Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/fraud-charges-for-kansas-couple-that-kept-dads-corpse-in-home-for-6-years-collecting-his-benefits.html
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But no kind of “abuse of corpse” charge added in?
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At some point you are going to have give up on this scam, like when his age gets over 100. They probably didn’t think that far ahead. Most likely they didn’t think at all.
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These kinds of fraud are almost always done by the family/child of the elderly deceased. Iirc, sometimes the child will take the identity of the parent to continue the scam. Of course you run into the same problem when their ‘age’ gets over 100… It’s also speculated that many of the supergenarians (people that lived over 110) were actually their children who had taken their identity.
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I was wondering the same thing. I also thought it was weird they just left him in the bed, but maybe those two things are connected? “We didn’t abuse the corpse, we never even touched it.”
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Hey Kansas is in the new- oh, god damn it…
I still never get these stories. Maybe you freeze or bury the body, but the ones where they just seal up a room?? I have found old, dead animals in the woods before. They stink so bad. It is a permeating smell that does not go away. I can not imagine a parents corpse in the room and you just leave it there for 6 years. I don’t see how you could control the smell, the bugs, etc I don’t see how you and your clothes don’t smell. I guess if they really sealed it up with thick plastic everywhere, including the vents.
You can never have anyone over ever again, that’s for sure. Blech.
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Were they Swedes, we might have some clues on their whereabouts.
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Yeah, I was specifically thinking about Japan. Lots and lots of centenarians living in remote rural areas with very little contact with other people, and a national pension system that pretty much all of the elderly have bought into. It’s a perfect combination for this kind of fraud.
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I had a bird die in my dryer vent and the smell was horrible for about four or five days while I crawled around the attic looking for the source, gagging. A bird in a dryer vent dessicates relatively quickly and then the smell ends. But an adult human is going to stink for AGES. I don’t get it.
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There was a famous case in the UK where that was exactly what happened. In that case the couple killed the wife’s parents. When the government dept that were paying the pension saw that the father was about to turn 100 they decided they should check up on him.
There’s a tv series about it which is called Landscapers as they used to return to the house to tidy the garden so people wouldn’t get suspicious.
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I don’t want to give anyone ideas but you could put them in a bath filled with salt
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That happened in an episode of NCIS. Are you sure that actually works? That show isn’t exactly known for its rigorous science.
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I feel like people have managed this scam without keeping the actual corpse in the house? You just bury them normally and don’t tell whoever the party-to-be-scammed about it? My dad still gets credit card offers and whatnot for my grandfather ten years after he died, and he had a proper funeral.
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i guess the couple thought the cops wouldn’t notice that the body was completely mummified when they finally decided to call. poor old man.
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Well I don’t think that anyone has suggested that the death itself was caused by foul play. He died at age 81 at home in bed, which is the kind of death that many people hope for. Hopefully he got to depart this world on his own terms and anything that happened after that didn’t bother him.
The surprising thing to me is learning that pacemakers record events like that, with files that can still be retrieved years later.
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A lot of the diagnostics are on a rolling FIFO format, but they also maintain counts that have essentially infinite storage. But odds are pretty good that someone who dies in 2016 would have had a remote monitoring-enabled pacemaker, so thise diagnostics would have been sent electronically to the manufacturer’s servers and on to the person’s cardiologist the entire time.
Though it might not even be obvious that he was dead - the way a pacemaker works, it looks for intrinsic electrical activity from the heart for about one second, but if it doesn’t see any, it stimulates it. When it stimulates it, the timer is reset and it starts looking again. The device isn’t sure whether or not the stimulation was successful, so it could just keep happily pacing away while the patient’s heart has stopped. There is no diagnostic to tell whether the patient is dead. What would look strange in the diagnostics is the sudden lack of any intrinsic electrical activity at all. Everyone has the occasional ectopic beat. Those numbers would zero out, and that would show up on the histograms.
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My father has a working sheep dog registered with his local council that is getting on for 35. He gets a new dog when the old one dies but just keeps the same registration. I’m wondering when someone from the council will twig.
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Back in the day, my grandfather had a colleague who declared his cat as a dependent for tax purposes. When the cat died at 17, he noted on that year’s return that Diesel (for that was his name) was deceased.
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No I am not sure and I’m not going to try it.
Edit: I Googled it and apparently it does (mostly) work. Unfortunately someone actually did it precisely for the reason of fraudulently claiming a pension: "Salt mummification" - atypical method of embalming a corpse - PubMed
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