Panorama City

Panorama City is the setting of a storage locker that became a major source of evidence in the investigation of Eldon Mate’s murder. Rented by Paul Ulrich under the alias Dr. L. Pasteur, the locker held four carefully organized cartons, preserved parcels, and a collection of working weapons. Its contents gave the investigation a material record of Ulrich’s activities and of people whose deaths were connected to the case.

Setting and Discovery

The locker was located in Panorama City and came to investigators’ attention through a key found in Ulrich’s bedroom nightstand. The key supplied a lead that the house itself had not: little of interest had been found there. Tanya Stratton had also vacated the premises within days of the shooting in Malibu, leaving the storage locker as a separate place where evidence had been deliberately collected and kept.

The discovery was examined roughly a month and a half after the slaughter of Eldon Mate, and weeks after Milo Sturgis had cataloged the locker’s contents. The investigation’s attention thus shifted from the immediate crime scene to a rented space whose significance lay in what it had accumulated over time. The locker was not merely a container for miscellaneous belongings: its four cartons were described as beautifully organized, and the arrangement made the stored material legible as a collection.

The Four Cartons

The first carton contained newspaper clippings, folded neatly and filed in chronological order, with victims’ names attached. Among them were meticulously preserved accounts of Roger Sharveneau’s suicide and the death of a teenage girl, Victoria Fusco. The clippings turned the carton into a record of past deaths, arranged not as loose reminders but as an ordered archive. Their presence connected the locker to a history wider than the killing of Eldon Mate, though the evidence does not establish the precise purpose for which Ulrich kept each item.

The second carton held clothing that had been pressed with similar care. Most of it consisted of women’s undergarments, accompanied by a smaller assortment of dresses, blouses, and neckties. The mixture made this collection markedly different from the newspaper file: instead of public accounts of victims, it consisted of personal garments, preserved as physical objects. The orderly presentation and the variety of clothing are concrete features of the cache; the evidence does not identify every item’s owner or explain how it came to be there.

The third carton contained more than a hundred pieces of jewelry, each kept in a plastic sandwich bag. Most of the pieces were junk, while a few were vintage costume jewelry. Some could be traced to dead people and others could not. Individually bagged, the pieces formed another inventory of personal effects, but their uncertain provenance distinguished this collection from the named, dated clippings. Together, the first three cartons gathered records and possessions associated with deaths, while leaving important questions about ownership and acquisition unresolved.

Preserved Parcels and Weapons

The fourth and largest carton contained a Styrofoam cooler with parcels wrapped in butcher paper and preserved with dry ice. An attendant at the storage facility remembered Dr. L. Pasteur visiting every week or so. The attendant recalled a large mustache and remembered that he offered pleasantries and talked about athletics, hiking, and hunting. Because the alias on the rental and the remembered visitor connect the facility’s account to Ulrich’s arrangement, the visits provide a human detail alongside the locker’s cataloged contents. The attendant also said it had been some time since the last visit; most of the dry ice had melted, and the largest carton had begun to reek. Milo Sturgis left the parcels for the coroner to unwrap rather than opening them himself.

Several rifles and handguns stood in a corner of the locker, all oiled and in perfect working order, alongside boxes of bullets. The same area contained two sets of Japanese surgical tools, one made in the United States and another made in Japan. These objects differed from the cartons’ carefully stored records and personal possessions: the firearms were maintained for use, while the tools added another starkly practical element to the cache. Their presence does not by itself establish how they were used, but it made the locker more than an archive of clippings and belongings.

Narrative Significance

Panorama City matters to the investigation because the locker gathered different kinds of evidence in one concealed, rented space: chronological reports of deaths, pressed clothing, individually bagged jewelry, parcels kept cold, and working guns. Their placement and condition supply the site’s defining contrast. Some objects were meticulously preserved, while the dry ice had eventually melted; the effort to maintain the contents did not prevent the cooler from deteriorating when visits stopped.

The locker’s discoveries also widened the case beyond the initial focus on Mate’s murder. Clippings named other victims, some jewelry could be traced to dead people, and the coroner was left to examine the packages inside the cooler. The resulting evidence did not make every connection or ownership question clear. Instead, Panorama City functions as the location where an orderly collection becomes disturbing precisely because its contents point outward—to multiple deaths and unidentified histories—without yet resolving them.