An Australian woman from Geelong spent up to five years sleeping next to her brother’s rotting corpse in the affluent suburb of Newtown, which lies south-west of Melbourne.
Newtown is considered to be a wealthy suburb and the median house price in the area is around $1.1million. But police officers entered the house to find rats, garbage strewn all around the house, rotting food and human faeces and the woman, aged in her 70s, living with the rotting corpse.
Police arrested the woman in December in an unrelated matter and stumbled upon the dead body. Forensic officers were forced to wade through rubbish, rats, dead possums and human excreta piled from floor-to-ceiling to reach the corpse. Police officials said the woman may have slept next to the corpse anywhere between two and five years. “It was a bloody skeleton they removed, not a body. How can someone be living with a dead body next door for five years and not a single person know about it?,” a neighbour was quoted as saying by local Australian news media outlet, the Geelong Advertiser.
“They’ve tried to sweep this under the rug. We have been living next to a house of horrors,” the neighbour further added. They also said that they raised complaints about the house to multiple government departments for years but no one paid attention to those concerns.
The house is a 15-minute walk from the GMHBA stadium, home to Geelong Football Club. It is also in close proximity to the busy cosmopolitan hub on Pakington Street. Some residents said they last spotted the man alive in 2018.
“Several welfare checks had been conducted at the property since 2021 due to growing concerns regarding lack of contact, lack of access and the poor state of the property,” a spokesperson of the Australian Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) said.
Victoria Police said they attended the property to conduct a welfare check on the man when they found his corpse. “This is a tragic incident. We send our sincerest condolences to the man’s family and friends,” they said.
The woman was released without charge in relation to the man’s death last year.
Comments
0 comment