Police in Missouri are turning to the public, as well as the cloud, for assistance as they continue to investigate the killings of two South American research scientists who were found dead Saturday inside their scorched Kansas City apartment.
Kansas City authorities handling the investigation into the killings of predoctoral researchers Camila Behrensen and Pablo Guzmán Palma asked that midtown residents who live along Oak Street and have home video surveillance systems, to call them.
The bodies of Behrensen, 24, of Buenos Aires and Guzmán Palma, 25, of Santiago, Chile, were recovered by firefighters from inside a burned midtown apartment on Saturday.
Behrensen and Guzmán Palma were both predoctoral researchers and members of the 2020 predoctoral research class at Stowers Institute for Medical Research.
Authorities say they are looking into a specific area that encompasses Oak Street from East 41st Street to East 43rd Street, between McGee Street to Gillham Road. They are interested in viewing and video footage (ring type cameras, exterior home surveillance camera, trail cams, etc.) or still photographs, from any time between 10:30 p.m. on Sept. 30 through 5 a.m. on Oct. 1.
Anyone with footage are urged to contact detectives at (816) 234-5330 or (816) 234-5043.
Behrensen, an avid runner, had earned a Bachelor’s Degree in biotechnology in 2020 from the University Argentina de la Empresa and spent two years studying metabolic changes in fruit flies.
Guzmán Palma earned his Bachelor’s Degree in biochemistry from Pontifical Catholic University in Chile, where he had been doing research on spinal cord regeneration.
In addition to scouring over video footage, police are turning to the cloud for help.
Detectives are asking Amazon for access to its cloud storage so that they can obtained data from the apartment’s Alexa device.
Police believe the killer may have been inside the victims’ apartment for several hours and hope Alexa managed to capture some of the conversations that may have unfolded during that time.
If you have any information about the killings, please call detectives at (816) 234-5043.
Tips can also be left anonymously at (816) 474-TIPS.
A $25,000 reward is being offered for information leading to an arrest.
