For 10 months, the woman drove around with a corpse in her car. She never contacted police or tried to find the dead person’s relatives. Instead, as the body began to decompose, she spread baking soda on the floorboards to mask the smell.  It may sound like a late Halloween story but the case of the Southern California real-estate agent and the mummified body of a woman found in her car is real, if macabre.

 

“I’ve been doing this job for 25 years… and I’ve handled a lot of suspicious deaths. But this is definitely a first,” said Mike Cohen, a homicide detective with the police department in Costa Mesa. The officer was called to remove a car parked illegally in a driveway in a bucolic neighborhood of low-slung houses and tree-lined streets. But as he approached the sedan—a 1997 Mercury Marquis—he was overwhelmed by a horrific stench. Peering inside, he saw the mummified remains of a woman sitting upright in the passenger seat of the car, half-covered with a pile of women’s shirts and jackets.

 

The real-estate agent had met the other woman in a park in a neighboring town, and had taken pity on her, because she was homeless, she told police. She clothed the woman, gave her food, and allowed her to sleep in her car at night for safety. It was unclear, police said, how long the two women had known each other, but the real-estate agent claimed she didn’t know the homeless woman’s name.

 

One morning, the real-estate agent went out to her car and found the homeless woman dead in the passenger seat. But instead of reporting her discovery to authorities, she carried on using the car—unbothered, she told police, by the smell. Detectives have identified the dead woman as Signe Margit, a 59-year-old former teacher from Laguna Hills, reported missing by her family after she stopped contacting them in December 2009. By the time she ended up on a slab at the coroner’s office, she weighed less than 30 pounds.

 

Story exerpts courtesy of Foxnews.com

Phote courtesy of google images