A man making his first visit to a home he bought in a foreclosure auction found the former owner's mummified body sitting on the living room couch, police said Tuesday.
Coroners estimate the woman's remains had been there since 2001, when she stopped making payments on the residence in the coastal town of Roses in Spain's northeast Catalonia region.
The body mummified instead of rotting partly because of the salty seaside air in Roses, a Catalan regional police official said, speaking on customary condition of anonymity.
The woman, in her mid-50s, was estranged from her children in Madrid, and no one had reported her missing. She was not identified by officials.
Police said her death also went undetected because her ground-level apartment is in an area of vacation homes with a high turnover of travelers. In addition, police said, the woman spent a lot of time in Madrid with her mother. The whereabouts of the mother was unclear.
Roses Mayor Carles Paramo told the newspaper El Mundo it was normal that no one missed the woman because in housing developments like this one "people are not minding other people's business."
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A woman's body was found wedged upside-down behind a bookcase in the home she shared with relatives who had spent nearly two weeks looking for her.
A spokesman for the Pasco County Sheriff's Office said Mariesa Weber's death was not suspicious. Family members said they believe she fell over as she tried to adjust the plug of a television behind the bookshelf.
Weber, 38, returned home Oct. 28 and greeted her mother, then was not seen again. Her family thought she had been kidnapped and contacted authorities. Family members scoured her room for clues but found nothing, though they did notice a strange smell.
Late one night Weber's sister went into her bedroom and looked behind a bookcase, where she saw the woman's foot. Using a flashlight the family saw Weber was wedged upside-down behind the unit.
"I'm sleeping in the same house as her for 11 days, looking for her," her mother, Connie Weber, told the St. Petersburg Times. "And she's right in the bedroom."
Both Weber and her sister had previously adjusted the television plug by standing on a bureau next to the shelf and leaning over the top. Her family believes Weber, who was 5-foot-3 and barely 100 pounds, may have fallen headfirst into the space.
"She's a little thing," her mother said. "And the bookcase is 6 feet tall and solid. And she couldn't get out."
The sheriff's office said Weber appeared to have died because she was unable to breathe in the position she was in.
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