Mummified woman was dead for 5 years and no one knew - Detroit Free Press
Sometimes, Pia Farrenkopf's family wouldn't hear from her for years at a time. And then one day, one relative or another would go to the mailbox, and there would be a postcard from Pia. "Sometimes she would go, literally, for years without us hearing from her," said her sister, Jean LeBlanc, who lives near Boston, where Pia and her nine sisters and brothers grew up. "And then all of a sudden, she'd show up, so nobody ever thought... So when she dropped completely from sight six years ago, her family never even realized she was missing — until 2014, when repairmen were hired to do some work on her foreclosed home. One year ago this Thursday, two of those workers walked into her garage and made a discovery so chilling that they ran from the house and called 911. What they found put to rest any questions about where Pia Farrenkopf had been all those years. Pia's neighborhood in Pontiac was solidly middle class, a newer subdivision of tidy houses and young trees. It was a far cry from Southie, what was then a rough, working-class neighborhood of Boston, where she lived with her large Catholic family when she was younger. Today, Southie is undergoing a transformation and its property values have skyrocketed, but the neighborhood still is home to blocks and blocks of row houses, broken up into apartments and duplexes, where. Source: www.freep.com
