Neville Olson, a Los Angeles-based freelance paparazzi photographer, was found dead in his apartment on 23 January 2012. Although the bizarre manner of his death became front page news, this is the first time his neighbour, Stevie Flanagan, who discovered his remains, has spoken publicly.

You got to be a particular kind of person to do what Neville did for a living. I asked him once if he felt dirty doing it, hiding in bushes waiting to get an up-skirt shot of whichever starlet was flavour of the month, but he said he was just doing what the public wanted him to do. He specialised in the dirt, like those shots he got of Corinna Sanchez buying coke in Compton–how he even knew she’d be in that neighbourhood, he never said; least not to me. He was cagey about how he got his info.

It kinda goes without saying that Neville was a little weird. A loner. I guess his work suited his personality. I met him when he was moving into the unit downstairs from me. The place where we lived at the time, it’s this split-level complex in El Segundo. Lots of people who lived there worked at LAX, so you got people coming and going at all hours. I was working for One Time Car Rental, so the place suited me. Convenient. I wouldn’t say we were close friends or anything like that, but if we ran into each other, we’d shoot the shit. I never saw anyone visiting him and I never saw him with a woman, not once, or a guy. He kinda came across as asexual. A couple of months after he moved in, he asked me if I wanted to come over and ‘meet his roommates’. I thought maybe he’d asked someone in to help share the rent, so I said, sure. I was curious to see what type of person would get along with him.

I almost puked when I went into his unit the first time. Shit, man, it stank. Don’t know how to describe it, guess you could say it was kinda like a mix of rotten fish and meat. It was hot and dark in there, too–the curtains were drawn and the A.C. wasn’t on. I was like, what the fuck? Then I saw something moving in the corner of the room–this large shadow–and it looked like it was heading straight for me. I couldn’t take in what I was seeing at first, then I realised it was a massive fucking lizard. I yelled and Neville laughed like crazy. He was waiting for my reaction. Told me to chill, said, ‘Don’t worry, that’s just George.’ All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there, but I was trying not to be a pussy, you know? I asked Neville what the fuck he was doing with a thing like that in the apartment and he just shrugged, said he had three of the fucking things–monitors from Africa or whatever–and that most of the time he let them run around, rather than keep them in their cages or aquariums. He said they were really intelligent, ‘Clever as pigs or dogs.’ I asked him if they were dangerous and he showed me this jagged scar on his wrist. ‘Big flap of skin came off it,’ he said, and you could tell he was proud of it. ‘But they’re usually cool if you treat them right.’ I asked him what they ate, and he was like, ‘Baby rats. Live ones. Get them from a wholesaler.’ Imagine that being your job, huh, baby rat merchant? He went into this whole spiel about how some people were against feeding rodents to monitors, and all that time I just watched that thing. Willing it not to get too close to me. That wasn’t all, he kept his snake collection and his spiders in his bedroom. Aquariums everywhere. Went on and on about how tarantulas make the best pets. Later, they said he was an animal hoarder.

Couple of days after Black Thursday, he knocked on my door, told me he was going out of town. Most of his work was LA-based, but occasionally he’d have to go further afield. That was the first time he asked me to check on his ‘buddies’. ‘I stock ’em up before I go,’ he said. He could be gone for as long as three days and they’d be fine. He asked me to check on their water levels and swore the monitors would be locked up tight. He was usually cagey about his assignments, but this time he told me where he was going, as there was a chance he’d get himself in deep shit.

He said he’d called in a favour to get on one of the charter helicopters, planned on heading to Miami, to that hospital where they’d taken Bobby Small, see if he could get a shot of the kid. Said he had to do it fast, the kid was being taken back to NYC soon.

I asked him how in the hell he thought he was going to get anywhere near there–from what I’d seen on the news, security at that hospital was tight–but he just smiled. He said he specialised in this kind of thing.

He was only gone three days, so I didn’t need to go into his place after all. I saw him climbing out of a cab just as I was getting home from my shift. He looked like crap. Really shaken, like he was sick or something. I asked him if he was cool, and if he’d managed to get a picture of the kid. He didn’t answer me and he looked so bad I asked him in for a drink. He came right over, didn’t even go into his own place to check on the reptiles. You could see he wanted to talk, but couldn’t get the words out. I poured him a shot and he knocked it back, and then I gave him a beer because I’d run out of hard liquor. He downed his beer and asked me for another. He downed that too.

The liquor helped, and slowly he told me what he’d done. I thought he was going to say that he’d disguised himself as a porter or something to get into that hospital, maybe sneaked in through the morgue, B-movie style. But it was worse. Clever. But worse. He’d moved into a hotel just down from the hospital, had this whole cover story and fake ID and accent that he’d used before–a UK businessman in Miami for a conference. He said he’d done the same thing when Klint Maestro, the lead singer of the Space Cowboys, OD-ed. That’s how come he got the shots of Klint looking all wasted in his hospital gown. It was easy. He just took extra insulin to make himself go hypo. I didn’t even know he was an insulin-dependent diabetic, well, why would I? He collapsed at the bar and let the barman or whoever know that he needed to be taken to the nearest hospital. Then he passed out.

In Casualty they put him on a drip, and in order to get admitted, he pretended to have an epileptic fit. He could’ve died, but he said it wasn’t the first time he’d done it, and he always kept a couple of little baggies of sugar in his sock to sort him out. It was his modus operandi kind of thing. Said it was a bitch to move around in that condition (they’d given him valium after the fit and he still felt like shit after making himself hypo).

I asked him if he managed to get to where the kid was and he was like, nah, it was a bust. Said he couldn’t get anywhere near Bobby’s ward, security was too tight.

But when they found his camera later, it showed he’d managed to get into the kid’s room after all. There’s a shot of Bobby sitting up in bed, and he’s smiling straight at the camera, as if he was posing for a family shot or whatever. You must’ve seen it. Someone from the coroner’s office leaked it. Kinda creeped me out.

He turned down a third beer and said, ‘There’s no point, Stevie. There’s no point to any of this.’

I was like, ‘Any of what?’

He acted like he hadn’t heard me. I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. Then he left.

I kinda got wrapped up in work after that. That puke virus was going around, and it seemed everyone at work was off sick. I was working double shifts and dead on my feet half the time. It was only later that I realised it had to have been a week since I’d run into Neville.

Then, one of the guys who lived in the section on the other side of Neville’s place, Mr Patinkin, asked me for the super’s number, said there was a problem with the drains. Said he thought maybe the smell was coming from Neville’s place.

I guess I knew right then something was up. I went down, knocked on the door. I could hear the faint sound of the TV, nothing else. I still had the key, but I wish to Christ I’d called the cops straight off. Mr Patinkin came with me. He needed trauma counselling afterwards; I still get nightmares. It was dark in there, but I could see Neville from the front door, sitting slumped against the wall, legs outstretched. His shape didn’t look right. That’s because there were bits missing.

They said he died of an insulin overdose, but the autopsy showed that he might not have been completely dead when they started to… you know.

It was big news, ‘Man eaten alive by pet lizards and spiders’. There was this whole story going around that the tarantulas had spun webs all over his body and were nesting inside his chest cavity. Bullshit. Far as I could tell, the spiders were still all in their spiderariums or whatever you call them. It was the monitor lizards who ate him.

Funny that he became the news. What do you call it? Ironic. There were even guys like him sneaking round the apartment trying to get a photo. The story pushed all that stuff about the The Three miracle children off the front page for a day. Later on it all got dredged up again when that preacher guy went on about it being another sign of the apocalypse or whatever–the animals turning on humans.

The only way I can deal with it is to think that maybe that’s how Neville would have wanted to go. He loved those fucking lizards.