GRUESOME

Search for Missing Woman Leads to Headless Torso and Bloody Power Saw

Officials said they believe the torso belonged to a woman who lived with the suspect at the time of her disappearance last month.

A power cord connected to a school bus parked on a New Orleans man’s property led authorities to a gruesome discovery Tuesday: a deep freezer with a headless woman’s torso inside. Also hidden in a nearby ice chest was a power saw with “bits of flesh and fluid on the blade surface,” investigators wrote in a subsequent report. The property owner, 34-year-old Benjamin Beale, was taken in for questioning. After refusing to answer investigators’ questions, Beale was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice in a death investigation. Authorities later tacked on weapons and drugs charges, looking into an alleged methamphetamine lab being run out of Beale’s home. The body hadn’t thawed enough to make a positive identification by Tuesday evening, but law enforcement sources told The Times-Picayune that officers believe the body belonged to Julia Dardar, a woman whose disappearance police were investigating when they searched Beale’s home. Dardar, who was reported missing in December, had allegedly been living with Beale at the time of her disappearance.