"Leaving Early, I'll Go Home Soon" Final Call
A man in his 50s in the United States was found mummified inside a closet at his home eight months after going missing.
According to local media and the legal journal Law & Crime on the 7th (local time), Richard Magee (53), a resident of the small town of Troy in central Illinois, went missing on April 26 last year.
Magee's wife, Jennifer, reported him missing to the police on April 27, just one day later, stating, "The last call I received from my husband was when he said he was leaving work early and going home."
The police who responded to the report searched the couple's home but found no significant traces and began an investigation.
Eventually, Magee was found by his wife Jennifer in a closet inside their home on December 11 last year, eight months after his disappearance.
Jennifer said, "I opened the closet where Christmas decorations were stored, and inside was a mummified body."
The Madison County Coroner's Office in Illinois, which has jurisdiction over Troy, confirmed the identity of the body as Magee through a recently released autopsy report and ruled the cause of death as suicide.
The police explained that when they first responded to the missing person report in April last year, they could not locate Magee, saying, "The house was filled with so many items that there was barely any space to step, making the search difficult."
They added, "There was a smell like sewage inside the house, and after Jennifer reported the foul odor, we conducted another search but found no clues."
Jennifer eventually contacted a plumber to cover the basement drain, which seemed to resolve the odor issue.
However, the coroner's office speculated that "the moisture remaining on the body gradually dried, causing it to mummify and the odor to decrease," explaining the long time it took to discover Magee's body.
The coroner's office also stated that there was "no possibility of homicide" related to Magee's death.
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