When officers and bailiffs broke into a small attic flat in Zagreb in 2008, they stepped into a room that seemed frozen in time. A dusty teacup, an old black-and-white television and the mummified body of a woman wrapped in blankets were waiting for them. She had been there for more than four decades, and almost nobody had noticed.
The woman was Hedviga Golik, born in 1924. Investigators believe she made herself a cup of tea and sat down in her favourite armchair in front of the television. Croatian authorities said she was last seen by neighbours in 1966, when she would have been 42.
A flat left untouched
The officers had come only to help establish who owned the property. Instead they found a home where nothing had been disturbed for decades, apart from the cobwebs. A police spokesperson said the cup she had been drinking from still stood on a table beside her chair.
The spokesperson admitted that police had no idea how a woman officially reported missing so long ago had never been found in the very flat she lived in. Her disappearance was reported to the authorities in 1973, but nothing came of it.
Her cause of death was never established. It is believed she died of natural causes in 1966.
The neighbour who vanished
Hedviga was reportedly from Rijeka, which was Italian territory when she was born and later became part of Yugoslavia. She moved into the one-room flat at Medveščak Street 77 in 1961. One Croatian outlet reported that an ex-partner had left her the flat, having received it as payment for building work on the block.
By then she had drifted away from her relatives. Opinions of her differed sharply. Some remembered a withdrawn, isolated woman, while others called her unpredictable and said they had seen her running through the streets shouting.
Katica Carić remembered that Hedviga would not go outside. She would drop down a bag holding money and a note listing what she needed from the shop. Katica filled a bucket with the shopping, and Hedviga hauled it up to her flat on a rope.
By the 1960s, many residents thought she was getting ready to leave. Some rumours said she was a Jehovah’s Witness, and others claimed she planned to join a religious sect.
Why nobody knew
Jadranka Markic was only nine when Hedviga disappeared. She remembered a quiet, polite woman who kept herself to herself. "We all thought that she had just moved out and gone to live with relatives," she said.
A decomposing body would normally give off an obvious smell and alert the whole building. But if Hedviga died in winter, the odour may have been far less noticeable, especially as her windows had been left open.
A notice on her door may also have kept people away. It said she had been left without ownership of the flat and that anyone trying to dispose of it would be committing a criminal offence. Yet it only appeared in 1998, and it was probably not an official document.
How things stand
The discovery left her neighbours shaken. Hedviga’s story is still one of Croatia’s strangest cases of a person who went unnoticed. Her exact cause of death remains unknown, and so does the full reason nobody went looking for her for 42 years.
Image credit: FACEBOOK
Source: The Mirror US
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