The American woman disappeared into her own home and turned into a mummy, and no one noticed
'14.11.2018'
Source: Lenta.ru
Eight years ago, a woman named Katherine Norris disappeared in the United States. As it turned out later, all the 16 months her dead body was in her own house, but neither the neighbors nor the policemen paid attention to him. The sad story of a man who disappeared long before he died tellsLenta.ru report».
Cursed old house
18 November 2010 of the year, a week before Thanksgiving, the American went to inspect the house that he had just bought at auction selected for debt from a certain woman. The man planned to restore and sell a cluttered two-story townhouse, located in a good place - at Cape Canaveral in Florida, near the beach. Nearby there were retirees and summer surfing lovers who were coming for the summer or weekend.
There was a lot of work to be done, only it took three days to clean up. In the kitchen sink there was such a tall stack of dirty dishes that the plates seemed to be propped up on the kitchen cabinet. In the middle of the living room there was a towel on the carpet, on it were two bowls with a long-moldy cat food. Everywhere there were empty orange glass jars of medicine. Next to the sofa on the coffee table lay a local newspaper issue for 24 July 2009.
Both bedrooms looked about the same: on the floor everywhere was littered with garbage, clothes and artificial flowers. In one of the rooms there was a dusty running track. An American everywhere came across a pile of books: about religion, nutrition and weight loss, organization of finances and motivation. Not far from the entrance to the garage was a newspaper clipping 13-year-old with a recipe and a quote: "Maybe I'm not perfect in general, but I definitely have excellent qualities."
In the garage was a closed silver sedan Chevrolet Chevy Nova 1987 year of release. A Christmas tree-shaped air freshener hung from the rearview mirror. A thin white candle was attached to the dashboard. There was a white blanket in the back seat and a pillow on the floor. On it rested the head of the mummified body in a dress. The man shuddered, ran out into the street and called the police.
The house and the car belonged to a woman named Katherine Norris. The police requested data from the municipal service and found out that the last time the normal power consumption was in the house in July 2009, in August of the same year, very little electricity was used, after which the counters began to show zero values. The last mortgage payment entered the bank in August 2009 of the year.
Local journalists immediately came to the house of Norris and began to interview the neighbors. They wondered: how could no 16 months detect the disappearance and death of a woman in their own home in a busy neighborhood? Neighbors of the deceased talked to the press reluctantly: obviously, Norris did not like. She rarely left the house and almost did not communicate with anyone, so no one was surprised when a woman suddenly ceased to appear in her yard. It has long ceased to pay attention. “She’s always been a little weird,” one of the locals blurted out.
Fresh starts
Catherine Norris relocated from Ohio to a small house on Cape Canaveral in 1990. Older acquaintances described her as a smart and purposeful woman with a difficult character. 38-year-old Norris was going through hard times: she had just broken up with her husband, who lived with 14 for years, and lost her job. She was given a good severance package, so she collected all the savings and took a new townhouse for 85 thousand dollars in sunny Florida. She had no acquaintances in this state, and she hoped to start a new life.
The American quickly found work - got a job at NASA's contractor for the purchase of spare parts for spacecraft. She earned 32 thousands of dollars a year and became friends with her colleagues. They organized cocktail parties and picnics, where Norris, perhaps, talked too much about her former husband. Soon, she began having problems in the office, and in December she was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder, in which the depressive phases alternate with periods of euphoria.
After Catherine was diagnosed, she began to take notes on library cards about her state of health and began to eat at fast food restaurants: she did not have enough strength to cook. Norris did not want to lose shape, so sometimes she did some exercise on a stationary bike or squat. She corresponded by mail with the few remaining friends from Ohio. She began to complain of arrhythmia and problems with sleep: sometimes she fell asleep at eight in the evening, and on other days she could not close her eyes until half past six in the morning. “I dropped my fork during lunch”, “In the evening I felt unbearable sadness and wept,” “I heard a noise outside the window at four in the morning. It looks like a barking dog ", - written on her cards.
When Norris returned to work, she started having problems with concentration. She confessed to colleagues that the pills that the doctor prescribed for her act on her like a drug. Sometimes an American could just sit at a table all day, staring at a wall. Soon she was demoted. In the summer of 1993, she spent a week in a psychiatric hospital after a failed suicide attempt. After that, she again decided to start all over again: she went to visit her sister in Ohio and went back to work again. However, soon she was strongly offered to resign.
Due to the increasingly powerful drugs, she became lethargic and slept all day. Sedentary lifestyle led to the fact that Norris recovered: with the growth in 155 centimeters, she weighed 72 kilogram. “I will live here again. Until April 1994, until I stop paying unemployment benefits, ”she wrote to her sister, planning a move. But in May 1994, her life changed again: she met an “interesting man” at the post office. In October, they got married. Norris decided that this time everything would be fine for her.
Second catherine
Her husband, Bill Kantsweiler, was 15 older than her. Marriage held more on calculation, not love. He paid the mortgage, and Norris provided “wife services and support,” as she described it in a letter to her sister. Kantsweiler had quite a few typical American hobbies: he played softball, arranged garage sales and actively visited them, went to the Baptist church on Sundays. Norris came to life a little next to her husband and was everywhere with him.
Soon their relationship deteriorated. Small domestic troubles destroyed their marriage: in the mornings they constantly blamed each other for not sleeping. Kantsweiler complained about the snoring of his wife, and Norris - that the husband is constantly tossing and turning. Finally, their union destroyed the terrible discovery about the past spouse: he lied to her that he was married three times, but in fact Norris was the twelfth wife and the second Catherine. She moved to another bedroom and locked the door for the night. In June, 1995, they parted. Finally, he called it a “money vacuum cleaner,” and she called him a fraudster and a hunter for “lonely and wounded female hearts.”
In 1996, at the divorce hearing, Norris admitted that she was afraid to be alone, because she was turning into an unreliable person and starting a reclusive life. “I realized to myself that I was attached to one person. And he becomes my airbag. And if there is no such person, I lock myself at home. When I am very sick, I “hibernate” for a while, until I convince myself again that there is a reason to leave the house, ”she wrote in a letter to a friend in 1995.
"Please contact me"
However, sometimes she still went out of the house: went to the doctor, to the pharmacy, took food to go to restaurants, bought unnecessary things in stores like eight identical dresses, so that they could be returned later. At some point, she became fascinated with gardening and grew lemons, limes and tangeloes on a plot. One day she suddenly gave a neighbor a banana seedling from a house across the road. Neighbors said that they had somehow seen Norris walking down the street in a robe in the middle of the night, pushing a cart full of garbage in front of him and calling for cats to eat the leftover food. In front of her yard she installed several cinder blocks with the words “no parking”. If Norris found out that a hurricane was moving to their area, she would knock over the windows and then not remove these boards for months.
Norris lived on modest savings, a small pension, and social service payments. She collected recipes, discount coupons and Christmas cards. Her credit card was slowly accumulating on her credit card for the services of doctors; nevertheless, she regularly sent donations to the Christian TV channel CBN and joined the organization of retirees. In 2002, her stepbrother called her to say that their mother was dying. She did not answer the call. He asked the sheriff to go to a relative and notify her about it. She did not open the door for him. When his mother died two days later, his brother again asked the police to tell his sister about it. She ignored the doorbell again.
At some point, Norris filed a lawsuit against a man who a few years ago drove into her car in a parking lot. The judge rejected the lawsuit, because the guilty driver died long ago. She continued to quarrel with her second ex-husband and always asked him to transfer money to her. Then Norris accused her former colleague of sexual harassment. When the lawyer asked her if she knew clearly, she answered: “Bye yes.” Soon the woman was bored by the courts, and she did not have money for the services of lawyers. Therefore, she wrote lawsuits and filed appeals herself, and the judges repeatedly rejected them. She skipped meetings, and when they came after her, she did not open.
In 2003, the judge issued a warrant for her arrest for contempt of court. The woman spent a week in prison. The report on her detention states that she weighs 99 kilograms with an increase in 155 centimeters. The arrest of the unsociable Norris became a generous rumor ground among the neighbors. They decided that the woman was imprisoned for being on the Internet posing as other people. It was not true, but Catherine really spent a day on the network and wrote thousands of messages to genealogical forums: “I am the granddaughter of Joseph Malford and Elizabeth Downey”, “I am the granddaughter of Zelma’s elder sister,” “I have information about the Yenger family”, “I’m with pleasure to talk with you "," Please contact me "...
By that time, she was about 50 years old. Health problems have long turned her into a passive, always tired and slowly thinking old woman. The interlocutors on the other side of the screen did not know about it. On its refrigerator, they found a magnetically torn page from the Florida Today newspaper from 18 August 2006, with a marker circled in the marker about the opening of the Scrabble playing club, checkers and cards for adults: “Come and enjoy the game with friends! Or make new acquaintances! ”
Awful Reality Aunt Katie
Then Norris began to constantly call to Ohio. She talked in 85, 142, 200 minutes, chatted for hours with a school friend recovering from a knee surgery. The woman even called her first husband several times and apologized to him. Most often talked with her nephew. He admitted that he was trying to cheer up her aunt and somehow even got ready to come to her. However, Norris implored him not to do this and harshly declared that she would not let him out of the door.
In the last years of her life, Norris was terrorized by police calls. In the middle of the night, she could call and complain that a suspicious white truck was parked in front of her house. When the outfit was leaving, she called back and said that the truck was gone, and a black car appeared in its place. Another time she complained about broken pipes or told about frightening shadows and voices outside the window, about the attempts of intruders to get to her through the window. When the police arrived, they did not find anything suspicious. Norris did not open the door for them.
She installed cameras at all entrances to the house and drilled holes in the doors in the garage to keep an eye on passersby. In July, 2009, she called the police and said that her ex-husband had conspired with her neighbors to disable her car. The policeman who arrived at the scene did not find any signs of hacking and said that the car was just very old and had broken down for a long time.
In the last letters to her friends, with uneven handwriting, she reported that for the last two months her life had become “incomprehensible” - it became difficult for her to distinguish reality from fantasy. Norris did not send this letter. She called her nephew and left a message on the answering machine: “This is Aunt Katie. Everything is fine between us. I love you". She left her car keys on the cluttered kitchen table, turned off the electricity and went to the garage. Locked in the car from the inside. Perhaps that was how she felt safe, looking at the flame of a candle. But at some point this light went out.
Nobody lives in this house
Over the months of 16, while Norris's body was mummified slowly in the car, life in the neighborhood was boiling. Neighbors did not see the recluse and did not attach any importance to this, but could not help but notice minor changes. One found the cats Norris on his site. Another noted that the woman was not tearing down the ripened limes, crossed the road and took them for himself. The third winced, looking at a pile of garbage on its site. The fourth one noticed that Norris had some liquid flowing out from under the garage door, but decided that it was engine oil.
In March, 2010, a nephew from Ohio, called the police and said that her aunt had been suspiciously out of touch with him and other relatives for a long time. He admitted that Norris sometimes disappeared, but the last message on the answering machine scared him. The police reluctantly came to her house, but found no signs of burglary or insects on the windows. The patrolman did not see anything suspicious and was not at all surprised that the hostess did not open the door.
After a while, neighbor Norris called the police and said that her gate had broken down, and no one seemed to be living in the house. At the same time, the bank hired insurance agents to inspect the house - Norris has delayed mortgage payments, so they decided to withdraw the building and put it up for auction. House and garage twice inspected. Agents photographed her car. “The building has been carefully studied. We confirm that nobody lives in the house, ”they wrote in the report.
***
The man who discovered Norris's body repaired the house and sold it to a woman from Orlando. She comes there at the weekend with her family and friends. They have parties and get along well with their neighbors.
The remains of Norris have been kept by the police for a long time. Only at the end of October 2018, the case of her death was officially closed. The police could not figure out anything except that it was Catherine Norris who was in the car, this was confirmed by DNA analysis. At the autopsy, they did not find any traces of the medication, but forensic scientists stated that they could have been out for a long time in 16 months. The cause and circumstances of death could not be established.
She was buried in Ohio. Relatives ordered a small memorial service. A short epitaph resembling a cruel mockery was knocked out at her grave: “You will be missed”.
