In this weeks episode, we look into the haunting world of hoarders. I will be sharing chilling stories of individuals who have met their demise within the confines of their cluttered homes, their bodies hidden amidst the chaos, sometimes remaining undiscovered for extended periods. Join me as we navigate through the disturbing tales of lives lost and found in the most unexpected places, hidden by the overwhelming hoards that amassed around them. This episode is a riveting exploration into the stark consequences of hoarding, as we peel back the layers to expose the unseen tragedies that occur within these cluttered havens. * Listener discretion is advised.
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Matson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly True crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:31 Hey, y'all, let's talk a little bit about hoarding.
0:34 I know that I personally love to watch hoarding, buried Alive.
0:41 I love watching them go through people's homes and many times if you're like me, I mean, I feel like it's sad but I also a part of me feels like it would be really satisfying to be able to go into someone's house and help them clean and help them get rid of stuff and declutter and really cool to see what the house looked like after all that stuff was gone.
1:08 Police and Ems run into this a lot because they go to homes more than we do because naturally, not all the calls that they get are for people who are deceased.
1:20 But many times we do have to go into the homes where a death occurs.
1:26 A lot of times you can't see the floor and it's hard to imagine that sometimes there's only one person in there that's actually dead in the house.
1:36 Many times.
1:37 There's an entire family just living there, like nothing's wrong and they just seem to know their way around and know when to climb over and go under and all the different things.
1:49 They're just used to the obstacles.
1:51 But a lot of times the homes are cluttered with pizza boxes.
1:57 Amazon boxes, beer boxes, as tall as the person is, they're not always empty.
2:04 Many times it's items that have been ordered and delivered and just completely unopened.
2:11 It's sometimes actually difficult again to find the person.
2:15 Many times we've been on a scene where there's a ton of clutter, the body is decomposed and you can smell it, but you can't always see it.
2:27 And I'll have to tell you about a really interesting case that I had at one time that was at a hoarder home.
2:32 But many times there are also animals, the animals have gone uncared for, you know, if the only person living in the house is the owner and the owner is deceased, then these animals have tried really hard to find food.
2:48 They've torn open boxes and sacks and just in an attempt to find food or to chase down something that smells like it could possibly be edible.
3:00 A lot of times there's animal feces and urine on the floor and sometimes there's human feces and urine on the floor, we have a lot of obstacles to dodge and it's kind of crazy to think about it because again, not a part of the job that I even thought about when I first started doing this.
3:19 I mean, I never once thought that I would have to step over animal and human feces.
3:25 I mean, in the hospital setting I've had it thrown at me, but I've never really had to step over it.
3:32 Of course, as we know we've all seen the show and it's really hard for Children of hoarders, they're left behind having to make funeral arrangements and grieve while they're dealing with probate and all those different kinds of things.
3:47 It's really hard to find paperwork and wills for people who live in a hoarding environment.
3:53 I mean, you don't know where the file cabinet is and nothing's really in order there's paperwork everywhere and mail everywhere.
4:01 There's just absolutely no order to it at all.
4:05 The family is left dealing with these overwhelming piles of stuff that's just accumulated over the years.
4:13 A lot of people who are hoarders start hoarding in their teenage years many times, not always, it can be triggered by depression or a traumatic event or even a brain injury.
4:30 And so there could be a lot of reasons why this happens.
4:33 It's not always a mental problem and a psychological issue, sometimes it can be from an injury, a brain injury that just things don't snap and things up there don't connect like they normally do.
4:49 It can also be an extreme mental disorder that stems from difficulty getting rid of things as well as problems with organization.
4:59 I always say I'm unorganized and I always feel somewhat better about my organization skills after I've gone into a hoarder's home.
5:09 I still wish I was more organized, but I feel like, I don't know, that gives me a little bit of hope and security in knowing that I'm not as bad as I thought I was.
5:21 But safety is a huge issue over time.
5:26 You know, the hoarding worsens, the stacks become bigger and taller.
5:31It's really hard to get around even if you're good at it.
5:35 If you're elderly and you need a walker or you're unsteady on your feet and you're trying to balance amongst all these boxes, it's going to be hard.
5:47 I mean, your risks are going to be higher.
5:49True.
5:49 You may have more to hold on to.
5:52 But if you fall, you know, good luck getting up.
5:55 If you're in a pile of trash, it's just, I've seen homes that are really, really bad.
6:00 Like I said, some of you police officers and EMS workers can tell me some horror stories about places that you've been into.
6:08 But I still think that it would be really rewarding to go into a hoarder's home and just help clean it up.
6:14 Cause again, I think sometimes once it gets out of control, it's hard for them to change.
6:21 Change is hard for everybody, right?
6:24
The main concern is, you know, you have to deal with the health department and fire and safety codes and just the safety of the person living there.
6:33 I mean, it's a big, big concern.
6:34 We have little old people falling every day on a clean straight floor.
6:41 We really don't need these boxes and all this stuff in their way.
6:46 I wanted to tell you a little bit.
6:47 I said earlier that I would mention a story.
6:50 I had a death that had occurred.
6:54 It was here in the area.
6:55 And what happened is, was an elderly lady and she had dementia and her son who was, I believe in his fifties lived with her, but he was a truck driver and so he wasn't home all the time.
7:09 He was back and forth.
7:11 What happened was the mom called 911 and asked the police to come over because her son's semi was parked in the front yard, and she couldn't find him.
7:24 It just so happened that the police came over when she called the first time, and she had a rather large dog.
7:31 I think it was a German shepherd.
7:33 And so because the dog was barking and was big and all that, the police did not go into the house.
7:41 They told her, well, maybe he's at a neighbor's house and her story was kind of iffy again because she had dementia.
7:48 They were really not sure what was going on.
7:50 Thought, maybe she forgot, and she had seen him, and he had gone somewhere in a private vehicle and that's why she couldn't find him.
7:59 They tried not to worry too much.
8:02 She called back, I think it was a couple of days later and said that he had still not returned home, and she was concerned because again, his semi was parked out front near the home and they lived in a neighborhood.
8:16 The second time the call came in that day, the police entered the residence.
8:22 She was a hoarder.
8:23 There were a lot of boxes everywhere stacked all through the house and they smelled something really bad.
8:32They did not smell it the first time, but they really didn't go in.
8:36I'm not even sure that they went close enough to the front door with it open to smell.
8:41They smelled something really bad again.
8:43She was a hoarder.
8:44 There were boxes everywhere.
8:46 You couldn't see anything but her little kitchen area, she had a little clean area in her kitchen.
8:52 And I just remember she was cooking beans, and I don't know why that sticks out in my head.
8:57 But I just remember when I walked in, there was this mix of beans and decomposition.
9:03 That was just one of the worst smells ever.
9:08 What had happened was the son's recliner was in the living room and was buried by a bunch of boxes like you couldn't see it.
9:18 It was almost like a hallway or a maze.
9:21 You had to go through all these boxes to get to his recliner.
9:25 And then there was a little TV in front of it which was not on, but the sun was dead y'all in the recliner and he was decomposed, and he had been there for, I'm going to say a week, I'm going to say probably a week the mom did not even ever mention the smell or say anything about it smelling bad in there.
9:49 I don't know if she had lost her sense of smell.
9:52 This was before COVID.
9:53 You can't blame it on that.
9:55 I don't even know.
9:56 I mean, my thoughts are, she probably had dementia so bad that she didn't notice it.
10:03 It didn't alarm her, but at the same time she was cooking beans on the stovetop.
10:09 I don't know.
10:10 I mean, she must have went in and out of it.
10:12 She was pretty demented when I met her.
10:16 It was weird y'all.
10:18 I was just like, poor lady.
10:19 Her son was dead in a chair.
10:21 Literally, I'm going to say 20 ft from where she was standing in the kitchen cooking.
10:27 Course she was worried, you know, five minutes, she'd worry 10 minutes.
10:30 She wouldn't, who knows?
10:33 I hope dementia is not something that any of us have to deal with, but unfortunately, we know that it will be with some of us, but I felt so bad for her because literally he was right there, and she just didn't know it.
10:47 And I feel like when we told her that we found him, you know, she was right there in the house and it's almost like it didn't register one minute and then the next minute she would cry.
10:58 It was just really odd and when a house is that cluttered, you can actually lose a person.
11:07 I mean, if they're dead though, you would think you would smell them.
11:11 But not always.
11:12 I mean, like I said, maybe something was wrong with her sense of smell.
11:15 But I just thought that was really unusual and also surprised me that she had this dog, you would think that the dog would somehow alert her that he was there and that something was going on because I know they kind of have a sense about things like that.
11:32 Thank God, it was well fed because, you know, it didn't eat him.
11:36 I kept thinking to myself that's the worst thing that could happen is, you know, he goes in there and like pulls the son's arm off and then drags it in there to his mother.
11:46 I mean, oh my God.
11:48 I mean, just when you think about stuff like that, it's frightening but that really happened.
11:53 I mean, I saw it happen.
11:55 I found another story, and this occurred in Parma Heights, Ohio.
12:00 And this was in 2022.
12:03 And this is a case where a man who was 70 years old died as a result of his own hoarding.
12:11 Now, the scene that I went on, he was not under a pile of boxes.
12:16 He looks like died naturally in his recliner.
12:19 He had a lot of medical history.
12:21 He was a truck driver.
12:22 He was a smoker.
12:23 You know, he probably didn't eat the best because he was always on the road.
12:27 He wasn't married.
12:29 There's a huge difference between these two stories.
12:32 But this man was 70.
12:35 Parts of it are the same and you'll see what I'm talking about.
12:38 He lived in a small home, but he had many, many secrets.
12:42 A neighbor had noticed that mail was stacking up outside and called the police for a welfare check again.
12:49 That's how a lot of our welfare checks come in is that neighbors notice they're not outside mowing like normal.
12:56 Their grass is getting tall.
12:58 They have, if there's such thing as a newspaper in your area anymore, their newspapers are piling up, their mail is hanging out of their mailbox.
13:07 They're obviously not outside and around like normal.
13:12 They miss doctor's appointments.
13:13 You know, doctor's office will call the police because they try to call a patient who didn't show up for an appointment that they know lives alone.
13:22 The police will go over for a welfare tech at that time, and they're deceased.
13:26 Thank good news for our neighbors.
13:28 And I know I've had an episode about that before called love that neighbor.
13:33 And there's a good reason to get to know your neighbors and your friends that live around you.
13:37 Because if your habits change or if something's unusual, they're going to pay attention just like, you know, Miss Kravitz on Bewitched.
13:47 If y'all remember, like, she was nosy and was always up in their business.
13:51 But if something was wrong, she probably would have been the first person to call the police.
13:56 I think we all have our little nosy rosies in our neighborhood.
13:59 But it can be good.
14:01 It can be very good.
14:02 Anyway, the neighbors noticed the mail stacking up and the police were called for a welfare check.
14:10 A welfare check years earlier revealed that the owner whose name was Robert Els was hoarding mountains of books and magazines and all kinds of household items.
14:25 Again, a lot of people who hoard, you know, they're going to buy things that they don't necessarily need.
14:31 And sometimes when they're delivered, they stay in the box, they don't ever get opened, they don't ever get used.
14:37 Maybe they were intended as a gift for someone that was never given.
14:41 I mean, just all different things.
14:44 Several years before the police had been there and had noted the hoarding.
14:50 Anyway, during this particular welfare check, the 70-year old's body was found and this is during a search that happened on March 2nd, he was buried in a pile of hoarded items.
15:05 Basically, he did die of a result of his own hoarding.
15:11 Now, the cause of death was ruled positional asphyxia, which basically means that something fell on top of him or landed on top of him with enough pressure that it left him unable to breathe.
15:27 And so the position he was in whether it be the position he landed or whether something was on top of him or not, the cause of death was positional asphyxia.
15:38 And we've talked about that before too when your seatbelt keeps you from being able to breathe.
15:45 But again, it's so important to wear a seatbelt.
15:47 But I'm just saying, I remember that we had talked previously in one of my episodes about positional asphyxia after a car accident where the gentleman died because his seatbelt was cutting off his ability to breathe and he couldn't get it off and EMS didn't get there quick enough.
16:03 Of course, as the police do in every case, they go talk to neighbors and get a little bit of information.
16:11 You know, they'll talk to the neighbor who called the police and say, you know, why did you call us?
16:15 What seemed unusual?
16:17 They'll talk to other neighbors in the neighborhood.
16:19 What was normal for him?
16:21 When was the last time you saw him?
16:23 Do you have any cameras that we may be able to look at to catch?
16:27 Maybe when he was outside last or when he last checked his mail?
16:31 There's a lot of different reasons to talk to the neighbors in talking to the neighbors.
16:36 The police discovered that he had told all of them that his mom, Lois had died 10 years before.
16:46 Well, Lois wasn't in the house.
16:49 There was no record of her death but guess what?
16:53 She was still getting her social security checks and still getting her retirement and they were being endorsed and deposited or maybe direct deposited.
17:06 Who knows?
17:07 I know there was such a thing back then because we're just talking about last year.
17:10 This is reset.
17:11 This is in 2022.
17:13 Anyway, the money was still coming in, the money was still coming in monthly.
17:18 Somebody was getting it because her death was never reported.
17:22 She was not in the house.
17:24 They knew that she probably was deceased, and a lot of the neighbors felt sorry for him because they're like, you know, nobody ever came to see him and his poor mom passed away and all these different things, they really felt bad for him.
17:38 And that's probably one reason why they kind of kept an eye on him and knew what his habits were.
17:43 But when going through his mail and this is of course he was already dead.
17:48 They're going through his mail trying to find family next of kin.
17:53 Maybe mom was alive just trying to find somebody because again, that's part of our job is to make sure that next of kin has been notified.
18:02 And they're going through his mail and found that he, Robert Els, had been paying for several storage units.
18:10 We all have heard stories like this before.
18:12 Guess what one storage unit they checked, just contained a lot of books and magazines and boxes and looked very similar to the house.
18:22 But they didn't find anything in there that gave them any clues.
18:26 But he had rented a second unit in Brook Park, which is also in Utah.
18:33 He had not been paying for it.
18:35 It went unpaid, and the contents were put up for auction much like the TV.
18:41 Show that I was talking about earlier, not hoarding but,, gosh, the other one, what's it called?
18:48 Storage Wars?
18:49 I was like, I cannot remember the name of that show.
18:52 But you know, people go in and they buy storage buildings that someone hasn't been paying for.
18:57 They cut the lock off and you get what you get.
19:00 You don't get to go through the boxes or walk into the storage unit before you make the purchase.
19:04 You really don't know what you're getting.
19:06 Well, in May, the person who purchased the storage building that had Robert Elsie's belongings in it, found a box of skeletal remains in the unit.
19:22 So naturally, they called the police, and you know, didn't know what was going on.
19:29 Hey, what is this?
19:30 And we've had cases before, and my coworkers will tell you where we find somebody called us one time because they had found what they called skeletal remains in a coffin turned out it was a Halloween crop.
19:47 The coffin was something that somebody was using in their front yard and the bones were plastic and they were used for Halloween decoration.
19:55 You know, we come along in cases like that, believe it or not, where we do have to determine if this is a person or not.
20:02 Well, it's obvious if you find a coffin and the bugs are plastic and it doesn't smell bad and there's no tissue or anything like that in there.
20:09 It's obviously not a person.
20:10 But anyway, we've had weird things like that happen.
20:13 That's what I mean, y'all when I say every day is different, like we literally never know what we're going to run up against, but there was a box of skeletal remains in this unit and of course, Robert Elsie was already dead.
20:27 The remains were that of Lois.
20:30 The medical examiner estimated that she had died probably back in 2012.
20:36 Mom had been dead for 10 years and Robert had been collecting her social security checks and her retirement.
20:46 He created that illusion that she was alive for 10 years.
20:51 He was collecting all the money and again, the neighbors felt sorry for him because he told them the sob story that his mom had passed away, but nobody ever really looked into it until now because the police noticed that her death was never reported.
21:08 It has to be reported.
21:09 If you die at home, it's good that they looked into it.
21:13 But eventually she would have been found because this owner of the building of his that was purchased would have eventually called them anyway, but she could still have died of natural causes.
21:26 Last I checked, you see, her remains were found in May.
21:32 I don't know yet if they have determined.
21:35 I remember the last few articles that I found on it said that they were still investigating.
21:40 It's really hard with skeletal remains unless you see something that indicates that they were beaten with something or unless there's some kind of trauma to the bone.
21:50It's really hard to tell if it was anything but natural.
21:54 She would have been 90 when she was found.
21:57 If she'd been dead for 10 years, she probably was 80 when she passed away and she likely had medical problems.
22:04 But you know what?
22:05 She could have fallen.
22:06 I mean, he could have found her on the floor.
22:08 Her death could have been accidental.
22:09 But if there's no broken bones, it's going to be really hard to tell his house was very unkempt.
22:16 It was decaying the wood on; it was splitting parts of it were sagging.
22:21 The front yard was totally grown up.
22:25 You could only imagine, of course, they have pretty harsh winters there.
22:30 Because of the bitter cold, you know, he became even more reclusive and even when his mom was alive and lived with him, they were both reclusive.
22:39 Nobody really saw him outside a lot.
22:42 It wasn't really something that you would expect, you know, to see them on a daily basis or even a weekly basis.
22:48 Robert didn't have a car or a job.
22:52 There was never any family that came for Thanksgiving.
22:56 He didn't have friends over for, you know, Sunday football or Monday night football.
23:02 There were never people really going in and out of the residence.
23:07 And the really sad part is the utilities weren't working.
23:10 He was living in this terribly dilapidated house.
23:14 Like I can't believe just from the way it's described in all the articles that the city had not condemned it and forced him to move out.
23:22 It just sounds horrifying, especially with all the hoarding and no utilities.
23:28Now, the officers that went on scene during the call didn't have body cameras at the time.
23:34 A lot of the stuff wasn't recorded that would have been or nowadays would have been in most places they did have cameras in their car, but they were motion activated and so nothing was recorded really by that means either of course, when he died because of the horrifying conditions of the house and the yard.
23:55 A lot of city officials responded to the scene and neighbors reported that it took about two weeks to completely clean the house out and get everything out of there Now, Lois was found in the box that had been in the storage container on May 30th of 2022.
24:17 And like I said, last I've seen, they have not really made a ruling on her cause and manner of death, but there's a very good chance that it could be undetermined.
24:26 Just because at this point, it is difficult to determine the city had taken her to court back in the eighties for hoarding.
24:34 This house had just continually gotten worse and worse and worse.
24:38 Robert was exposed to it.
24:39 And that's probably all he knew.
24:41 Sounds like he was never married and didn't have any Children.
24:44 He just lived with mom and her habits became his habits.
24:48 But little Lois was born November 24th and she, like I said, would have been 90 at the time she was found.
24:58 I don't know what year that makes her born in these again are things that you don't always see on TV.
25:05 When they talk about going to death scenes, the smells that we deal with.
25:10 I know I've told you all about that before.
25:12 The smells and the bugs and those types of things.
25:15 Hoarding situations are very, very common.
25:19 Animals, animal feces, all those things.
25:24 It's just like I said, it should qualify as one of the dirtiest jobs.
25:28 But those of us who do it, love it.
25:31 And again, that's I think why a lot of people who start to work for the medical examiner realize really quick that maybe it's not really what they thought it was going to be when they become exposed to the smells and all these different things.
25:46 Anyway.
25:46 Kind of a day in the life as I always tell my husband, you know, he never knows what I'm going to smell like.
25:51 When I come home, I'm going to smell like sweat and bug repellent and decomposed or burned bodies.
26:00 And the worst thing is then when you go to the store after work, and you forget because you're so used to smelling that way and you're so used to smelling the smells that you kind of forget that you're offending literally everybody around you.
26:14 And yeah, there's that anyway, just kind of wanted to, I guess, go over that story because I thought it was kind of interesting and I saw a hoarding show the other night and it made me think, you know, I haven't covered anything on hoarding.
26:27 And again, it's just unfathomable to think that you could get lost in your own home.
26:34 But again, when there's a lot of stuff in there, sometimes it's hard to find a dead body.
26:38 Sometimes you really do have to follow your nose.
26:41 And that's the true meaning of that phrase right there.
26:44 We are experiencing wonderful weather here over the weekend, we got a lot of rain, but today it was beautiful and, in the seventies, it feels like it's cooling off a little bit.
26:53I hope that everyone has an amazing Thanksgiving.
26:57 Hopefully, I didn't ruin your appetite by talking about the smell of dead bodies and hoarding but have an amazing thanksgiving.
27:04 If you're traveling, please be safe and I look forward to talking to you next week.
27:10 Thank you so much for joining me today on pushing up Lily's.
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27:24 Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at pushinguplilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.