Tomas Harvey wanted to give his mother's home a bit of a fresh cleaning.

She'd lived in the house for 40 years, but little had changed in the decades leading up

to the 1960s.

If you'd asked around the neighborhood there in the Welsh town of Rill, every single

person would have said that Sarah Harvey deserved that gift.

She was kind and quiet, if not unremarkable.

And she'd been living alone ever since her husband passed away in 1938.

Well, that's not entirely true.

For a handful of years, beginning in 1940, Sarah Harvey played host to a lodger.

Mrs. Knight was an older woman who had recently separated from her husband.

She wasn't well, and so Sarah looked after her while she stayed there.

And when World War II ended, Mrs. Knight moved out of town.

Fifteen years is a long time for someone to live alone, which is why her son, Thomas,

wanted to freshen up the house before she returned home from a stay in the hospital.

On May 5th of 1960, he was standing on the landing of his mother's stairs, looking

at a large storage cupboard.

Maybe he thought it contained cleaning supplies, or perhaps boxes of old decorations.

I have no clue, really.

Whatever the reason was, though, he reached up and opened it wide and found a body.

The petrified, mummified body of a woman.

Insects had eaten away most of the face and hair, and there was a thick layer of dust

on the skin, but that didn't stop the police from identifying it.

...