10 bodies that were discovered years after the person died

Welcome to WatchMojo and today we’ll be looking at 10 bodies that were discovered years after the person died.

For this list, we’ll be investigating the discoveries of corpses of human beings who lived in the 20th century onwards. We’ll be excluding historical figures who lived before the 1900s.

#10: Pauline & Caroline Jessett

In the summer of 2014, police in Oxfordshire, England made a grisly discovery in a small, rural home. At the urging of environmental health staff worried about the security of the building, officers broke in and discovered the remains of mother and daughter Pauline and Caroline Jessett. According to the coroner’s report, Pauline had been dead since 2012 and Caroline since 2013, after failing to handle her mother’s passing. Caroline wrapped up Pauline’s body in sheets and blankets and put her in the bathtub. The bodies could only be identified by using forensic techniques like checking the specific serial number on Pauline’s artificial hip.

#9: John Sabine

Before her death in 2015, Welsh woman Lee Ann Sabine made her neighbors promise to dig up an old medical skeleton she had hidden, and place it in the house for a joke. Three weeks after her death, it was discovered that this was no medical skeleton – it was the 18-year-old corpse of her ex-husband, John Sabine, which had been wrapped in plastic and hidden in 1997. The now-deceased Lee Ann subsequently became the prime suspect in a murder investigation. Bizarrely, this isn’t the only time this has happened. In 2014, the body of Charles Woodburn was found buried on his property in Jefferson, Maine after 12 years missing; he was also suspected to have been killed by his spouse.

#8: Unknown Man in Lille, France

In 2012, the body of a man was found in a deserted property in Lille, France, after lying completely undiscovered in his bed for some 15 years. By the time he was discovered by the French authorities, he was nothing more than a skeleton in pajamas. Though it has been impossible to determine both a cause of death and the man’s identity so far, police say that given the fact the house was clean inside and the doors were all locked, he most likely died peacefully in his sleep. The only other information they have managed to find out is that he was Spanish and may have been born as long ago as 1921.

#7: Joyce Carol Vincent

In 2003, Joyce Carol Vincent visited the hospital for a peptic ulcer, and that was the last time she was seen alive. After being discharged, she retreated to her London bedsit, a place meant for women who were the victims of domestic violence. It’s here that she died from what investigators believe is of natural causes, alone in front of the television. About three years later, authorities went to collect overdue rent and found Joyce’s remains, TV still on, tragically surrounded by wrapped but undelivered Christmas presents. The story struck such a chord that a documentary was even made about her life and how she could have gone all this time without anybody looking for her.

#6: Quincy Jamar Davis

In the mid-2000s, teenager Quincy Davis was pulled out of middle school and was never seen or heard from again. That is until a state trooper conducted a search of his mother Tonya’s Ford Mustang during a routine traffic stop over a decade later. After noticing an unpleasant smell and bleach stains in the car, the officer checked the trunk and found Quincy’s remains, hidden and wrapped up in plastic trash bags and sealed tight with duct tape. Following the discovery, Tonya has plead guilty to a charge of voluntary manslaughter and has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.

#5: Hedviga Golik

Ask yourself: how does a corpse go completely undiscovered for 42 years, in a city-center loft apartment? It seems that no one has a good answer, but that’s what happened to Hedviga Golik when she died in Zagreb, Croatia, only to be unfound for almost half a century. She was last seen in 1966, and in the ‘70s neighbors supposedly asked the police to check the apartment after assuming she had moved out. Finally, in 2008, neighbors broke in and found Heviga dead in front of her TV with a cup of tea beside her.

#4: Natalie Wood

She was nicknamed “the woman Sydney forgot” when her body was found on the floor next to her bed. Natalie Wood was discovered in 2011 after she was last sighted by her sister-in-law Enid Davis in January 2004. Wood’s remains were reportedly so small that when the house was first searched they were initially missed and they could later be packed up into one drawer, plus two jars. Wood had apparently confided in Enid that she was suffering from a brain tumor, and though the state of her remains make it impossible to tell, that’s probably what ended up killing her.

#3: Gregory Barnes

It took Sonja Barnes 35 years to finally get closure over what happened to her brother when he mysteriously vanished during a skiing trip to the Italian Alps. He stayed with his sister in Ottawa, Canada for a week in 1980 before his relocation to Europe where he met his end. In 2015, the Italian authorities contacted Sonja and revealed that Gregory’s body had finally been Found. This was only possible because an unusually hot summer had melted enough of a glacier that the crevasse into which he had fallen was revealed, along with his passport that allowed him to be identified.

#2: JoAnn Nichols

In 1985, while on her way to a hair salon appointment, widely-adored first-grade teacher JoAnn Nichols vanished. Her remains were found after her husband James died in 2012 and a contractor was emptying out their empty house in Poughkeepsie, New York. When the contractor knocked down a false wall, he found JoAnn, kept inside a large plastic container and wrapped in more plastic and sheets. The medical examiner reported she most likely died of blunt force trauma twenty-eight years ago. Her late husband is the prime murder suspect.

#1: Pia Farrenkopf

Though she had nine siblings, Pia Farrenkopf often went years without contacting any of them – or any other friends or relatives for that matter. These reclusive habits are ultimately the reason nobody found her for five years after she died, when a contractor visited to evaluate the property after it was taken into foreclosure by the bank. Farrenkopf’s body was lying on the backseat of her SUV, parked in the garage, and police estimate it had been there since at least 2009. They investigated the incident as a potential homicide, saying that it was unlikely that she took her own life.The cause of her death has been ruled undeterminable since 2015.