To get her father’s military pension, a Taiwanese woman is alleged to have spent years concealing his corpse in her house. The woman, whose identity has not been disclosed, reportedly spent more than 50 years living with her father, according to the South China Morning Post.
When health officials were refused access to her house in November of last year in order to take dengue-prevention measures, the authorities became suspicious. She was consequently fined NT$60,000, or around ₹ 1.50 lakh.
Police were called because of her persistent reluctance to let government representatives enter her house. The lady first told police that her father was at a nursing facility when they questioned her about his whereabouts.
She altered her account when authorities questioned her further, saying her brother had brought him from their city of Kaohsiung to the mainland. When police looked into her story, they found that the sibling had passed away 50 years prior and that the woman’s father had never left Taiwan.
After that, the woman continued to lie, claiming that her father had passed away on the mainland but that she was unable to locate his death certificate.
Due to the shifting accounts, the police searched her residence and discovered an old person’s bones inside a black plastic waste bag.
Police discovered after a lengthy inquiry that the man had been deceased for a while. According to a forensic specialist, the average time for a corpse to break down into skeletal remains is one to two years.
Interestingly, the woman’s father had been in the military for almost 20 years, and based on his rank and service record, he was paid a monthly pension. An average monthly pension for veterans of the Taiwanese military is NT$49,379, or around ₹ 1.27 lakh.
Authorities will ascertain if the lady committed a more severe crime than merely concealing her father’s body as part of their continuing inquiry into the man’s cause of death.
Damage, abandonment, insults, and theft of a body are all punishable by law in Taiwan, and the punishments can be severe, up to and including five years in jail. The punishment may be doubled by 1.5 times if a close relative or direct relative is involved in the offense.
The woman is presently receiving medical attention while being watched over by cops.
