A headless person lay buried under construction rubble in a large plastic sheet in an apartment building. The case is reminiscent of a famous double murder from 2008.
Vienna – During renovation work on an apartment building in Vienna, construction workers discovered a body on Tuesday afternoon (April 16). According to the current status of the investigation, everything points to a violent crime. The horrific discovery brings back grisly memories of a high-profile case in Austria.
“Heavily decomposed”: Body without a head had probably been lying in an apartment building for a long time
As several Austrian media reports, the residential building in Vienna's Margareten district has been completely renovated since January. During preparatory work in the basement, employees of the construction company are said to have heard a pungent smell coming from a basement compartment that was accessible to everyone. Buried about 20 centimeters deep under construction rubble, they came across a black plastic bag. There was a headless corpse inside, writes
oe24.at
, among others .
According to police information, the body was “severely decomposed.” Officers later found the head buried nearby. It is unclear whether the body is that of a local resident - neither gender nor identity are yet known, a police spokeswoman told
meine.at
. The body is currently being autopsied.
The investigators assume that the person had been lying there for a long time. On the one hand, the state of decomposition indicates this, and on the other hand, access to the cellar has been prohibited since the renovation work began. In addition to apartments, the building also has a locksmith service and a post office and bank branch on the ground floor. The case raises questions similar to those of another recent case in Austria, in which three burned bodies were found in an apartment.
“Reminds me of the Ice Lady”: Gruesome find has parallels to famous double murder
After securing the body, the police began a murder investigation. It cannot currently be ruled out that the person “died a natural death” and “someone only buried the body in a prohibited way”. But it is “a hundred times more likely” that the case was a violent crime,
oe24.at
quoted an investigative spokesman as saying. The alleged perpetrator then apparently disposed of the body in the basement of the apartment building.
According to media reports, residents reacted with shock. Tenants rarely used the basement. “Nobody knows how long the body had been there,” a resident told
meine.at
. “You are reminded of the Ice Lady,” said one tenant
,
referring to a famous criminal case from Vienna.
In 2008, a woman is said to have shot her husband and two years later her partner and then hid the dismembered bodies in a concrete freezer in the basement under her ice cream parlor. The case was exposed in 2011 and she was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012. Just in January, a similar case came to light when an angler pulled the foot of a sawn-in corpse out of the river.