It was early fall and the weather was perfect. For muggy south Florida the low humidity and cool temperature was a welcome relief. It was about 10:00 am when I heard the radio call go out. A house fire in a lower middle class neighborhood. Actually it was a little lower than that but not run down.
Tiny little cookie cutter homes that were the rage in the 1950’s real estate boom. About 1200 sq. feet of suburban bliss for the post war wave of new Floridians. Sort of a Florida Levitt town. Now days it was mostly original owners who were really old, rentals or fix-er-uppers for newly weds were financially challenged. Most of the homes needed a fresh coat of paint but the yards were tidy.
The officer assigned to the call was not one of my brightest stars so I headed out there to check on the situation. As I arrived the fire department was just wrapping up. It had been a small fire, confined to just one room. All they had left to take care of was clearing the structure of heavy smoke. As usual they opened doors on both sides of the house, opened a few windows and set up their extraction fans. The house was clear of smoke in a few minutes.
The only problem with the fire was the dead guy in the bedroom. So now we had a death investigation to work. We entered the front door and were immediately struck with a very unusual sight. The entire room from floor to ceiling and from wall out for about 3 feet were stacked Styrofoam dinner boxes. You know the kind they put take out food in. But, due to the smell from the fire smoke we didn’t detect the odor of spoiled food, if there was any. That was really odd. But we were there to investigate the death.
So we headed on into the first bedroom. There we observed a very elderly white male. His body was laying on its back in bed as if he had been taking a nap. He was dressed in a khaki jump suit and the most remarkable thing about his singed body was the remains of what once had to have been a very long gray beard. We had to inspect him for the obvious signs of any possible foul play before we made the call to the medical examiner’s office. There were none of the signs that would set off alarm bells.
No sign of struggle, no sign of trauma, no weapons, nothing amiss. What we found was one the most unique accidental deaths I ever attended. He lay there peacefully. As I looked him over I noted every thing about him appeared as though it had not been groomed for many years. On his hands, the fingernails were very long. Claws really. And stained by nicotine to an orange yellow, the obvious sign of a lifelong smoker.His hair under his head where it had been protected from the fire was to the middle of his back. His beard likewise had prior to the fire reached the middle of his chest. His toe nails were about as long as they could be and still fit into shoes.
In the corner of the tiny room a few feet from the side of his bed was a pyramid pile of cigarette butts. Apparently he would smoke in bed and flick the butts to the corner of the room. Over the years they had accumulated into a pile that reached from the wall out about 2 feet and from the floor up about 2 ½ feet. It was still smouldering a little bit. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that his smoking in bed, butt flicking had resulted in a toxic smouldering death. No crime here.
We called the medical examiner’s office to report the death and provide them with the preliminary details. His body would be transported to their facility for an autopsy. In Florida any death that is unattended or does not have an attending physician who will sign the death certificate has to be investigated by the ME’s office. Once they have determined the cause and manner of death they will issue the death certificate.
After they took our preliminary information and dispatched their ‘removal’ team, we still had some investigating to do. We sill had to determine the man’s identity and try to discover a next of kin. And try to ascertain how the situation in general came to be.
The first thing we determined is that his favorite brand of cigarette was Belair. There had to be thousands of butts in that pile. Before rewards points on your visa card there were green stamps and other ways to get stuff for buying other stuff.
In those years Belair cigarettes had something like coupons. A strip of them came in a carton and there was one on the back of each pack of cigarettes. They were like green stamps I suppose. You were supposed to save them until you had enough to trade in for goods. You could get all kinds of stuff. In his bottom dresser drawer this guy had enough of those coupons bundled up with rubber bands that they looked like bricks. He could have cashed them in for a new car!
We started with a check of the dresser next to his bed. Some of the usual stuff was there, wallet, keys, pocket change. In the wallet was only a military ID. He was a retired Captain from the Navy. His date of retirement was 1959. Mind you today’s date was November, 1986. Twenty four years this guy had been retired and never put another piece of ID in his wallet. No credit card, no voter registration no driver license. Nada.
Then I got to looking at his keys. They were on a really old key chain. There was no car in the carport, on the driveway or on the street out front. None of the keys fit the front door. In fact it appeared that the keys were, at a minimum, all from 1962 or earlier.
Pulling the drawers open on the dresser we found loose change. Lots of loose change. Probably several hundred dollars worth of loose change. And there was something else about the change. There were fifty cent pieces, Franklins. And the quarters, they were ‘real’. So were the dimes. All real silver. None of that copper wafer stuff. Not a single penny was later than 1962 either.
Wow, looks like this guy’s world stopped in 1962. We looked in more drawers. In each drawer was neatly folded and stacked his t’shirts and shorts. But there was something odd. There were holes. Little holes. As I leafed through the layers it was apparent that insects had been chewing through the layers, all the items had never been moved in the drawers in however many years it took for the insects to bore their holes down through the layers. So, apparently the dresser drawers had not been touched since at least 1962. Twenty four years of bugs munchin' on his fruit of the looms.
Still we didn’t find anything that would help us find a next of kin. So we looked into the next bedroom. It was obviously his wife’s room at one time. It had a feminine decor, pink walls, once white, now yellowed french provincial dresser and headboard and a pink velvet chair lightly sprinkled with soot from the fire.
The bed was neatly made and in the center a book. Upon examination of the book it was a guest book from her funeral. After I removed the book from the bed it left an outline, a shadow, part of which was formed by the soot but mostly it was dust, 24 years of dust. The book had lain on that bed since the day of her funeral in 1962. The guest register had only a couple names.
The clothing in her closet was all 1950’s vintage. I think Mame Eisenhower washer role model. All tidy and neatly hung. Shoes, hats, purses, etc. All as she had left it. On her dresser a wedding photo of them from the 1940’s, probably WWII era. And a small arrangement of plastic pink roses. In the drawers it was almost the same as in his room. All the lingerie was neatly folded and had little bore holes from the insects. The holes in each garment line up perfectly, nothing had been moved in all these years.
In the bathroom it was obvious that the home had been neglected all these years. The toilet had stopped working years before. There was no water in it. It had been used until it was completely full, the contents were dry and decomposed to the point it looked like potting soil from the nursery. The bathtub and been plan ‘b’. He used it as a toilet until it, too, was no longer functional, full almost to the rim, and also looked like the sludge drying pit at the local water treatment department.
Through the window above the bath tub ran a garden hose. It let to the middle of the room and had a spray head with a cut off valve. In the middle of the floor was the largest lobster pot I’d ever seen. You could boil a dozen lobsters it it at one time but you wouldn’t want to us it for lobster any more. On top was a toilet seat and I don’t have to tell you what was in it.
We still had not found a single paper with adequate personal information to lead us to a next of kin so we kept looking. The only rooms left were the kitchen/dining area. In the kitchen, on the counter tops and stove were peach cans. The largest can you can buy at a grocery store. They were all empty and stacked neatly from the counter top as high as they would go to fit under the kitchen cupboards, about 5 high as I recall, and from the wall out to the depth of the counter top.
On the stove they were piled as high as they would fit, to the vent. The oven was filled also, neatly stacked empty peach cans. On the other wall where the sink and window were he had stacked half gallon size cartons from milk. Again stacked neatly from counter top as high as they would go and from the wall to the edge of the counter top. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that for many years this man lived almost entirely on peaches and milk.
In the dining area was a table, chairs and hutch. Stuffed into the shelves of the hutch and piled on the table were dozens of yellow envelopes. I recognized them immediately. They looked exactly like my income tax refunds. They were U.S. Treasury envelopes. Not opened. They were all addressed to our victim. Each one still contained their light green benefit check, probably his military pension and her social security. The postmarks dated back to the early 1960’s. Some were addressed to him, some were addressed to her.
Among the multitude of stuff I had found it helpful to carry in my patrol car were a variety of paper bags. They came in handy for many things. Today filled three full size bags with wads and wads of unopened, un-cashed government checks. After I counted them I estimated that there were about 750 checks. I figured that they represented over $500,000.00!
The checks, of course were of no value, government checks are not valid after 90 days. But the idea that he had lived in squalor all those years when he had the means to live in some comfort was disconcerting to say the least. I logged them in to property in case Uncle Sam wanted them back.
We spoke to a neighbor who’s house is where the bathroom hose came from. He told us that he had provided the man with the hose when they cut off his water for not paying the bill. That was several years ago. He didn’t really know the old guy, said they tried to help him out when they could but the old man had little to say. The neighbor had contacted meals on wheels when he discovered that the old man was living on peaches and milk.
We never found a next of kin. The medical examiner’s office has some data resources we don’t. I often wonder if they ever found his family. Eventually we discovered that the man had been taken into protective custody a few years earlier but that the department of health and human services had determined there was nothing wrong with him and released him back to live on his own, so much for counting on the agency that is supposed to watch out for the welfare of our elderly.
I doubt they even made an effort to do a home inspection. If they had they would have learned that although he was ambulatory and could talk, his clock had stopped the day his wife died.
That was the day his earth stood still.
