New Zealand man Stephen Royds was living in a swanky Los Angeles hotel room that he paid for by dealing drugs and every night he slept in the same room with his dead girlfriend, stored in a plastic container packed with dry ice.
Stephen Royds was arrested as he tried to sell cocaine. He told police home was room 966 at the upmarket Fairmont Hotel.
Police raided the room looking for more drugs. While they found them, they also found something else inside a large plastic container. It was 33-year-old Monique Trepp - preserved on ice in the bedroom the couple had shared.
Police do not know when Trepp died but an anonymous comment left on a news website suggests it may have been months ago.
It is believed that Trepp died of a drug overdose.
Royds has lived at the $300 per night hotel for at least two years. He was a regular at the Tapas Restaurant across the road, where the manager says he is a quiet man who often eats alone.
In an interview, Royds told a newspaper reporter that he kept his dead girlfriend’s body for religious reasons.
But police say Royds had skipped bail in the past and was wanted. If he had reported his girlfriend's death, he would have been captured.
Dry ice has been preserving the bodies of rock stars for decades, but it can be a dangerous substance to play with.
”You wouldn’t want to be trapped in a sealed room with it,” Supagas’ Gary Chapman said. “It would probably suffocated you before it blew open.”
Discovered by a French chemist in 1835, dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide.
It is most commonly used to package items that need to remain cold or frozen, such as ice cream or meat, without the use of mechanical cooling.
Forensic pathologist Simon Stables says it is not a bad way to preserve a body’s internal organs, but warns the skin will burn rather than freeze.
“Dry ice will essentially burn the skin a bit like a frost bite,” Mr Stables said. “So the skin will become black, like frostbite, the body will eventually become dehydrated, where the person is essentially unrecognisable.”
Mr Stables says Royd’s method to preserve his girlfriend’s body would have been high maintenance and would have had to pour more dry ice into the chilly bin every three days.
Royds spent around ten years in Queenstown, before moving to the US during the 1980s to purse a skiing career.
Royds moved to the area from Waimate in South Canterbury as a schoolboy in the seventies.
His father John was a JP and marriage celebrant, who served on the borough council and developed the Lodges apartments on the waterfront.
Royds and his brother learned to ski on Coronet Peak and were lured to America by the skiing there. Brother Tony still works as a ski instructor in Aspen, but Stephen eventually lost contact with his whole family.
An old school friend of the arrested man says the pictures from America today were a complete shock.
”I didn’t recognise him at all,” Paul Wilson said. “He looked quite big to me and quite unusual looking.”
Royds is now in Orange County jail, awaiting his next court appearance.
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- Full interview with reporter about body on ice case
- NZ man's arrest in US news to his estranged dad
- Former Kiwi kept girlfriend’s body on ice for a year
source: newshub archive
