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Investigators began to consider the possibility that the killing was not planned and instead had arisen from either an argument or Angara witnessing something the killer did not want anyone to witness; they had also ruled out the discoloration and ozone issues as a motive, and no longer believed the displacement sensor's breakdown was a factor.
From the strength required to lift and replace the access panel, and struggle with the , chemist, police came to believe the killer was male (although the county coroner argued that a woman in sufficient physical condition could have done those things as well).
The Passaic County prosecutor's office assigned 13 detectives to work the case; they spent 4,000 hours interviewing all the plant's employees and getting DNA samples from those who had worked there that day.
Workers did their jobs in pairs as a safety precaution while the police kept a close eye on what happened at the plant.
The investigation exacerbated tensions among employees.
A month after Angara was killed, two electricians started arguing about overtime.
One threatened to take the other "off the grounds and smash his head in", according to police.
After the other electrician complained, he was suspended.
By that time investigators had narrowed their focus to a group of eight men, finding that many of the employees had a generally favorable impression of Angara.
They still had not identified what might have moved one of them to kill her.
"Either there is some very powerful motive out there that someone has kept completely to themselves, or it may suggest this wasn't a planned killing", such as a confrontation that got more heated, chief assistant prosecutor John Latoracca told "The New York Times".
One year after the crime, detectives had narrowed that group down to three suspects, one of whom was the coworker who had first taken note of Angara's absence after walking down to the basement.
James Wood, chief homicide detective for the prosecutor's office, told "The New York Post", that another suspect was in his opinion about to confess before retaining counsel and refusing to speak with police further.
"None of them have solid alibis; they all had access to the place she was", Wood added.
Police had asked all three suspects to take lie detector tests, with different results.
One passed, another was inconclusive, and a third refused.
"This killer isn't smart, just lucky", Wood said.
Investigators believed more strongly that the case was an instance of manslaughter rather than a planned killing.
Re-interviews following the lie detector tests did not produce anything.
Divers looked through the tanks to see if anything had been missed.
Federal and state environmental regulators reviewed the plant's records, at the request of police, for anything unusual they might have missed.
By the middle of 2006, no new leads had emerged, and the case went cold, one of two out of Passaic County's 30 homicides that year that went unsolved.
At the request of the Angara family, the state Attorney General's office had the state police review the case in 2007, but nothing new developed from that.
After Angara's death, the PVWC contracted for improved security, including armed guards patrolling inside and outside the plant at all hours.
In 2007 the family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the PVWC and some of its employees.
They alleged that the plant had a history of safety violations and accidents, for which the state had cited it 55 times, but the commission had done nothing to correct them.
After two years, a judge ordered the parties to mediation.
Ten years after the killing, when the Angara family had lobbied state senator Joe Kyrillos to support their call for another state-level review, police suggested that they might have been mistaken about the three suspects.
"[W]e looked into the additional things that became areas of concern in interviewing these folks", chief assistant prosecutor Latoracca told "The Star-Ledger", "and based on that, we thought that while there were reasons they came across as hinky, we ultimately didn't believe they actively killed her".
Police have considered two alternative possibilities related to the crime.
Early in the case, investigators noted that an unsolved 1968 killing, also in their jurisdiction, bore some similarities to the Angara case.
On August 31 of that year, the body of 22-year-old Joan Freeman, from what was then known as West Paterson, was found in a hallway at the Hoffmann-La Roche plant complex that straddled the border between Clifton in Passaic County and Nutley in neighboring Essex County.
She had been attacked suddenly from behind, struck several times on the head with a wooden mallet, after which the attacker slit her throat; any one of the wounds inflicted would have been enough to kill her, the coroner said.
Passaic County authorities investigated the case since it was determined to have occurred on their side of the county line.
Like Angara, the case combined minimal evidence at the scene with a limited pool of suspects.
Freeman, a secretary at the plant, had also been working alone, doing overtime recording employees' work hours from their time cards, on a Saturday in a second-floor library in one of the 86 buildings on the drug company's campus, when she was killed.
There were no fingerprints on the mallet, and the knife used to cut her throat was never found.
The campus itself was, like the Totowa treatment plant, fenced off with access permitted only to those who had been cleared to enter by security.
Like Angara, detectives pored over Freeman's personal life but could not find anything which could give rise to a motive.
The county prosecutor's office, state police, and Clifton police devoted 16 investigators, including two full-time, to interview 300 people who might have been able to be on campus that day, including lie detector tests.
But they were unable to narrow down any specific suspects.
"Many times I went home and couldn't sleep", one of detectives recalled later.
"We just didn't get that lucky break".
The case is still open; detectives review the files occasionally.
"The events are similar in nature", county prosecutor Avigliano told "The Star-Ledger".
"A woman was murdered in a secure facility."
His office's detectives studied the case both to see if anyone who had worked at Hofmann later worked for the PVWC, and to see if they could learn from how the investigators handled the Freeman case.
In May 2006, over a year after Angara's death, it was reported that some of the investigators had begun to consider the possibility that it was in fact an accident.
They had contacted Scottish forensic pathologist Derrick Pounder of the University of Dundee, one of the few in the field expert in drownings, particularly those that occur in cold water.
His research has found that in a small percentage of such cases, the victim experiences bruising on the neck and petechiae on the eyeballs that closely mimics injuries otherwise seen as strong indicators of premortem strangulation.
Pounder never examined Angara's body (and could not have, since it had been cremated shortly after her death in accordance with Hindu funerary traditions), nor any of the records from the autopsy.
County prosecutor Avigliano noted that five medical examiners in Passaic County, who "had" had access to the body and records, had all agreed that the death was a homicide.
But that belief was not unanimous among those who had been part of the initial investigation.
The county's chief homicide detective Wood retired in 2006 after having worked on the Angara case for 18 months.
By the time of the third anniversary of Angara's death, he had come to believe, in part after considering Pounder's research, that the case was an accident, the result of negligence rather than malice.
He said that the plate may have been removed before Angara came to the room where it was.
An unnamed plant worker told "The New York Post" that on the day of Angara's death, the state had ordered some testing as a result of the pinkish discoloration.
Normally the necessary sample could be collected by machines along the path, but one supervisor was "very old school.
We still tested by taking water directly from the tank.
And that required removing the plate", the worker said.
Wood believes that someone forgot to replace the plate.
When Angara came into the dimly lit area, she did not see it and fell in, after which the person who should have replaced the plate did so in a hurry.
"I don't think anyone will ever admit to taking that plate off or putting it back on because they know they're going to be held liable for it", Wood told "The Star-Ledger".
In 2015 Angara's daughter disputed that theory.
Her mother was exceedingly cautious, she said, and it was unlikely that she would have failed to see a dark, wide hole in the floor.
At the time, plant workers said they had never seen one of those panels left open, either.
"I think you would have to ignore a lot of facts to believe it was an accident", Angara's daughter said.
The family has also questioned why it seemed Angara's coworkers failed to notice her absence for the rest of their day.
At that time the county prosecutor's office described the case as "open but inactive"; chief assistant prosecutor Latoracca, who was by then in private practice as a criminal defense attorney, said he understood why Wood and some other detectives had come to believe Angara's death was an accident but reiterated that he had faith in the medical conclusions that her death had been caused intentionally.
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