Body Found in Car at LAX

Torrance Civil Service Commissioner Elinor Massey, reported missing a month ago, may be the woman whose badly decomposed body was found on the back seat of a car at Los Angeles International Airport late Friday, police said.

Although the coroner’s office had not made a positive identification of the body, Fred Massey said Saturday that he believed the body was his wife’s.

“It was our car,” Massey said. “The police said it looked like a woman of her size and stature. I took the dental records to the coroner’s office this morning. My assumption is that it’s her, and it’s just a question of looking at the dental records and confirming it.”

He reported the 43-year-old woman missing on March 5, a day after she told him and her sons Eric, 8, and David, 12, that she was going to the Mervyn’s department store in Torrance to buy a pair of shoes, Lt. Larry Robinson said.

Fred Massey said his wife suffered from periodic bouts of depression and added that police had told him they found empty bottles of prescription medication near the body.

Elinor Massey was last seen driving a 1979 blue wood-paneled Toyota station wagon that matched the description of the car in which the body was found, said Lt. James Cameron of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Airport Police.

Parking Stub Stamped

Cameron said an airport security guard found the body at 5:30 p.m. Friday in a car in parking lot B of the airport near 111th Street and Aviation Boulevard. A parking stub found in the car was stamped with the time and date the woman apparently entered the parking lot--7:51 p.m., March 4, he said.

Massey said his wife’s depression began in 1983 after she developed chronic back pain. She had attempted suicide twice, in 1985 and 1987, but both times he found her at home and took her to the hospital, he said.

In January, under the care of a San Diego psychopharmacologist, she began taking a new anti-depressant medication, but the drug “hadn’t helped,” Massey said.

“I think what was disturbing for all of us was that she could disappear and not be found for so long in a community like this,” he said.