INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Man Arrested In Death Of Woman Whose Body Was Found Inside Of A Suitcase Outside Of A Hotel

By Angela Woods
Published on: 12:09 PST, Apr 10, 2016

Police announced the arrest of a man as a suspect in the murder of a young woman whose body was found in a suitcase last week. Joshua Matthew Palmer, 33, has been arrested and charged with suspicion in the murder of Shauna Haynes, 21. Haynes’ body had been stuffed into a suitcase and left in a trash can outside of a Core-Columbia Inn. Palmer was taken into custody in the 14000 block of San Diego Mission Road in Grantville.

According to KTLA-5, the body was found in the suitcase on Wednesday in front of the San Diego hotel. A neighborhood resident spotted the suitcase as he was out walking that day and noted what he believed to be hair caught in its zipper. He felt that the bag was suspicious and phoned police.

During the course of the initial investigation, it was discovered that the suitcase had actually been dumped into one of the trash cans in the area in which it was found. A man who pulled the trash cans to the curb said that particular can was unusually heavy. No one is sure who later removed the suitcase from the trash bin, but a police representative has said that many transients live in that particular area and that they tend to go through dumpsters and trash bins, and that is possibly how the suitcase was removed from the trash can.

Fox 5 describes the bag as “medium sized” with wheels.

Numerous media outlets originally speculated that the body had been dismembered, but Lt. Manuel Del Toro of the San Diego Police Department’s homicide unit denied this to the Los Angeles Times. He said that the body was fully intact.

The Los Angeles Times also writes that actually two reports were made to the police about the suspicious suitcase on Wednesday. Both men described above who came into contact with the suitcase phoned police. The first was around 11 a.m. when one of the residents described above of a local hotel pushed an unusually heavy trash can to the curb from the parking lot, and the other was when the second man reported above found the suitcase on the curb and noted the hair sticking out from the zipper.

The body was found in the suitcase near a row of trash cans in the rear parking area of the hotel, a three-story building.

Tommy Gunz, a local tattoo artist, worked on the victim prior to her death and recounts his memory of her. He said that she even mentioned him on her Facebook page thanking him for the work that he did on her tattoos and posting a photo of the finished results.

“Prayers up for sure, that’s one of the saddest things I’ve heard in my life.

She was a nice girl, yeah. We sat for like three hours or something maybe three or four hours, she was stoked on her tattoo.”

Gunz says that he also worked on the suspect as he and the victim showed up together for their February session.

“He looked kind of like that, yeah, kind of big. He wasn’t very much talkative but he didn’t seem like a mean person.”

Neither a motive for the slaying nor a cause of death have been released. Police confirm that both the victim and the suspect knew each other, citing posts and photos that each had made about the other on social media. Authorities also believe that the murder was premeditated. The victim’s relationship to Palmer has not yet been clearly defined.

https://twitter.com/mhng_farabz/status/718840281882165248

Palmer is being held in the San Diego Central Jail and will be arraigned on Tuesday.

[Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images]

Share this article: Man Arrested In Death Of Woman Whose Body Was Found Inside Of A Suitcase Outside Of A Hotel
More from Inquisitr