the pair had successfully enjoined the cab driver to help them throw the box into the Hudson River, near Tunnel nightclub. At first, Alig claimed the killing was in self-defense, but he later admitted to having committed manslaughter. In the documentary film Glory Daze (2015), the police recount the discovery by a group of children at the beach at Miller Field, Staten Island, of a box containing the remains of Melendez, in March 1996. (American Justice reports the box was found in April 1996.) A tropical storm had helped propel the floating, cork-lined box to Staten Island. Mainstream media began covering Melendez's disappearance when the victim's brother and father turned to the press for help and interest grew in rumors – first publicized to outsiders by Michael Musto as a blind item in his Village Voice column – that Alig and Riggs had murdered Melendez. The coincidental discovery, on Friday, September 8, 1996, of another dismembered body, fished out of the Harlem River at a pier near 134th Street by a homeless woman, sparked police to begin investigating the case in earnest. A police officer in Staten Island, who caught the Melendez media coverage, initiated an investigation of the John Doe found at Miller Field. The Staten Island Police Department used dental records to identify Melendez (whose body the coroner had mis-identified as that of an Asian male); on November 2, 1996, the mutilated corpse was positively identified as Melendez, and details of the rumors about how Melendez was killed were confirmed. In the face of increasing police scrutiny, Alig fled to Toms River, New Jersey, where he moved into a motel room with his boyfriend, a drug dealer named Brian. On December 5, 1996, the police arrested Alig at the motel and hours later, Riggs in Manhattan. Alig insisted to the police he and Riggs had killed Melendez in self-defense, and disposed of the body in a panic. (This story contrasts sharply with the account Alig had given the victim's brother, John ("Johnny") Melendez, in an August 1996 conversation secretly taped by the District Attorney's office, implicating "Melendez and club czar Gatien in a drug-dealing venture at Gatien's nightspots", and charging "that Riggs killed Melendez for Gatien because 'Peter is in trouble right now for drugs' and 'Angel knew everything and he was threatening to go to ... his friend at the Village Voice and tell him all this