A North Carolina woman who bought her neighbor’s used standalone freezer thought she got a steal for only $30. But upon opening it, her delight turned to shock when she discovered her neighbor’s mother dead and frozen solid inside.
When a woman from Goldsboro, North Carolina, discovered her neighbor was preparing to move away, the $30 deal for the freezer was struck. She moved the freezer into her home, plugged it in, but left it for three weeks unopened.
When she was finally ready to use the freezer, she was shocked by what she found inside.
“My heart was in my throat and I ran outside, called 911,” the neighbor said.
The freezer’s new owner said her recently moved neighbor insisted that the unit stay closed for several weeks because inside was a “church project” in the form of a “time capsule” that must stay undisturbed.
The ex-neighbor told her that members of a nearby church would come by in a few weeks to open the freezer and remove the “project.” But when no one came, the woman decided to open the freezer herself to see what was inside.
“I had already made the decision that I really needed to open it because everything was just so sketchy,” she added. “And I had even had the idea that maybe her mom was in there.”
“I went in there and I opened it up,” she said. “Lifted the lid and I saw a foot. And I put the lid back down and I tried to analyze what I just saw. And it looked fake so I opened it again and I looked again. But then I recognized the foot. It was her mother’s foot.”
Goldsboro police confirmed that inside the freezer were the remains of the ex-neighbor’s mother.
“She sold me her frozen mother for $30. How do you do something like that?” the buyer told the media.
The neighbor’s mother hadn’t been seen since last September, but was well-liked by locals.
“(She was) Just the sweetest lady. I mean quiet, kept to herself, stayed at home. Just unbelievable how she could just stick her mom in a freezer,” the woman said.
Police have discovered that the ex-neighbor told several different stories to different people about why she was moving away. She has yet to be located.
By some accounts, the elderly woman’s body had been dismembered. The remains have been sent to the county medical examiner’s office and an investigation has been launched into the death. The hunt is also on for the dead woman’s daughter.
This is far from the first time someone has used a freezer to put a murder on ice. Last year, a Detroit Mother told the media that she was not sorry she tortured and murdered her two children and then hid their tiny bodies in her freezer. She insisted that the murders were in retaliation for the children’s bad behavior.
In another case, a Florida woman is being charged for the death of her 11-year-old daughter, found in the family freezer.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.