A 66-year-old man in Austria allegedly mummified the dead body of his 89-year-old mother as he wanted to receive her social security benefits.
The body of the elderly woman, who died more than a year ago, was kept in the cellar of their house. According to police, the woman seemed to have suffered from dementia and had passed away in June, 2020, reported The Guardian. The man lived with his mom in the Tyrol region in Austria.
During questioning by police, he admitted that after she died, he froze her body with icepacks to do away with the foul smell. Then he used bandages to wrap the body to absorb corporal fluid.
Helmut Gufler, in charge of the police’s social security fraud unit, said, “He covered his mother with cat litter and finally the corpse was mummified."
When the suspect's brother asked about their mom, he said that she was in the hospital.
He would get his mom’s benefits by post on a monthly basis but recently, a new postman said that he wanted to see the beneficiary. When he refused, the postman reported the matter to the authorities, and then the body was found last weekend.
Since June 2020, the woman's son had received £42,750 ($59,053.14) from the payments. He had not killed his mother, revealed an autopsy, but he is accused of hiding a corpse and benefit fraud.
In a separate case, last month a man's mummified body was discovered lying next to a sofa after a neighbor noticed a bird trapped in the house, according to The Sun.
Pauline Blake had knocked on John Noble’s door as she was concerned about the bird. After getting no response from her neighbor for a few days, Blake dialed 101 and police reached within 15 minutes. The cops broke down the door of his Huddersfield house in England and eventually found his mummified corpse.
In the nine years that Blake lived in the neighborhood, she had never seen him take any rubbish out. She saw him only three times. She said, "I would sometimes hear him coughing, but that’s about the only sound I ever heard from that house.”
