According to Nanyang Siang Pau, a man kept his dead 42-year-old wife, Lim Ah Tee, in his bedroom for 35 days. Every day, he had sprayed perfume all over her body and only lodged a report on October 26th after being unable to beat the stench from the corpse.
On September 21st, the husband came back home and saw his wife’s lifeless body on the floor of their living room. He then carried her to the bedroom and told his 16-year-old son to be quiet as his mother is sick. The post-mortem report showed no evidence of foul play.
There have been a few similar incidents in which family members decided to keep corpses of their loved ones by their side:
- In September, a mother in Georgia mummified her 22-year-old son with vodka. It was reported that she has been preserving his body for the last 18 years.
- Jean Steven lost her husband in 2000, and her twin sister also passed away nine years after. When she began to feel very lonely living alone, she exhumed both the corpses whose graves were in her backyard. She sprayed their favourite perfumes on their rotting corpses to combat the horrible stench and dressed them up. When she was questioned, she said, “I think when you put them in the ground, that’s goodbye, goodbye. In this way, I could touch them and look at them and talk to them.”
- Le Van dug up his wife’s body one year after her death, and moulded her skin with plaster and clay to keep the corpse nice and clean. He also dressed her up and put on a lipstick. He had told the authorities that she slept on the same bed with him and the eldest among three children will hug her every night before she goes to sleep.