A 61-year-old woman from Pennsylvania has been arrested for hiding the body of her dead grandmother for 15 years so she can cash her Social Security checks.
Keeping the corpse
In February, two women walked into a house that was foreclosed, both were interested in purchasing the house but while looking around they discovered the corpse of Glenora Delahay.
The police investigated the incident for more than a year and they found out that Delahay passed away in March 2004 and she was 97 years old.
When the suspect, Cynthia Carolyn Black, found out that her grandmother died, she did not report the death. Black kept the dead body and stored it in a freezer in the basement so that she could still collect her Social Security checks.
ABC 27 reported that the authorities still do not know how much Black has collected all these years. However, around $186,000 was paid to Delahay from 2001 to 2010.
Black also lived with her grandmother for years before she died, and Black moved the corpse for 100 miles from their house in Ardmore to their house in Dillsburg in 2007, around 2 years after her grandmother died. Black used the monthly checks to pay for the mortgage.
However, when the Kralltown Road home went into foreclosure, the suspect moved to a property on South Front Street in York Haven.
Black purposely kept the corpse at their old property, so when the two women came around to look at the house, they saw the freezer and the corpse inside. The corpse was wrapped in sheets and trash bags, as soon as they found out it was a body, they called the police.
Even though the authorities were called, it took 15 months before Black was arrested. She was arraigned on May 27 and she was held on bail for $50,000. Black is charged with abuse of a corpse, theft by unlawful taking and receiving stolen property. She is due to appear in court.
The records show that she also lived with Glenn Black Jr. at the Ardmore home and at the Kralltown Road property where the body was found and where he operated their business Blacks Furniture Refinishing. But the 55-year-old man was in jail for pleading guilty to an indecent assault of a substantially impaired person charge, and it was from an incident in February 2018.
The pair seemed to take everything in the property except the freezer and Delahay's body when they moved out, Inquirer said that according to their neighbor they stripped the house, taking a fence that was used to keep a dog inside the property, toilets, copper pies and almost everything. The neighbor also said they only kept to themselves.
Similar incident
In April 2020, a body was found inside a freezer in an apartment in New York City. The corpse was discovered after the son of the owner of the apartment came to clean up the place after the owner died.
When he walked into the apartment located on Broadway, near West 150th Street, he found the body in a freezer, which was shut using duct tape and was placed in the living room. The NYPD stated that they could not tell if the corpse was a man or woman. The reason behind the death of the corpse is still not known.
