Grisly discoveries

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/07/2019 (2274 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The police don’t suspect foul play, but the case is still generating headlines around the world.

There’s a simple reason for the storm of media attention — 10 years after he mysteriously vanished, the body of an Iowa man was discovered wedged behind a cooler in a vacant grocery store where he used to work.

Iowa police confirmed in a news release last week the decomposed body found in January inside a closed-down No Frills Supermarket has been identified as Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada, who was 25 when he vanished.

His remains were found Jan. 24 when cleanup crews were removing shelves and coolers from the now-defunct grocery store. On Nov. 28, 2009, Murillo-Moncada’s parents reported him missing, telling authorities their son “became upset and ran out of their home” during a snowstorm. His parents said he was acting irrationally, likely because of medication he was taking.

Investigators believe, after he ran away, Murillo-Moncada went into the storage area in the supermarket and climbed on top of one of the coolers. Police said employees would occasionally perch on the cooling units whenever they wanted to take a break. Investigators believe Murillo-Moncada likely fell into the 45-centimetre gap between the wall and the cooler and noise from the compressors muffled any cries for help.

It’s not the first time something tragically bizarre like this has happened, as we see from today’s grisly list of Five Infamous Cases Where Bodies Were Only Discovered Years After the Victims Died:

5) The long-lost body: Geraldine Largay, a hiker who was missing for more than two years on the Appalachian Trail and survived 26 days before succumbing

The strange story: In April 2013, Geraldine Largay, a 66-year-old retired air force nurse, set off to hike the famed Appalachian Trail, a 3,500-kilometre trek between Georgia and Maine considered the longest hiking-only trail in the world. Known to friends as Gerry, she vanished after she left the trail to relieve herself and was unable to find her way back. The site is so densely wooded and remote it is used by the U.S. navy for survival training. She was reported missing by her husband, George, when she failed to show up for a meeting at a parking lot three days later. Largay’s disappearance launched the biggest search mission in Maine’s history, and intensive efforts endured for months. Just over two years later, Largay’s campsite and remains were found by a forester; tragically, she was unknowingly only a few miles from the trail and a 10-minute walk from a path that turns into a road. She died in her sleeping bag because of starvation and exposure. A haunting note, dated Aug. 6, 2013, was written on a torn-out page from her journal. “When you find my body, please call my husband George and my daughter Kerry. It will be the greatest kindness for them to know that I am dead and where you found me — no matter how many years from now. Please find it in your heart to mail the contents of this bag to one of them,” the missing hiker wrote. The bag included her cellphone and the journal, the final entry in which indicated she survived for almost four weeks before dying. Maine wardens discovered Largay had repeatedly tried to text her husband after becoming lost, but the messages were not delivered because of poor cell reception. At 4:18 p.m. on July 23, 2013, after spending her first night lost in the forest, she texted George, “Lost since yesterday. Off trail 3 or 4 miles. Call police for what to do pls. XOX.” There is a small measure of comfort in knowing her final wish — for her family to know her fate — was granted.

4) The long-lost body: Dennis Pring, a homeless British man whose remains were found under a sofa 10 years after his death

The strange story: Alan Derrick, a resident of the southwestern British city of Bristol, lived in his apartment for 10 years with an unusual companion — the corpse of his roommate who died while drinking on the sofa 10 years earlier. According to news reports at the time, Derrick had invited drinking partner Dennis Pring, 73, to crash on his couch because the homeless man had nowhere else to go. What Derrick, who reportedly has learning difficulties, didn’t expect was that his friend would unexpectedly drop dead on the furniture. An inquest heard that Derrick didn’t want to tell authorities about his friend’s death because he was worried he would be evicted, so he reportedly turned the sofa over and eventually forgot about the corpse. Here’s what neighbour Reggie Asking, 76, told the Daily Mail newspaper in 2008: “The pair had met in the local pub. They were around the same age and would have a good laugh. I know that the guy (Pring) was struggling to find somewhere to live and that Alan offered him a place to sleep on his sofa. But when they came home one night, the other guy died. Alan was scared to tell anyone about it. He knew he shouldn’t have had a lodger… So, he just turned the sofa over and forgot about him. When I was talking to him after the body was found, he said, ‘I can’t believe it. I just forgot he was there.’” It is believed that Pring died at some point between April and June 1998. During the 10 years after his death, neighbours complained to the council about foul smells emanating from the flat but, although authorities visited twice, the body was never found. “Mr. Pring’s skeleton was discovered in January 2008 when cleaners were brought in after Mr. Derrick was evicted from the flat following a county court order,” according to Britain’s Telegraph newspaper. “Council officers who visited the flat believed the smell came from the lavatory.” One council official told the inquest she had walked past the overturned sofa without noticing the body underneath. No charges were laid against Derrick, though procedures for caring for vulnerable people were improved.

3) The long-lost body: Hedviga Golik, a Croatian woman who reportedly sat down in front of her TV set, passed away and wasn’t found for decades

The strange story: By all accounts, 42-year-old Hedviga Golik made herself a cup of tea and sat down to watch some television in her little apartment in her hometown of Zagreb, Croatia. According to assorted online news reports, that’s when she died in her armchair. It was 1966 and Golik’s remains sat in that chair in front of the TV, her cup of tea unfinished, until authorities finally opened her apartment on May 12, 2008, 42 years later. Conflicting reports say it was 35 years later. Croatian police were reported as saying Golik had last been seen alive by her neighbours in 1966. “Her neighbours thought she had moved out of her flat in the capital, Zagreb,” according to a report in the Daily Record newspaper. “But she was found by police and bailiffs who had broken in to help the authorities establish who owned the apartment.” A Croatian police spokesman was quoted as saying: “So far, we have no idea how it is possible that someone officially reported missing so long ago was not found before in the same apartment she used to live in… When officers went there, they said it was like stepping into a place frozen in time. The cup she had been drinking tea from was still on a table next to the chair she had been sitting in and the house was full of things no one had seen for decades. Nothing had been disturbed for decades, even though there were more than a few cobwebs in there.” It is thought she had been reported missing — again, there are conflicting reports — but for unknown reasons, no one ever checked her suite. Neighbour Jadranka Markic, who was nine when Golik “vanished,” said she was shocked by the discovery. “I still remember her. She was a quiet woman who kept herself to herself but was polite. We all thought that she had just moved out and gone to live with relatives,” she was quoted as saying at the time.

2) The long-lost body: Louise Pietrewicz, whose whereabouts were unknown for 52 years until her skeletal remains were unearthed in a basement in 2018

The strange story: Sandy Blampied remembers the last time she saw her mother, Louise Pietrewicz, alive. According to the Washington Post, it was October 1966 and, just before walking up to the school bus in their Polish farming community on Long Island, then 11-year-old Blampied kissed her mom goodbye and said: “See you later, OK?” Pietrewicz, then 38 and reportedly trapped in an abusive marriage, withdrew US$1,273.80 and closed her personal bank account, according to the Suffolk Times. The last time she was seen by relatives, the woman was driving away from their family farm in Sagaponack, N.Y., with her then-boyfriend, William P. Boken, a married police officer for the Long Island town of Southold. “She would never have just left me,” Blampied told the Suffolk Times. “If she was alive somewhere, she would have called and told me so we could be together.” But there were no calls and the mystery deepened until 2017, when the Suffolk Times published an in-depth investigation into Pietrewicz’s disappearance that sparked renewed interest in the cold case. The case was reopened and in 2018 skeletal remains were found in the basement of a Southold house previously owned by Boken, who died in 1982, years after the house was sold, Suffolk County police said in a news release at the time. The Suffolk Times reported Boken’s former wife tipped police off to the basement, where she said a body had been buried shortly after Pietrewicz’s disappearance. “Sometimes later in life, witnesses do come forward to give us information that maybe at one point they felt compelled not to release, felt threatened… or just out of their conscience come forward,” Gerard Gigante, Suffolk City chief of detectives, told a news conference. Detectives had searched the home years ago and found nothing, but this time they came armed with ground-penetrating radar, which led them to a full skeleton. DNA testing revealed the bones belonged to the woman who had vanished without a trace 52 years earlier. “I just broke down,” Blampied told the Suffolk Times after learning her mother’s remains had been identified. “I just broke down and cried. It is so hard to believe what has happened. I still can’t believe it. This was my mother.”

1) The long-lost body: Canadian Gregory Barnes, who vanished while skiing in the Italian Alps and whose remains weren’t found for 35 years

The strange story: For 35 long, painful years, all Sonja Barnes could do was wonder. The Toronto woman was desperate to solve the mystery of what happened to her 24-year-old brother, Gregory Barnes, who disappeared in 1980 while skiing in the Italian and Swiss Alps. She always suspected the grim truth, but refused to abandon hope. “It’s been a bit of a mystery,” she told CBC News in September 2015. “I hung on to hope for an awfully long time because there was no body, there was no trace.” But in 2015, Sonja Barnes got the news she had been dreading for 35 years — Italian police called to inform her her brother’s remains had been found. Gregory’s body was found in a crevasse — along with a passport that confirmed his identity — after a hotter-than-normal summer caused glacial melt that uncovered the young Canadian’s long-hidden remains. “I was in complete and absolute shock,” Sonja told the Niagara Falls Review after receiving the news from the authorities in Italy. “It’s not something that I ever expected to happen during my lifetime.” The discovery of the long-missing skier — an avid outdoorsman who worked in Germany for a Canadian word-processing firm — made international headlines. According to news reports, Gregory was heading to the top of a peak in the Bernina mountain range with a group of other skiers when he had trouble with his binding and returned to their hut to fix it. When he tried to catch up to his group, he made a wrong turn, fell into a deep crevasse and died. “He should have known better,” Sonja Barnes told CBC News of her brother’s decision to leave his group. “But he’s gone and he’s been gone for 35 years, and now I have total peace of knowing that… there’s no longer any room for doubt.”

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca