On the afternoon of February 9, 2005, the body of 43-year-old Geetha Angara (born July 15, 1961) a chemist, was found in a water tank at the Passaic Valley Water Commission treatment facility in Totowa, New Jersey, United States, after the tanks had been drained. She had not been seen since the previous morning when she had gone to the water tanks to take samples; items she had been carrying when she was last seen alive were also found. The items, a radio and broken beaker, were found in the water, below an access panel that was slightly ajar. Broken glass was found on the floor near that panel.
An autopsy found bruises on Angara's neck consistent with choking, as well as on her waist and elbows, suggesting she had been involved in a violent struggle, but not a deadly one. The cause of death was determined to be drowning, as she was alive when she had gone into the water. Investigators classified the case as a homicide, believing the killing had been intentional; they put Angara's death as having occurred the day before.
Since access to the plant was tightly controlled, police believed that the responsible party was someone else in the plant that day. After interviewing all of Angara's coworkers over the next few months, detectives found some possible motives and narrowed a list of possible suspects down to eight men. Three were ultimately considered suspects, but after further investigation the case went cold, and they have not been publicly identified and no arrests have been made.
Investigators have also considered the possibility that the death was purely accidental, based on the work of a Scottish pathologist who argues that injuries very similar to those associated with strangulation can occur as victims drown in very cold water such as that Angara was found in—the theory is that the plate over the tank might negligently have been left open following some sample collection for water testing. Struck by similarities with a 1968 killing of a woman, also in Passaic County, alone while in a high-security industrial complex on a weekend, they looked for leads in that case's file. In 2007, Angara's family, frustrated by the lack of progress, successfully pushed for the state's Attorney General to review the case, but that effort did not result in any new leads or information either.
Background
Born in 1961 in Chennai, India, Angara earned bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry from Loyola College, Chennai, the first woman in the school's history to do so. As the top student in the class, she earned a gold medal. In 1984, she emigrated to the U.S., where she earned additional master's degrees and a doctorate in organic chemistry from New York University.
Angara married another Indian émigré who worked in banking, and the couple shortly had the first of their three children, settling at first in Clifton, New Jersey, a suburb in Passaic County. After a year at Merck analyzing compounds, in 1992 Angara began working for the Passaic Valley Water Commission (PVWC), a public utility owned by Clifton and the neighboring cities of Passaic and Paterson, which provides of water daily to 800,000 customers in those cities and 14 other communities in that region of North Jersey. Seven years later, the family moved to Holmdel, to the south in Monmouth County, where they believed the school system was better.
In 2003 an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, "Brotherhood", used the PVWC plant as one of its filming locations. It centered on a coverup of lethal fraternity hazing; one scene had a character's body found floating in a tank. "Brotherhood" was the show's first episode aired in 2004.
Angara had been considering leaving the PVWC, but changed her mind after she was promoted to senior chemist of the plant and earned a plant operator's license. In that position, she took the lead in transitioning the Totowa plant from the chlorination it had been using to purify its water to an ozone-based process. She was proud of her work on that project, but some of her coworkers had resented both her promotion and the switch, her husband later recalled. Angara did not socialize much with her coworkers, other than a few she worked with closely, preferring to concentrate on her work.