The 75-year-old woman had been living alone in her home in northeast Tokyo, Japan, after her husband died a few weeks prior to her confession and handing herself into the police
An elderly woman living in Japan was found storing her daughter’s body in their family freezer for 20 years.
On Tuesday September 23, Keiko Mori, a resident of Ibaraki Prefecture in the northeast of Tokyo, Japan, handed herself into the police, accompanied by a family member. The woman, 75, was arrested after keeping her daughter’s body in a freezer for an entire two decades, according to a police report.
A police spokesperson further confirmed that she had been living alone since the death of her husband, just a few weeks before she made her confession. She told officers that she had kept a body in her freezer and that “it was her daughter”, who was born in 1975, according to a local, AFP reports.
When investigators arrived at her seemingly normal home in Tokyo, they were met with the truth that Mori had been hiding for years. It was there that they found a woman’s body curled up, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and some underwear, sitting in the freezer.
Police claimed that the body was in an advanced state of decomposition, further adding that they would anticipate an autopsy to determine the cause of death all those years ago. Since their discovery the elderly woman has been arrested on suspicion of abandoning a body.
She explained to investigators that the strong smell of her corpse filled the house and so decided to then purchase the freezer that she could store her daughter’s body inside, a police spokesperson shared. Although, she did not discuss the cause of her daughter’s death or whether she had any involvement in it.
The now deceased daughter of Mori was not in fact her only child, while the number of children was not revealed, she is believed to have had several children.