1 charged with desecrating corpse, collecting checks

For months, a man from The Village lived with his father's corpse and collected his retirement and Social Security checks, prosecutors alleged Thursday.

Asked why, Lynn Christopher Little said “I needed the money.”

Little swiped roughly $3,200 a month from his father's retirement and Social Security checks, and he forged signatures on 19 checks totaling $5,775, prosecutors said.

Little, 50, was charged in Oklahoma County District Court with one felony count of desecrating a human corpse after his 89-year-old father, William Little, died last year.

Prosecutors also charged Little with one felony count of embezzlement, one felony count of forgery and one felony count of abuse and neglect by a caretaker.

On Jan. 12, police were dispatched to a house in The Village to look into a suspicious death.

After months of not hearing from William Little, another of his sons, as well as the son's wife, came from out of state to check on him, according to a court affidavit.

They used a key to enter the house and found William Little dead in his bedroom.

Lynn Little then came out of his own room and and appeared to have been sleeping, they told police.

A police officer entered the house and smelled a strong odor of a decaying body. The officer found William Little “partially laying on his bed,” according to the affidavit.

William Little appeared to be in an advanced state of decomposition, police said.

Police asked Lynn Little how long his father had been dead, and he couldn't provide a date, except to say that it was prior to Thanksgiving.

Little was the sole caretaker of his father. He allegedly told police that he would often have to pick his father up after he fell.

Little told authorities that one day, his father went into his bedroom and shut the door, and he never again checked on him.

For months, when Little was asked about his father, “he would deflect the questions or give the generic response that he wasn't feeling well and did not wish to be bothered,” police said.

From January 2018 to late August, Little signed six checks that were written to him, totaling $625, with all but two of those checks written by his father, police said.