Smell leads police to body in Midtown house

So what if you and your neighbors suspected there was a dead body hidden inside one of the houses on your block, but no one took you seriously? That's apparently what happened in Midtown for weeks before police finally investigated this weekend and discovered a body in the trunk of a car parked inside the garage of a townhome. Ugh.

Neighbors in the 1300 block of Rosalie said they began noticing a foul odor coming from Steven Mark Weinstein's home several weeks ago. At first they thought it was rotting garbage, but when the smell didn't go away and flies began coming and going underneath the garage door, residents wondered — half-jokingly — if there really wasn't a body inside. People began calling the police, who came out to investigate March 10. John Connally was housesitting in the neighborhood when the police showed up: "I opened the door and said, 'Oh, you're here about the dead body.' The officer saw the flies coming out from under the cracked garage door and smelled the odor," he told the Chronicle. Mail carrier Nedra Siverand refused to deliver mail two weeks ago, saying the smell made her sick to her stomach: "I knew something was dead. I just knew it," she said. Weinstein eventually e-mailed neighbors and blamed the smell on food left around the house by a man named Jim Stiffler, who Weinstein said had fallen on hard times and was staying with him. "This has been unpleasant to say the least, not to mention incredibly embarrassing. At least now I can feel dangerous having had the police called on me twice. But seriously, this will soon be a distant memory," he wrote. In an e-mail Thursday, Weinstein said that "the smell should be gone (praying) by the morning."

But it wasn't, and Weinstein's explanations weren't enough to convince some people. "[Weinstein] wasn't driving his car and started driving a new brick-red Nissan Frontier pickup truck several weeks ago. I told them I thought that the body was in the trunk of his car," Katy Lindsay, who had been calling and faxing police for more than a week, said. "Plus, no one had seen the roommate around for weeks." When officers finally went into the home early Saturday, they found a body in the trunk of a white Oldsmobile Alero with New York license plates (Weinstein recently moved here from New York, neighbors said). Weinstein — who reportedly tried to swallow a bunch of pills with alcohol when the cops showed up — has been charged with tampering with or fabricating evidence, and the body has been sent to the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office for investigation.