No one missed a woman dead for three years

There's a sad story in today's Toronto Star ...

In 2006, someone finally decided to check up on a London woman named Joyce Vincent who was badly behind in her rent.

What they found was a skeleton on the couch. She had been dead for nearly three years, the TV still on and the Christmas presents she had wrapped for friends lying on the floor along with a landslide of mail piled up inside the front door of her apartment.

Vincent, 38, lived alone in Wood Green, a declining but packed area of London, a city of eight million people. Her corpse was so desiccated that the coroner couldn’t figure out a cause of death, couldn’t even identify her from dental records until the police tracked down a photograph of her that showed her smiling.

It could happen to any of us. Apparently she just sat down and died as the TV, turned to BBC1, flickered and chattered away for cycles of leafy springs, hot summers, endless rain and every news event you and I lived through in those years. Her window was open in her busy apartment block above a street-level shopping mall, but the smell from nearby garbage bins disguised the stench of her rotting body.

...

But why didn’t the friends whose names were on the wrapped gifts ever track down their mysteriously vanished friend?

You can read the rest of the story here.

How sad is that? She was dead for almost three years and no one noticed.