A shocking case has emerged in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, where a 75-year-old woman has confessed to police that she stored her daughter’s body in a household freezer for more than 20 years. Officers who rushed to her home discovered a badly decomposed female body inside a small freezer in a kneeling position. The woman was arrested on September 25 on suspicion of abandoning a corpse. The daughter’s exact cause of death remains under investigation.
According to Ibaraki Shimbun, the elderly woman arrived at a local police station at 9:15 a.m. on September 23 with a relative and admitted she had placed her daughter’s body in a freezer at her house. Police immediately searched the property and confirmed her account.
The freezer, about 85 cm high, 95 cm wide and 60 cm deep with a total capacity of 205 liters, contained a body dressed in a T-shirt and underwear, with the head slightly bent forward in a kneeling posture. The remains were so badly decomposed that visible injuries could not be identified. The body was also covered with dried leaves, deodorizer and a blanket.
The woman reportedly told police she bought the freezer because of the strong smell of decomposition in the house at the time. “I put my daughter’s body in there about 20 years ago,” she said. She was still living with her husband and mother-in-law when she hid the body; her husband has since died, and she now lives alone. The daughter was born in 1975 and would have been around 50 today.
Police said they arrested the woman for abandoning a body and performed an autopsy on September 26 to determine the daughter’s true cause of death.
