Body of Las Vegas woman found in clutter at home

[babylonsister]

Body of Las Vegas woman found in clutter at home
AP
…
By OSKAR GARCIA, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 3 mins ago


LAS VEGAS – A four-month search for a missing Las Vegas woman came to a ghastly end this week when her husband found her corpse in their home amid a labyrinth of squalor that had been impassable even to search dogs.

Bill James apparently had no idea that the body of his pack-rat wife, Billie Jean, was under the same roof as he helped police scour the home and the Nevada desert for any sign of her. Then he spotted the feet of the body poking out of a floor-to-ceiling pile of junk Wednesday, revealing in shocking detail the woman's penchant for hoarding.

Police say they searched the home several times — even using dogs from a unit that helped locate bodies at ground zero after Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina. But they were unable to find the body of amid the piles of clothes, knickknacks, trash and other junk.

"For our dogs to go through that house and not find something should be indicative of the tremendous environmental challenges they faced," police spokesman Bill Cassell said.

more...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100828/ap_on_re_us/us_lost_in_home

[LiberalAndProud]

1. Hoarding: Buried Alive

Is there more of this type of behavior now, or are we just that much more voyeuristic than we've been in the past?

[jaxx]

2. Those shows are depressing.

I watched a couple of them awhile back and had to turn it off. It's sad that people go to these extremes and sadder that nothing can be done to stop the madness. The families suffer and the person must feel such a compulsion to acquire stuff that it's their life.

[TheDebbieDee]

3. I don't think the % of hoarders has increased lately.......

I just think that, thanks to reality TV shows, we are more aware of hoarders.

The same priciple applies to serial killers - they have been around forever but the general public has only become aware of existence of serial killers within the last 30 - 35 years.

[Warpy]

7. Cheap credit made it a lot easier, that's for sure

A friend of mine had to clean out a relative's house after the woman had died some years ago, a 70 something who had outlived her husband and only child. The place was floor to ceiling boxes from TV shopping stations, most of them unopened. The junk wasn't important, IMO, it was the human contact she got when she ordered it.

The sale of the house paid off the multiple credit cards with barely enough left to bury her.

A depression baby would also tend to hang onto that stuff, unopened, instead of selling it at a yard sale or giving it to charity. Instead, she had less and less living space as more and more was devoted to junk she'd never wanted in the first place and had only ordered out of loneliness.

Since that kind of credit has now largely dried up, I think we'll stop seeing so many stories of hoarders down the road. In any case, a lot of them are likely to get hungry enough to start parting with the salable crap.

Hoarding is a disease, but it was made much, much worse by the wage collapse and substitution of easy credit to support the consumer market.

[sandnsea]

8. My grandmother was a hoarder

Her house wasn't the stereotypical floor to ceiling nightmare, but then she had a full 3 br/2ba upstairs and a matching basement. But she hoarded all sorts of things, depression type hoarding. She had plastic milk jugs and bags of the red caps. Bread ties and bread bags. Everything under the sun. She kept a very neat house though and she didn't buy much of anything. So maybe what is being hoarded has changed.

[malaise]

4. This is the third hoarder who died in the middle

of their junk.

[izquierdista]

5. They died doing what they loved

Some people love mountain climbing, some people love extreme sports, me, I want to go like my grandfather, peacefully in his sleep, not like the passengers in his car.

[babylonsister]

6. LOL!

:spank:

[Maru Kitteh]

9. Very few hoarders have a "penchant" for hoarding. Most of them hate it.

I wish that people who wrote articles made a greater effort towards accuracy.