A man got the surprise of his life while attempting to redecorate his elderly mother’s home when he stumbled upon a crime scene inside the house. Leslie Harvey, with good intentions, set out to make minor renovations to his mother Sarah Jane Harvey’s Welsh home.
At the time, Sarah Jane was in the hospital, but Leslie soon discovered that she had been hiding a secret from him and everyone else.
As a child, Leslie had always been intrigued by a 6 ft 11 in storage cupboard located in the upstairs hallway.
At 29 years old, in May 1960, he finally gathered the courage to open the cupboard, only to uncover a horrifying scene.
His mother, 65, had always told him the cupboard stored old British wartime memorabilia left by previous tenants.
Leslie made a shocking discovery when he found a mummified body hidden in the cupboard, tucked behind dusty clothes and cobwebs. The cupboard, which extended from the floor to the attic vent, provided perfect conditions for mummification. Leslie uncovered a curled-up body in a nightdress, its face unrecognizable due to years of insect activity.
Following this gruesome find, Mrs. Harvey became the prime suspect, and police visited her in the hospital to identify the body. Raymond Vaughn, a retired police officer, called it the strangest case he’d ever encountered in a crime documentary.
When questioned, the elderly woman revealed the body was that of her former tenant, Frances Alice Knight. Frances, in her 60s, had been renting a room from Mrs. Harvey and received a weekly allowance from her estranged husband.
Frances, who was disabled, had lived in Mrs. Harvey’s home during World War II. According to Mrs. Harvey, one night in 1940, Frances went upstairs while Mrs. Harvey made tea. When she returned, she found Frances dead.
Instead of contacting the authorities, Mrs. Harvey admitted to dragging Frances’s body into a cupboard and continued to collect her £2 ($2.61) weekly allowance fraudulently, telling neighbors that Frances had moved to a care home in Llandudno. However, when pathologists soaked the body in glycerine for a week to soften it for examination, they discovered that Frances had actually died from strangulation. A ligature mark on her neck indicated that a stocking might have been used.
When taken to court, Mrs. Harvey changed her story and avoided prosecution for murder. She claimed Frances had a cold and that it was “common knowledge” at the time to wrap a stocking around one’s neck to alleviate symptoms. Without sufficient evidence to disprove this claim, the prosecution couldn’t charge her with murder. However, she was convicted of obtaining money by deception from May 1940 to April 1960 and sentenced to 15 months in prison.