Evidence Discovered in Ulrich's Storage Locker

Evidence Discovered in Ulrich's Storage Locker is the posthumous inventory that turned Paul Ulrich’s rented unit into a material record of suspected violence. Catalogued by Milo Sturgis after Ulrich had been shot in Malibu, its four carefully arranged cartons contained clippings about deaths, pressed clothing, jewelry, and a cooler holding butcher-paper parcels preserved with dry ice. The locker also held working firearms and surgical tools; together, these finds expanded the investigation beyond the murder of Eldon Mate, while leaving the most consequential contents for the coroner to identify.

Discovery and investigative setting

Late in November, a month and a half after the slaughter of Eldon Mate, Milo Sturgis had finished cataloguing four cardboard cartons from a Panorama City storage locker rented by Paul Ulrich under the name Dr. L. Pasteur. A key found in Ulrich’s bedroom nightstand had led investigators to the unit. The discovery followed the shooting in Malibu; by then Tanya Stratton had vacated the premises within days of that shooting. The house itself had yielded nothing very interesting, making the locker’s contents a sharply different kind of evidence: an ordered collection concealed outside the home.

The timing places the inventory in the aftermath of a violent investigation rather than at the moment the locker was opened. Milo’s work was methodical: he catalogued what the cartons held, while some objects could be connected to dead people and others could not. The distinction matters. The discovery supplied a disturbing pattern and several investigative leads, but it did not make every item’s history or purpose certain.

Four cartons and their contents

The cartons were beautifully organized. The first held newspaper clippings, neatly folded and filed in chronological order, with victims’ names attached. Among them were meticulously preserved details of Roger Sharveneau’s suicide and the death of a teenage girl named Victoria Fusco. The collection thus preserved deaths as records to be sorted and revisited, not as isolated scraps of news. The selection made the locker feel less like casual storage than an archive, although the inventory alone did not establish why Ulrich had kept each clipping.

The second carton contained clothing pressed with care. Most of it was women’s underwear, but it also included a few dresses, blouses, and neckties. Its contents were varied rather than uniform, and the account does not assign a known owner to every garment. That gap between careful preservation and uncertain provenance recurs throughout the discovery: the objects were plainly collected, but their individual stories were not all recoverable from the objects alone.

In the third carton, Milo found more than a hundred pieces of jewelry, each placed in a plastic sandwich bag. Most was junk; a few pieces were vintage costume jewelry. Some baubles could be traced to dead people, while the origins of others remained unknown. The bags and the sheer number of pieces made the collection legible as an accumulation, but not as a complete catalogue of victims or stolen property. The distinction between traceable and untraceable items kept the evidence powerful without making it definitive in every instance.

The cooler and the instruments

The fourth carton was the largest and most alarming. Inside it sat a Styrofoam cooler containing parcels wrapped in butcher paper and preserved with dry ice. The storage-facility attendant recalled that Dr. Pasteur came by about once a week. He remembered a nice man with a large, old-fashioned mustache who offered pleasantries and talked about athletics, hiking, and hunting. It had been some time since the alias’s last visit; most of the dry ice had melted, and the carton had begun to reek. Milo left the parcels unopened for the coroner. Their contents therefore remained unconfirmed at the time of the inventory, even as their preservation and the emerging smell made them an urgent part of the investigation.

Several rifles and handguns lay in a corner of the locker, each oiled and in perfect working order, with boxes of bullets. The same area also contained two sets of surgical instruments, one Japanese-made and one made in the United States. These tools resonated with the evidence from Mate’s murder: the killing involved extremely careful cutting in the confined space of a van, with no blood found outside and the scene apparently swept clean. Yet the locker inventory did not establish that either set of instruments had been used in that killing. It raised a concrete line of inquiry, not a forensic conclusion.

Evidentiary significance and limits

Taken together, the cartons joined several kinds of material evidence: a chronology of deaths, garments, possible victim-linked jewelry, parcels requiring examination, and a maintained arsenal alongside surgical equipment. Their orderliness contrasted with the violence associated with Ulrich and the investigation into Mate’s murder. The alias Dr. L. Pasteur also connected the unit’s rental identity to the attendant’s remembered visitor, whose visits and ordinary conversation had helped him pass as unremarkable. The locker’s contents made that everyday cover newly unsettling without, by themselves, explaining every object or visit.

The discovery’s force lies partly in what it made investigable and partly in what it withheld. Milo could identify some jewelry as belonging to dead people, but not all of it; he could inventory the weapons and instruments, but their use was not demonstrated by their presence; and the coroner, not the police inventory, would determine what the dry-ice parcels contained. A newspaper account subsequently framed the case as a victim in a police shooting believed responsible for Eldon Mate’s murder. The locker gave that suspicion a dense physical context, while preserving the difference between a compelling pattern and proof for each individual item.