The South L.A. apartment where the LAPD found Stanley Thiesfield | Daina Beth Solomon

When police officers arrived at a two-room apartment just south of USC last fall to investigate complaints of foul odors, they found a body decomposed beyond recognition.

Something else caught their attention, too — the black electrical cord knotted around the man’s neck.

A Los Angeles Police detective declared the apartment a crime scene and set about collecting mail, business cards, fingerprints, DNA samples — anything that might offer clues about the dead man’s life, and how and why he’d died. A driver’s license revealed a name: Stanley Thiesfield.

Almost a year later, the fact that Thiesfield died at age 59 remains one of the only conclusions of the investigation. 
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