Man decorated his mum's house as surprise but what he found turned the home into a crime scene
A man has told the story of how his life was changed forever, simply by choosing to do a good deed for his mother.
Leslie Harvey decided to spruce up the Welsh home when his mum, Sarah Jane Harvey, was in hospital but he soon discovered she had been keeping a terrifying secret.
In particular, he had been very interested in a 6 ft 11in storage cupboard which had been situated on the landing since he was a child.
Aged 29 at the time, Leslie wanted to do something nice for his mum, 65.
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It was in May 1960 that he chose to open the cupboard and found a gruesome sight.
While his mum had claimed that the space held former wartime memorabilia from former tenants, what he found was a lot different.
As it turns out, there was a shrivelled-up mummified body in the cupboard, hidden behind clothes and cobwebs.
The cupboard extended from the floor to the loft vent and created the perfect conditions for mummification to occur.
The body was curled over, wearing a nightdress, and the face was unrecognisable due to generations of insects.
The discovery of the body meant that Mrs Harvey was the number one suspect, and police soon visited her at her bedside in hospital to find out who the body belonged to.
Raymond Vaughn, now a retired police officer, admitted that it was the strangest case he’s ever heard during a crime documentary.
Mrs Harvey later identified the body as former tenant, Frances Alice Knight.
Frances was a woman in her 60s who received a weekly allowance from her estranged dentist husband and rented out Mrs Harvey’s room.
The tenant was partially disabled and resided there during WW2.
Mrs Harvey explained to police that her tenant was upstairs one night in 1940 when she went down to make a cup of tea.
However, when she returned to Frances, she was already dead.
Instead of alerting police, she said she had dragged her into a cupboard and then fraudulently began to collect her £2 a week allowance, telling others that she had moved to Llandudno to live in an elderly home.
But after pathologists soaked the body in a glycerine for a week until it had softened enough for an examination to be conducted, signs were found to suggest Knight had died from strangulation.
As on her neck, there was a ligature mark that looked as though a stocking was the cause of her strangulation.
This led police to launch an investigation into the case as a homicide.
However, at her trial at Ruthin Assizes, Mrs Harvey had a smart defence.
When the prosecution alleged that she had strangled the woman after obtaining permission to draw out her money, she explained that Frances had been suffering from a cold and that it was ‘common knowledge’ at the time to wrap a stocking around your neck to help.
As the prosecution couldn’t provide evidence that the stocking had been stretched through someone pulling on it, Mrs Harvey was cleared of murder.
She was, however, charged with obtaining money by deception between May 1940 and April 1960 and was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment.
When Mrs Harvey was released, she then went to live at a nursing home and passed away soon after.
Topics: Crime, True Crime, UK News
Britt Jones