A chronic paranoid schizophrenic who lived alongside her father’s corpse for at least six months – ‘disguising the smell of putrefaction by sprinkling it with powdered chocolate and coffee grounds’- has been found ‘unimputable and dangerous’.
Leiria judges – considering charges of profaning a corpse, and tax fraud – sentenced the woman to a maximum period of internment in a psychiatric hospital of eight years.
But until the decision passes into ‘res judicata’ (that is, until it becomes official and can no longer be appealed), the woman remains free.
The unsettling story of how Amália Mendonça lived in the home she shared in Caldas da Rainha with her 87-year-old father came to light last year (click here), after a grandson of the elderly man realised his grandfather was lying dead on the kitchen floor.
The kitchen door was locked, from the outside.
During the months the body had been slowly decomposing, Ms Mendonça used her father’s pension, never informing authorities that he had died.
Whether the old man died of natural causes, no one can tell. The body was simply too far gone.
Explain reports, Ms Mendonça did not attend her trial. She did however turn up to hear the reading the sentence, repeatedly trying to interject.
The female judge “had to thump the table” to silence the interruptions, writes Correio da Manhã, which has carried a photograph of Ms Mendonça outside the courtroom.
In the end, the 62-year-old was ‘found guilty’ on two charges (the profaning of a corpse and tax fraud), but ‘absolved’ of the crime of IT fraud, relating to her use of the dead man’s bank card.
Says CM, Ms Mendonça suffers from psychotic chronic paranoid schizophrenia.
