TO her nine siblings Pia Farrenkopf was a successful IT worker.
She would send postcards from Amsterdam, Austria, Ireland, Las Vegas — she once called from the Italain Alps.
So it did not duly bother them that for years whenever they called Pia on the phone at her home in the city of Pontiac in Michigan that she never answered. A family member tried to call her in 2012 to tell her that her mother had died. She did not get a response but did not think it odd.
Her mortgage payments were deducted automatically from her bank account and no one thought anything was amiss. Her mailbox was emptied — the postman would return it to the post office in an arrangement with Farrenkopf - her lawn was mowed by a neighbour in another arrangement and her driveway was always cleared of snow in winter.
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| Pia Farrenkopf |
Sometimes she would go, literally, for years without us hearing from her,” her sister, Jean LeBlanc, who lives near Boston, where Pia and her nine sisters and brothers grew up, told Detriot Free Press
FACEBOOK PAGE: MUMMIFIED IN MICHIGAN
“And then all of a sudden, she’d show up, so nobody ever thought anything about it.”
They never thought that Pia was missing — her last bank withdrawal for $1500 was on February 25, 2009.
The money in the bank account ran out in 2013 and the bank foreclosed on her.
But it was not until March 5 last year that two workers asked to carry out repairs by the mortgage holder made a discovery that saw them run from the house and call emergency services.
Pia Farrenkopf’s body lay mummified and frozen to the back seat of a Jeep Liberty parked in the garage. Dressed in a black jacket, blue shirt and jeans, she was surrounded by hundreds of unopened letters and empty packs of cigarettes. She had $500 in cash in her pockets and a partially drunk bottle of wine by her side.
She was positively identified using DNA in July last year.
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard determined that she had died in early 2009 and she had not been shot or wounded.
“There was no trauma to body, so it only leads to a couple conclusions,” Bouchard told Detroit Free Press.
“Either it was a medical situation that led to her death or something self-induced.”
Dr Bernardino Pacris, the Oakland County deputy medical examiner who conducted the autopsy, said he was unable to determine how she died due to the severe extent of the mummification of organs.
A former friend Joan Gill Strack said that Farrenkopf was “just a very private person” who “did not want a whole slew of people around”.
Her sister Paula Logan told Detroit Free Press that she believes her sister was murdered, though she doesn’t have proof. She thinks her sister’s behaviour indicates she was in fear of something or someone. Logan is considering asking a TV show that deals in unsolved mysteries to look into the case further.
“There’s got to be something there that somebody missed,” she said.
“I just hope people don’t give up,” she said.
The death leaves many perturbed.
Jean LeBlanc said after her sister’s body was found: “I have no idea. I have absolutely no idea.”
“I just don’t understand why anybody would sit in the back seat of their own car. And just stay there. Why would you do that?”..
(Culled from news.com)
This is indeed mysterious....
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