News of the Weird

[SharonBell]

Woman Dead Since 2003 Left Sitting at TV
By TERRY KINNEY, AP

CINCINNATI (Jan. 10) - The mummified body of a woman who didn't want to be buried was found in a chair in front of her television set 2 1/2 years after her death, authorities said.

Johannas Pope had told her live-in caregiver that she didn't want to be buried and planned on returning after she died, Hamilton County Coroner O'Dell Owens said Monday.

Pope died in August 2003 at age 61. Her body was found last week in the upstairs of her home on a quiet street. Some family members continued to live downstairs, authorities said [my emphasis]. No one answered the doorbell at Pope's home Monday afternoon.

It could take weeks to determine Pope's cause of death because little organ tissue was available for testing, Owens said.

An air conditioner had been left running upstairs, and that allowed the body to slowly mummify, he said. The machine apparently stopped working about a month ago, and the body began to smell.

"Standing outside, one could smell death," Owens said.

Police went to the house last Wednesday after receiving a call from a relative who hadn't seen Pope in years. They found a staircase behind a door blocked by a basket and climbed to the second floor, where they found the body.

An air conditioner had been left running upstairs, and that allowed the body to slowly mummify.   
   
It was not clear if any crimes were committed, Owens said.

Authorities did not identify the caregiver, a women in her 40s who apparently lived in the home with Pope, Pope's daughter and her 3-year-old granddaughter.

"The caregiver is not someone you'd think was from another planet or really seems off the wall - (she's) a pretty normal kind of person," he said. "But I think out of loyalty, friendship and love of her friend, (she) decided to keep the body at home."


01/10/06 9 EST

[Ed]

Eew - stinky

A guy I used to work with kept smelling this terrible smell in the hallway to his flat.  Several weeks later, he came home to find police crawling all over the place and he wasn't allowed into his home.  It turned out that the woman across the hall from him had died several weeks earlier and was steadily composting in the bath.  Her husband was carrying on as if nothing had happened.

[SharonBell]

WHOA!! Now THAT'S what I call DENIAL!!!

[Ed]

Innit?  Can you imagine doing your morning ablutions with your significant other lying bloated and stinking in the bath, still soaking in their own juices, flies all over the place, maggots writhing?  I mean, if that doesn't register as wrong in your mind, WTF does?

[SharonBell]

Maybe he just wasn't much of a housekeeper...or had no sense of smell!! 

[doolols]

Very, very gross 

[Robert M. Blevins]

I saw a very overweight man in Seattle wearing a t-shirt that read this:

"I Beat Anorexia"

[JoyceCarter]

Right...  They're all out there, these people, evidently!

A relative of mine, Evelyn, tells of having been stopped in the street by twins in her village, people she'd known her whole life.  These men had always been known to be a bit slow in the uptake, from schooldays on, but all right in a plodding way.  Neither one had ever married, and they lived with their widowed mother.

One said to Evelyn,  'Could 'ee come tek a look at our mother?'

She asked him, 'Isn't she well, boy?'

And the other one answered, 'We think 'er's daid, cuz the rats be atin' 'er.'

Fair play to them - they got to the right conclusion in the end!

[Geoff_N]

Morbid and weird though these true stories of corpses in houses are, it is old hat in stories and TV soaps. The UK teen soap Hollyoaks had such a story last year where a teenage boy was in denial of his mother's death. She sat in her armchair for weeks. Similar storyline in a Doc Martin episode. Even in Britain, given a dry summer, a corpse of a thin person won't necessarily give off pungent odours, especially after a week - - tell 'em Sharon.

Geoff

[SharonBell]

Dry summers and cold winters do tend to keep the odour down. I find if I sprinkle a bit of baking soda around the old gal, it keeps the stink tolerable. Those nice automatic air-freshners help, too. 

[SharonBell]

Right...  They're all out there, these people, evidently!

A relative of mine, Evelyn, tells of having been stopped in the street by twins in her village, people she'd known her whole life.  These men had always been known to be a bit slow in the uptake, from schooldays on, but all right in a plodding way.  Neither one had ever married, and they lived with their widowed mother.

One said to Evelyn,  'Could 'ee come tek a look at our mother?'

She asked him, 'Isn't she well, boy?'

And the other one answered, 'We think 'er's daid, cuz the rats be atin' 'er.'

Fair play to them - they got to the right conclusion in the end!

My only question, Joyce, is which chapter of your book will this appear in your Village Idiot Chronicles?  

[Geoff_N]

For those who prefer a touch of authenticity mixed with morbidity, you might this worth saving:

Putrefraction begins after about 2 days. The process is faster in damp places or when the body is exposed to air. Decay is about eight times faster in the air than underground. Too cold or too hot and the process won't happen. In very hot temperatures the body will dry out and mummify instead.

People with a lot of fat will decay faster. People who died of bacterial disease will also decay faster. However, some poisons preserve the body.

2-3 days: green staining begins on the right side of the abdomen. Body begins to swell.

3-4 days: staining spreads. Veins go "marbled" - a browny black discoloration

5-6 days: abdomen swells with gas. Skin blisters

2 weeks: abdomen very tight and swollen.

3 weeks: tissue softens. Organs and cavities bursting. Nails fall off.

4 weeks: soft tissues begin to liquefy. Face becoming unrecognisable

4-6 months: formation of adipocere, if in damp place. This is when the fat goes all hard and waxy.


oops it's time for tea and scones.

Geoff

[SharonBell]

Ooo, lovely! I'll take a few biscuits, thanks. 

[Ed]

Geoff - that's only if there isn't a starving dog in the house, too

I remember seeing something on TV about a place (think it's Quatico) where the FBI have a piece of land set aside, littered with corpses - some in shallow graves, some in cars, some out in the open, led down, hung up, allsorts.  Can you believe people actually donate their bodies for that purpose?  I can understand donating organs so that somebody else gets the benefit of them directly after your demise, but the thought of being sat in a field somewhere, with the crows pecking at you and the foxes ripping bits off, well, it just don't seem right, somehow

[SharonBell]

It's called the Body Farm and it's in Tennessee. Patricia Cornwall wrote a book with the same title. Much ofl the information on forensic entymology is due to this man's work. He's amazing. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/10/31/body.farm/

[SharonBell]

Had to share this. Looks like grandma didn't need the damn coffin, after all!
http://www.boners.com/grub/795075.html