Woman Slain - But Trip Continues

The argument in the car got bloody somewhere in Kansas, police say. But Angel Rivera kept driving. And driving.

More than 2,000 miles and two days later, he arrived in New York City - via Colorado - to see his family. In the passenger seat was the corpse of his longtime live-in girlfriend, who had been stabbed to death.

“Where’s Trudy?” police said Rivera’s sisters asked repeatedly when he showed up alone for dinner Sunday at a Bronx restaurant. “In the car,” was his only reply.

The sisters checked the Mazda. The body was in the bucket seat, covered by a jacket, a pool of blood at its feet.

Rivera, 33, of Topeka, Kan., told authorities his gruesome odyssey began when he and 30-year-old Trudy Poley were driving to her telephone company job in Lawrence, Kan., Friday morning and arguing over his unemployment, said Police Capt. John Dillon.