Austrian police have found the dead body of an 89-year-old woman who was kept hidden by her son in his cellar for at least a year.
Her son reportedly froze her body with ice packs, and tried to hide the smell.
“He covered his mother with cat litter and finally the corpse was mummified,” Helmut Gufler, a police spokesperson, told Austrian public broadcaster ORF.
Police said the deceased woman had died from dementia, and that her son had hidden the body so he could carry on receiving her pension benefits. He reportedly pocketed R835,000 since June 2020.
The man was found out when a postman asked to see the beneficiary of the pension payouts and called the police when he couldn’t.
A post mortem has shown that the son did not kill his mother.
