Who is Yumi Yoshino? Woman kept dead mom in freezer for 10 years over fear of being evicted from apartment
A Japanese woman kept her dead mother frozen for 10 years for fear of getting evicted from her home. Yumi Yoshino, 48, revealed that she didn't want to move out of the home that she had shared with her mother in Tokyo. The mother is reported to have been 60 years old at the time of death. The reason why Yumi believed she would have been evicted was that it was her mother who had signed the lease on the municipal housing complex unit.
Yumi was forced to move out of her apartment in January since she was delinquent on rent and the amount totaled 1.1 million yen ($10,500). According to Kyodo News, a cleaner who had arrived to work at the flat discovered the body in a freezer hidden in a closet. An autopsy couldn't determine the exact time, day or cause of death, and the mother's body was found partly frozen. According to the police reports, the body was bent partly to fit into the freezer. However, there were no official wounds listed in the report.
Yumi was found on Friday holed in a hotel near Chiba, near Tokyo, and was arrested thereafter.
Coincidentally, a piece of similar news was reported in Utah when the body of a dead woman's husband was found in her freezer. A routine welfare check up on 75-year-old Jeanne Souron-Mathers led to her being found dead. Also, her husband had been dead for a while and stuffed in a freezer.
A report in Fox13 quoted the Tooele City Police as saying that they received a call from a maintenance worker at Remington Park Retirement Apartments around 11 am on Friday. This call came through requesting a welfare check for a 75-year-old resident who had not been seen in two weeks. Sergeant Jeremy Hansen said, "We had a history of checking on this female, making sure she was fine." He then added, "I’ve been here 13 years, and this is one of the strangest cases. We’ve never had anything like this."
The 75-year-old was found dead with "no apparent trauma" by the police who had arrived at the unit off of 495 W. Utah Avenue. A maintenance worker had let them into the woman’s apartment as he was worried about her welfare on not seeing her for two weeks. Hansen had added, "(The officer’s) thinking, ‘OK, we just need to investigate the death, nothing super suspicious," calls the detective because that’s our protocol."
It was while attempting to find out how long Mathers had been dead that the twist in the case surfaced. Hansen said, "We can look at like food in the fridge, freezers, anything that gives us some sort of a timeline as to when that person actually died," and added, "The detective sees a deep freezer in the utility room, he opens it up and immediately finds an unidentified, deceased adult male in the freezer."
The body was believed to be in the freezer for anytime between 1.5 years and 11 years and was later identified as the dead woman's husband, Paul Edward Mathers, 69. Interestingly, he may have written a letter -- and had it notarized -- absolving his wife of blame in his death more than a decade ago, authorities said. Police said, investigators who found Mathers in the freezer also found a letter stating his wife did not kill him. “It was notarized on Dec. 2, 2008,” Sgt. Jeremy Hansen of the Tooele Police Department told Fox13 in Salt Lake City. “We believe he had a terminal illness.” They are yet to verify that the signature on the letter belongs to Mathers.