Naked and lifeless, her body was found in the predawn of her 22nd birthday: March 3, 2006. A Friday. Investigators from the Las Vegas Metro Police Department, having been summoned to the 25th floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino at 3:23 in the morning, found little to work with upon their arrival: The deceased was just a young woman—more like an older girl, in reality—who had no perceptible bruises or abrasions, and only enough possessions linked to her to indicate that she was a Californian with a history of intermittent and ephemeral visits to Las Vegas.
Yet, with the evidence that they did have, investigators came to the conclusion that it was a homicide case lying before them.
A few days later, Metro homicide detectives, maintaining a stiff reticence on account of the ongoing investigation, said only that the girl had rented a room at a hotel just north of the Strip the day before her death—Thursday—and that her name, as it appeared on her California driver's license, just above her San Francisco home address, was Bridget, born March 3, 1984.
The coroner's office, as of the time this story went to press, has yet to identify the cause of Bridget's premature death, and will not be able to do so until the results of her blood tests are returned. But no matter. What little is known about this case so far is tragic enough, and if that which authorities suspect and which all the facts of the case point to is true—that Bridget was one of the 250 escorts whom researchers estimate to be working in the Las Vegas Valley at any given time of the day—then her death is another kind of travesty; for it is by no means an oddity in this town. "We don't have any numbers at our fingertips," Lt. Curtis Williams, a leader of Metro's vice section, says, referring to the number of deaths amongst prostitutes in Las Vegas. "It's difficult to place numbers here; you just really don't know."
And that's because statistics are hard to calculate in a business that is not only furtive and surreptitious but also stigmatized by society, assert UNLV researchers Kate Hausbeck and Barbara Bents, who began their pioneer studies on both the legal and illegal sex industries in Nevada before the turn of the new millennium. In their 2005 report Sex Industry and Sex Workers in Nevada, the two sociological doctors state that presenting either consistent or reliable numbers is an implausible endeavor, considering the taboo nature of the subject.
Nevertheless, one high-level escort in Las Vegas says that while murder is the extreme, brutalities against working girls occur on such a regular basis that it's heartrending to speak of: spitting, cursing, and degrading to no end; slapping, beating and the barbaric forcing of anal sex; and all sorts of rape and other atrocities of which you would never believe a human capable until you experienced it firsthand.
"Things like these happen all the time," says the independent escort, an educated woman and an indefatigable political activist. "They usually go unreported, or covered up—to protect the image of the tourist industry, you know. I'm not sure why this one happened to make the news."
The lieutenant, the UNLV researchers, and the escort—they all say the first mistake of many of Clark County's prostitutes (the outcall dancers working for an agency, the streetwalkers working for a pimp, the independent escorts working for themselves; some 3,000 to 5,000 in total, depending on the survey consulted) is that they don't realize the inherent perils of the profession upon signing on.
"It's a very sensitive situation," says Lt. Williams. "No matter if [prostitutes] enter a hotel room on the Strip or a motel Downtown, or even a local's house, they're putting themselves in an unfamiliar environment. And that's dangerous." Therefore, the high-level escort says, it's imperative that a girl screens each and every one of her potential clients with sober diligence, checking the validity of their employment and any references from other girls in the business. And above all they must put him to the test of a woman's intuition, because the truth is that most prostitutes arrive at their client's doorstep alone and vulnerable, armed with nothing but their ability to discern precarious circumstances and their wit to escape them.
"But the problem is," the insider says, "most girls working for these agencies—and there's only five or six agencies controlling everything—don't have the intuition to secure themselves." She, an escort who dove into the business headfirst five years ago with an agency, says that prostitutes are often docile and incognizant young girls who are so overcome by the pressures to make money and please their employer that they lose their intuitive sense of self-protection—that human instinct to judge not only character but also the safety of a situation. Then they find themselves at the mercy of a stranger, whose aggression could be easily sparked by unfulfilled expectations, alcoholic temerity, ruthless power trips, sheer testosterone rages, or even certain antidepressant pills, which she says in her experience causes the worst abnormal behavior amongst clients, disconnecting their sense of right and wrong.
And then, she says, the girls are rendered powerless, abandoned to their own fate like, perhaps, Bridget this past March 3rd.
"A lot of girls have been taught to be more scared of the police than the psychos," she says. "It's so sad. They're not even aware that tragedies like the girl at Mandalay Bay can happen."
Hausbeck and Brents say that the city's illicit sex industry, which operates in the shadows of the Strip's bright lights and the town's anonymous atmosphere, has become so sophisticated with the help of modern technology that now it's all but invincible. The local phone book, for instance, has an adult entertainment section as thick as this copy of the Weekly, with its 115 brazen pages, and there's not much anyone can do to eradicate it.
And everyone knows the underlying reason, too: economics. Plain and pure economics.
"Here, in Vegas, it's a very lucrative profession," the high-level escort says. "Very, very lucrative."Yes, lucrative enough for a girl to travel from Northern California and stay for a few nights, renting a room and entertaining men in their hotel rooms at all hours of the night. But is it also lucrative enough to risk the myriad perils of the job and perhaps gamble away a young life, just turning 22 years old?
No suspects have been named thus far in Bridget's death, and Sgt. Rocky Alby said Metro homicide detectives are still interviewing guests from the 25th floor.