.

LA is a pretty weird place.

Im going to speculate she overdosed and he used the dryice to keep the body from decomposing and stinking up the place.

*

Quite a bit of projectionism there MHR..by your strawman logic Schwarzenegger, Haggard, Foley, Renzi, Abramoff, Cunningham etc etc etc are 'liberals'

Hey, MHR, what do you call a three trillion dollar budget, cronyism, corruption and bigger government??

GOP Patriotism!!

I think Jet has it. She died of a cocaine overdose & he didn`t know what to do with the body etc.

"...you cannot save your face and your ass at the same time..." - vachon@shadrach.net

The Urban Legend web site has an article about bodies discovered by guests in hotel or motel rooms. They're more common than one might think.

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/gruesome/bodybed.asp

People with severe sexual repression reduce human beings to only objects of desire.

Several years ago a middle aged man who was still living with his mother was found to be keeping a woman's body in a freezer in a moving van in the back of his house. The young woman had been missing for several years after her car was found broken down on a CA highway.

It was already a movie. Can't remember the title, but it starred Keven Bacon and Colin Firth, as a sort of Lewis-Martin duo from the 50s. They murder a girl, pack her in ice with a bunch of lobsters and send her off to...Miami, I think?

Anyway, wonder if these guys saw the same movie?

Jet I think is correct about preserving the body until someone could dispose of it. Since the story mentioned cocaine... I wouldn't be surprised that she was a mule that smuggled a large quantity of cocaine inside her body. The death might have happened as a result of the smuggling, or maybe there was an argument about money...

Jeez, we don't even have backing for our movie yet and you guys are already arguing over the script!

Wasn't this already on Law & Order?

If the goal was to postpone rigor mortis/decomposition to throw the investigators off the tracks, then I think it'd fail because the dry ice would damage the skin in a certain way.

It's already a novel--Robert Stone, maybe Flag for Sunrise--where the colonel takes the priest back to his digs and shows him a body in the freezer. What do you expect me to do with that? I don't know, I only deal with the living, you are in charge of the dead.

lampwick -- yes, dry ice does sublime, but not as quickly as you might think. Especially a bathtub full. Remember, it is used to ship steaks across the country.
absent observer -- you're probably right. And wouldn't someone buying a bathtub of the stuff be a clue in itself?

Mmmmm, here in Alabama you can buy dry ice in the local Wal-Mart. I don't think many "associates" are going to ask "are you getting this to pack a body?"

All snark aside, we do live in interesting times!

It's only a "little" weird? Guess someone's seen too many CSIs.

Well, as opposed to packing the body in a case of African moths.

"It's not normal; it's a little weird."

What do they usually pack bodies in when you're in an upscale hotel in Orange County?

And here I was thinking this seemed kind of normal. You mean real life isn't like tv and the movies???

LAS is right. This sounds a fair bit like Atom Egoyan's film Where the Truth Lies.

Well, as opposed to packing the body in a case of African moths.

In that case, it would be just typical.

I guess some people are self-important over-achievers, and would pack a body in dry ice, instead of in the more typical crate of African moths in their race towards distinction.

How often do police "routine[ly]" search upscale hotel rooms? And what are they "routinely" looking for?

Anyway, wonder if these guys saw the same movie?

Are you referring to "Where The Truth Lies"? I don't remember much about the movie, aside from that it kinda sucked. Thankfully, I now get to put this link up:

http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/my_year_of_flops_case_file_99

Pretty humorous deconstruction of the whole thing. And I would be very surprised if Dick Wolf wasn't on a conference call with the writing staffs of all three Law & Orders right now, ordering them all to produce episodes with this subject matter.

"Goddamn it, this show's supposed to be 'ripped from the headlines' isn't it? I want to see something this week!."

"But Mr. Wolf, sir, writing, filming and editing a television show takes more than just three days!"

"Don't give me excuses. I'm Dick Wolf. I can buy and sell your ass twelve times over. I was the one who came up with three--three!--different Law & Order episodes dealing with the Jayson Blair scandal within just a few DAYS! Wrote the things myself. So don't tell me that you can't do it. I WANT TO SEE AN ICE WOMAN SHOW ON WEDNESDAY OR YOU CAN ALL MOVE YOUR ASSES OVER TO CSI AND WRITE WITTY BANTER FOR MARG HELGENBERGER, GOT THAT!"

I believe that dry ice, if properly sealed & insulated, won't sublimate very quickly. But sans details, it's impossible to say anything.

It would be merely Norman Bates' weird to store a human corpse in a private location. That one was found in a hotel room is double-secret weird.

The drug subtext is telling. If I had to guess, there was an OD/accident and the body was frozen so as not to stink up the place before Mr Cocaine could check out.

The question that occurred to me: "...a ROUTINE INSPECTION of a hotel room..." When do police make routine inspections of hotel rooms? Maybe in LosAngeles they do?

Read the link:

Police said they searched the room after seizing a small amount of narcotics and arresting a man on suspicion of possessing and selling cocaine.

The rate of sublimation for dry ice depends entirely on its container. In a good cooler, a big chunk will last weeks; on a counter, maybe a day. And it'll damage skin in a predictable way (think freezer burn, remember its -70C).

Nice to know all the time in the lab served some purpose.

As for the story line, its more CSI than law and order. I like the drug mule idea, if she died and you still wanted to extract the cargo, you might want to minimize decomposition until you could get someone. Although all you'd really need us a good knife, good nerves, and a lot of Lysol. This would be a really good ending for a trainspotting-type movie.

We used to mix dry ice with MEK, or Chlorothane, Alcohol so it wouldnt dissapate so quickly and drop bushings [to shrink them] or keep ice-box rivets cold before shooting [bucking] them.

What is a "routine search of a room" at a hotel? Do the police routinely snoop around one's hotel room while one is out sightseeing?

crusty dem - Quite right. And even in an open container, if cold CO2 can pool it will last somewhere in between. But in any case it would be more than the few hours someone originally guessed.

What I don't understand is the selection of dry ice. Why not water ice? Easier to get (or so I thought -- evidently not the case in Alabama) and easier to explain in large quantities.

Pound for pound dry ice would absorb more heat than water ice. Also, dry ice simply becomes a gas as it warms and goes out the window rather than puddling on the carpet. Dry ice was probably a good choice for this application though just as likely it was just something available.

This story does give me a different view of Newport Beach.

I'm pretty sure I saw something like that on the episode of 'Dexter' that ran on CBS recently.

(Man, CBS running a series like Dexter. I still can't quite believe it.)

Without question, the fact that there are "routine" searches of upscale hotel rooms by police is much more newsworthy, and more in need of an explanation, than the discovery of a body packed in dry ice.

Ah, never mind. "Routine" in this case meant "while searching a room in connection with a drug arrest."

Maybe I've been watching too many really bad movies, but it sounds like the beginning of a viral epidemic.

Does Mickey Kaus have an alibi?

Have you ever watched National Lampoon's Vacation? Apparently this guy did...

Well, the link above is clearly an invitation to check the mattress before lying down -- seems there are dozens of cases where people spend a night or more sleeping on top of people who have been stashed away inside mattresses or under beds. And the motel staff keeps saying that the smell the guests are complaining about is a figment of their imagination. What's with all the German tourists finding bodies?

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/gruesome/bodybed.asp

The hit man/serial killer called the Iceman once killed someone and left his body under the bed in a Lincoln tunnel vicinity love motel. Several couples used the room for sex before the body was found...

No dry ice, tho.

It's the Bride of Bredo Morstoel!

A standard ploy in crime novels. Body temperature or decomposition is altered so that the butler has an airtight alibi at the supposed time of the murder.