BODIES OF EVIDENCE
Sad stories of corpses kept, found or forgotten
A Yorkshire judge declined to prosecute Yoshika Yasutake, 55, her brother Takahiro Yasutake, 49, and their elderly mother Michiko Yasutake, 78, after they were discovered to have kept the body of a third sibling, Rina, (below) in their house for six weeks after she died in September 2018, aged 49. Police had visited the family’s house in Helmsley, North Yorkshire, after being alerted by a local pharmacist who was suspicious of Yoshika and Takahiro buying “excessive quantities” of surgical spirit and also because they “smelled of dead bodies”. When asked what they needed the surgical spirt for, they told the pharmacist that it was for “cleansing an individual named Rina Yasutake”. Police said they found Rina’s corpse in an advanced state of decomposition on a bed in the property, and that she had started to mummify. As a result, the family, who locals described as “reclusive”, risked trial on a charge of preventing the lawful and decent burial of a dead body without lawful excuse. However, Judge Sean Morris, the Recorder of York, decided that the prosecution should not proceed, saying, “These three defendants suffer from an extremely rare mental affliction which has created a unique situation for the criminal courts,” and that it was not in the public interest to pursue the matter to trial. yorkshirepost. co.uk, 9 Nov 2021.
In mid-February, after more than two years of neighbours complaining about a foul stench coming from a neglected flat in their block in Peckham, South London, police broke in and discovered the skeletal remains of a 61-year-old woman. The woman’s next-door neighbour said: “I came back from a trip abroad in September or October 2019 when I noticed a horrific stench in the building. It was so bad, I had to put a towel under the door.” She had repeatedly called the housing association to voice concerns about her neighbour because the letterbox was filling up, but police had said that lots of people had moved out of London during the pandemic and the woman could be abroad and did not initially investigate further. Police said: “The woman’s death is being treated as unexplained but not suspicious.” dailymail.co.uk, 21 Feb 2022.
Also in February, Italian police discovered the mummified remains of 70-year-old Marinella Beretta sitting at a table more than two years after she died. Beretta, who had no living relatives, was found in her house in Prestino, near Lake Como in northern Italy, when police called at her house to warn her that imminent high winds risked uprooting neglected trees in her garden. Neighbours reported that they had not seen her for at least two and a half years and had assumed she, too, had moved away at the start of the Covid pandemic. Based on the level of decay the medical examiner established that she died sometime toward the end of 2019. theguardian.com,
8 Feb 2022.
Believing that a house in Sallynoggin, Dublin, belonging to a known reclusive hoarder had been abandoned, the council sent in workers to clear the premises. They had only removed a fraction of the accumulated contents when they turned up a live hand grenade. They paused the clean-up and called the Gardai, who brought in a bomb disposal squad to deal with the device, which dated from the Irish War of Independence. Once they were allowed to return to the building, though, the next thing they discovered was decomposed human remains, so called the Gardai in again. The Gardai strongly suspected that these belonged to the owner of the property, but they needed to carry out DNA testing and consult dental records to confirm this. They were also trying to establish when anyone had last seen the man, but suspect he had died during a period of lockdown and that his remains had lain undiscovered for a year or more. irishtimes.com, 3 Feb 2022.
More than two weeks after he was reported missing, and after an extensive search of the area around his home in Hermanstown, Minnesota, the body of 60-year-old William Terry (below) was found in a concealed room in his house. “After receiving new information concerning the layout of his residence, deputies conducted a follow-up search and located his body in a previously undiscovered hidden room,” said the sheriff’s office. They found no signs of foul play and believe Terry took his own life. bringmethenews.com, 9 Dec 2021.
After not seeing his neighbour, 70-year-old James Fitzgerald, for some time, a Seneca, South Carolina, resident went round to his house and found his heavily decomposed body. While it is not clear how long he had been dead, he was sufficiently decomposed that police needed to use autopsy results and fingerprints to positively identify the dead man. When they did, he turned out not to be who they were expecting; James Fitzgerald, it was revealed, was, in fact Frederick McLean, a fugitive on the FBI’s most wanted list. Wanted for serious sexual offences, McLean had been on the run since a warrant was issued for his arrest in 2005. Police are now investigating whether he had help in evading capture. edition.cnn.com, 19 Nov 2021.