CBS 19 - The Eye of East Texas News - Woman Lives with Husband's Corpse

Woman Lives with Husband's Corpse

By Michele Reese

He was dead for more than a week, and Big Sandy police say his common law wife was living with his corpse. Police say they were called by the woman's brother, when he became suspicious that something wasn't right, when she refused to let him in to the couple's duplex on Hillcrest Street.

"As soon as I exited my vehicle I could smell a decomposing body. It's a smell you don't forget," Big Sandy Lt. Van Burr said. 

When Lt. Burr went inside the home in Big Sandy on Friday,  he saw something he'd never seen in his 24 years in law enforcement.

"He was propped up with a couple of pillows on the couch facing the television. He had no shirt on a pair of sweat pants and his body was bloated and had turned black," Lt. Burr said.

Fifty-year-old William Drake had been dead for more than a week, after his kidneys failed. But his common law wife never reported it, instead she was living with his corpse.

"We smelled odd smells. It wasn't anything concrete," Neighbor Monte Starr said. "One day in passing though we smelled cabbage."

Starr lives in the duplex next door. He said he didn't think anything about the smell because the woman was acting normal.

"She had been in and out we had seen her for a few days, " Monte said. "People were asking where Bill was and she's just tell them he was asleep."

The couple's good friend, Dan Sturgeon, believes she just couldn't accept Drake's death.

"She had to wake him, she thought he's just asleep, but I think her mind must have told her he wasn't asleep, but she wasn't going to give up," Sturgeon said. "Her whole life was around Bill."

Police say since the discovery, family has committed Drake's wife to a mental hospital for evaluation.   Meanwhile the neighborhood remains in disbelief that this bizarre turn of events happened on their quiet street.

Police say the woman is not facing charges since she has been hospitalized and family tell police this is not the first time she has had to have a mental evaluation.

Police did not order an autopsy because they say he died from natural causes.