I’ll be speaking and playing “The Newly-Dead Game” with folks at Frozen Dead Guy Days in Nederland, Colorado on March 4 to 6, 2011, but I just read news about another frozen dead guy. Well, I can’t tell from the story if it’s a guy or a gal.
Today’s Albuquerque Journal has a story about human remains found in a chest freezer. A couple cleaning a vacant house in Eddy County (southern New Mexico) discovered the remains while clearing out the house’s contents for storage. The home, which had been vacant for several months, belonged to the mother of the woman cleaning out the house.
The couple looked in the freezer just before putting it into storage, and could not tell if the remains were human or those of an animal. They hauled the freezer to the Carlsbad Police Department, where two officers opened it and studied the remains long enough to determine they were human. The Eddy County Sheriff’s Office was contacted to handle the investigation, since the home with the freezer is in the county, not Carlsbad.
The daughter of the homeowner said that her mother had been married and told police she had not seen her stepfather in at least four years.
Capt. Kelly Lowe, Carlsbad assistant police chief, said, “As far as who it is, how it got there, how long it’s been there, I can’t answer any of that.”
The body was transported to the Office of the Medical Investigator in Albuquerque.
Who knows what they’ll discover!
January 27, 2011 update: Turns out the frozen dead guy was the husband of the woman who lived in the house. She died on hospice care at home at the age of 63. While the identity of the man has yet to be confirmed, the husband had been unaccounted for since 1997, when he would have been in his early 70s. The woman left a note to the effect that she could not afford to survive without her husband’s retirement income.
Before her death, she told a hospice worker that she had stored her late husband in the freezer, which was in her bedroom. The hospice worker dismissed the statement, believing it was the result of her grave condition.
Two thoughts: How sad that she was so strapped financially she resorted to hiding his death to keep collecting his retirement. And why didn’t someone ask her why she kept a chest freezer in her bedroom?
The sound of a constantly running freezer would drive me to distraction. At least he was close by.