I was relaxing at my desk Monday evening when they transferred the call from Tammi Hanlin to me. She said she found one of her escort ladies, Fanny Janssen, apparently raped and murdered in her 4th floor Carnegie Hill apartment. Tammi said she found no pulse at Fanny's throat.
I told Tammi to stay there and not touch anything more until we got there. Taking my partner, Detective Olivia Benson and Crime Scene Investigator, Vittoria Romano, with me we hurried to the scene. I called Dr. Garret Macy, our Medical Examiner while we were in route, advising him of the situation. Macy arrived with two paramedics and the van shortly after we did.
Tammi led us into Fanny's bedroom. She was laying there spread eagled on her bed, totally naked and the bruises on her throat indicated that she'd been strangled. We questioned Tammi while Vittoria set to work with the corpse snapping photographs then going over the entire room for fingerprints and hair particles.
Tammi called downstairs at Olivia's request and had them bring us up a copy of the information on last man Fanny had been working with that afternoon. His name was William Hanks, who had called requesting an escort for lunch that day. He used a credit card in his name which Tammi had cleared before sending Fanny over to meet Hanks at the Coco Paza restaurant around noon.
Hanks was supposedly residing at the Plaza Hotel so Olivia called the desk there and they confirmed he was indeed registered there. Macy arrived and confirmed the death was probably due to strangulation but he'd confirm all that later after the autopsy.
Taking Olivia with me, we left Macy and Romano to finish up there and headed over to the Plaza Hotel. Hanks was in his room and seemed quite surprised when we arrived knocking at his door. After saying that he had hired Fanny as an escort and she had invited him back to her room that afternoon. When Olivia asked him if he'd had sex with Fanny, he clammed up saying he'd want a lawyer. He willingly accompanied us back to the 5th Precinct where he called the company he worked for, Levies, and they contacted a lawyer for him, Diane Neal. We kept him in a private cell as a suspect until Ms. Neal arrived and met with him.
Garret called us down after he'd completed the autopsy. He said there were some very confusing things we needed to know. Fanny did die from strangulation, but there were no real signs of rape. She had indeed had consensual sex within the last six hours. There wasn't any trace of semen and it was obvious her partner had used a condom. What seemed odd was based on the body temperature he put the time of death between 4:00 pm and 5:00 pm that day but he was sure that the intercourse had occurred much earlier. Also the bruising of her throat occurred while the killer was wearing latex gloves and the finger sizes appeared to be much larger then all the fingerprints Vittoria found haphazardly all over the apartment.
In other words indications were that two men were involved, not one man raping and murdering her. Diane Neal said she believed that her client did have sex with Fanny, but had left her quite happy and well paid for her services. She said that Hanks claimed he did see another man there when he was boarding the elevator, a man the got on with him, but then said he forgot something and went back down the hall in the direction of Fanny's number 405 room.
Hanks voluntarily gave us his fingerprints and DNA which Vittoria matched up with those she found at the scene. Based on what we now have, we released William Hanks, but asked that he remain in town. The search is now on for the real killer!
