An unnamed New Zealand widow was reported to have bathed and fed her husband’s corpse, refusing to accept he was dead. The couple believed to be Indian migrants were said to be in their 50s before the husband’s demise due to an ailment. Report said the police thought they had stumbled upon a possible homicide after neighbours complained about a stench. The corpse was said to had decomposed so terribly that it took investigators to use dental records to confirm the man’s identity. “One of the challenges was the denial by the spouse that it was her husband and police had to do a lengthy identification phase,” detective senior sergeant Grant Ferguson told the New Zealand Herald. The investigation revealed the woman suffered mental issues.
“That was the twist or sticking point in the investigation. She was saying, ‘that’s not my husband, this is a stranger that arrived the day my husband disappeared’.
“She was feeding and bathing this decomposing body.”
Ferguson said he believed the woman had been caring for the body for about six weeks before being found three months ago.
“At this stage we are not looking at it as a homicide. We’ve got a lot of our fingerprint and DNA results back and we are pretty comfortable with the identification – that it was the woman’s husband.”
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