Man unearths 20-year-old dark family secret after offering to decorate his mom's house
Leslie Harvey tried to give the Welsh home a new lease of life when he found something he wasn't meant to see
A man who attempted to decorate his elderly mother’s home got a shock of his life when he discovered a crime scene within the property.
Attempting to do a good deed for his mom, Leslie Harvey embarked on a mission to give the Welsh home a new lease of life in the form of a minor renovation.
At this time his mum, Sarah Jane Harvey, was in hospital but he quickly discovered she had been keeping a secret from him and everyone else.
As a boy, he had been very interested in a 6 ft 11in storage cupboard which had been sat on the upstairs hallway since he was a child.
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But at age 29 at the time, Leslie decided he would finally get to see what was in the container.
It was in May 1960 that he plucked up the courage to open it, and when he did, he received a horrid sight.
His mom, 65, had always claimed that the space held former British wartime memorabilia that belonged to former tenants.
Unfortunately, Leslie would go on to discover a mummified body in the cupboard, which was hidden behind dusty clothes and cobwebs.
As it turns out, the cupboard provided the perfect conditions for mummification to occur as it extended from the floor to the attic vent.
What Leslie saw was a curled-up body that was wearing a nightdress, with an unrecognizable face due to generations of insects.
Because of the gruesome find, Mrs Harvey was the number one suspect, and police visited her bedside to find out who the body belong to.
Raymond Vaughn, a retired police officer, told a crime documentary that it was the strangest case he had worked on.
He recalled that when they asked the elderly woman about the body, she revealed that it was her former tenant, Frances Alice Knight.
Frances was in her 60s and collected a weekly allowance from her estranged husband while she rented out Mrs Harvey’s room.
Frances was also disabled and lived there during WW2.
According to Mrs Harvey, her tenant was upstairs one night in 1940, and she came down to make a cup of tea.
But, when she returned, Frances was dead.
Instead of calling the police, she admitted to dragging her body into a cupboard and fraudulently collecting her £2 ($2.61) a week allowance and told everyone around her that the tenant moved to Llandudno to live in an elderly home.
However, when pathologists soaked the body in a glycerine for a week so it would soften enough for an examination, it was found that she had died from strangulation.
They noticed a ligature mark around her neck that looked as though a stocking could have been used.
When police took Mrs Harvey to court, she flipped the script and evaded prosecution.
She explained that Frances had been suffering from a cold and that it was ‘common knowledge’ at the time to wrap a stocking around your neck to help alleviate the symptoms.
As the prosecution couldn’t provide evidence to dismiss this, Mrs Harvey was cleared of murder.
But she was charged with obtaining money by deception between May 1940 and April 1960 and was sentenced to 15 months in prison.
Topics: True crime, Crime, UK News
Britt Jones