The mystery of the body in the freezer

June 1993

The chilling tale told by Fine Gael TD Avril Doyle in the Dáil last week, about the body of a dead farmer being kept in the freezer for five days on a farm near Gorey, has set the area agog with talk, rumour and speculation.

Indeed, Avril’s story would do justice to an Edgar Allan Poe horror movie. She told her story to drive home a point when opposing the Government’s new probate tax.

Deputy Doyle said she was telling this macabre story to emphasise the lengths to which people would go to avoid paying any sort of inheritance tax.

She said the incident she referred to happened just before the Government scrapped the inheritance tax, almost twenty years ago.

About five days before the inheritance tax was to be abolished, a substantial farmer from near Gorey died of natural causes. His wife, in order to avoid paying the inheritance tax, put her husband’s body in a deep freezer in an outhouse and kept it there until the inheritance tax was abolished.

Deputy Doyle said that the woman then removed the body from the deep freezer and thawed it out, before reporting the death to the doctor in the normal way.

The Deputy said that the wife was assisted by a workman in putting the body into the freezer and taking it out.

She is reported to have said the couple were well-known in the Gorey area and that were both were known as being fond of a ‘drop’ of Scotch.

She is also reported to have said that putting the husband’s body in the freezer did not help the woman very much as she died a year after her husband.

Deputy Doyle’s claim made the headlines in some of the tabloid newspapers and was generally widely reported in the media.

As a result, the microscope is being put on farming families in the Gorey area where a wife died a year after her husband and needless to say many families are being targeted as the possible family involved.

Certainly, they will not be too happy with Deputy Doyle’s claim, and who could blame them as it place a slur on some families.

Many people to whom I have spoken said that the Deputy ‘ should have left the dead to rest in peace’.

However, for a long time to come, the ‘ body in the freezer’ mystery will intrigue people in the Gorey area.

But it seems rather strange that details of this incident have not leaked out over the years, especially as a workman is reported to have been involved in moving the body.

Long-serving Gardaí in Gorey never heard of such an incident or the rumour of such an incident.

And speaking as a journalist covering the Gorey area for over 40 years, I (Séan Dwyer) have never heard even a whisper of such an incident either.