For six years the bills were paid, the grass was cut and no one noticed the body of the dead woman sitting in a car’s back seat in a garage of a residential neighbourhood in Pontiac, Michigan.
Her mummified body was finally found last week by someone dispatched to check on the property that fell into foreclosure after the money ran out of her account and the mortgage payments stopped, police said on Friday.
“It is the perfect storm for a mysterious set of circumstances and a challenge because of the extreme degradation of the body,” Oakland County sheriff Michael Bouchard said.
The woman has not yet been positively identified, but it is thought she is a person who stopped working in 2008 and had set up all of her bills to be paid automatically from her bank account. She is thought to have worked as a contractor in the financial department for a major motor manufacturer.
A neighbour cut her lawn, her mail was sent to the post office and she had no family living nearby, Bouchard said. “The last withdrawal from her account was in March 2013,” he added.
Neighbours said the woman had family in Germany and would be gone for days or weeks at a time. When she was back home, she kept to herself, local broadcaster WXYZ reported.
“Nobody came over to check on the lady. It’s weird. And it’s actually scary,” a neighbour told the local television station. – Reuters