Open House Turned Deadly for Agent : Crime: The body of Elaine Siegel was found in an upscale house on Coldwater Canyon Drive. Real estate professionals worry about possible new dangers of the job.

A blue and white “Open” sign lay discarded in the ivy at an upscale Coldwater Canyon Drive ranch house. On Wednesday, no one answered the front door.

A day earlier, that door was unlocked by Elaine Siegel, a Beverly Hills real estate agent from Alvarez, Hyland & Young with a booming new career and a blooming romance. She was opening the house for the traditional Tuesday brokers’ open house, a time when real estate professionals “go on caravan” to see one anothers’ listings.

Most agents who stopped in at 2044 Coldwater Canyon Drive during the noon hour Tuesday found the home empty, although one reported seeing a purse and keys in the kitchen, police said.

Then an agent touring the house alone just after 1 p.m. took a close look and saw Siegel’s feet--and then the rest of her body. Siegel, 48, had been stabbed to death in a back bedroom.

The agent from Gilleran, Griffin Realtors who discovered the body “was terrified,” said her sales manager, Randy Spalding. “For all she knew the murderer could still have been there.”

Neither Spalding nor police would release the woman’s name.

Police were tight-lipped about their investigation, but speculated that Siegel may have interrupted a burglary, although Los Angeles Police Detective Charles Brown said the home was not ransacked. He would not say if anything was missing from the home.

But the woman who found the body told her boss, Thomas Gilleran, about a stack of paintings seen near the dead woman, suggesting that a burglary might have been interrupted.

Coldwater Canyon Drive is a busy thoroughfare connecting the city to the San Fernando Valley. The gray and white house is owned by criminal defense attorney David Beerman, a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office in the 1970s. It is listed at $795,000.

Despite Beerman’s clientele, Brown said, police were not pursuing the possibility that the killer was a disgruntled client of the attorney.

Beerman, through an assistant, declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

Brown also said investigators were not focusing on friends or associates of the victim, a former hairdresser and makeup artist who has been in the real estate business less than a year.

“She was an incredible broker,” said Elaine Young, a friend and a well-known Beverly Hills broker who of late has been on the talk-show circuit warning women about the dangers of silicone injections.

Young, who shared the listing with Siegel, said the dead woman, who had a grown daughter, was “the happiest she had ever been in her entire life.”

“She was madly in love. She had just lost 40 pounds,” Young said.

The two women were going to fly to Florida today.

Siegel’s amicable divorce from broker Ken A. Siegel would have been final in four days, Young said.

Ken Siegel did not return phone calls.

Real estate professionals were divided over whether the murder portends new danger for brokers and agents, a group that deals with strangers on a daily basis.

Young insists the murder is a “fluke tragedy’ that is unrelated to the buying and selling of property, but others are not so certain.

Helene Sherman, a Jon Douglas agent in Beverly Hills, said her phone lines were buzzing with anxious colleagues wondering if their business had become too risky.

“We’re all freaked,” Sherman said. “We are very vulnerable.