Opinion ID: 844272
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The discovery of Denise’s body: July 1994

Text: Over three years later, on the morning of July 13, 1994, Yavapai County (Arizona) Deputy Sheriff Joseph Michael DiGiacomo received a radio call about a possible stolen truck parked outside a house in a small high desert community in Dewey, Arizona. When he arrived at the house, Deputy DiGiacomo found backed into the driveway a 24-foot rental truck with a vehicle identification number that matched a report of a truck stolen from Orange County, California six months earlier. Deputy DiGiacomo conducted an inventory of the truck‟s contents in preparation for confiscating the truck and having it towed it away. The truck was locked, but he noticed that a power cord ran into the rear of the truck under the back door. The other end of the cord ran over a fence and into the backyard of the house. Deputy DiGiacomo called a locksmith, who unlocked the padlock on the truck‟s back door. The truck contained paint cans and painting equipment, and the power cord ran to a running freezer at the back of the truck, which was locked and sealed with masking tape. Believing he had stumbled onto a mobile drug lab, Deputy DiGiacomo called local narcotics officers to assist him. After the narcotics investigators arrived, the locksmith unlocked the freezer. When they cut through the tape and 3 opened the freezer, it emitted a foul odor. One of the investigators reached into the freezer and felt what he thought was a human shoulder. Deputy DiGiacomo sealed off the truck and called Scott Mascher, Lieutenant Supervisor of the Homicide and Major Crimes unit of the Yavapai County‟s Sheriff‟s Department. Lieutenant Mascher opened the freezer and saw that it contained something wrapped in a black trash bag as well as bodily fluids that had became frozen at the bottom of the freezer. The bag had frost and ice crystals that were consistent with having been in the freezer for a long time. After cutting through three layers of trash bags, Lieutenant Mascher found a naked human body, frozen solid in a fetal position with the hands secured behind the back with metal handcuffs. Finding no identifying information for the body and no signs that the person had been killed in the freezer, Lieutenant Mascher sealed the freezer and the truck and had everything towed to forensic pathologists in Phoenix, Arizona.