Building 4 “God’s Eyes”

The events occurred in yet another of the houses that line the street. However, the building itself no longer exists there, having been torn down years ago. The piece of land on which it sat is now vacant, a faded wooden fence being the only part of the original property that still survives. Questions still remain concerning the tearing down of the home, since by all accounts it had been in remarkable condition, and had several parties interested in purchasing the land, even after knowledge of the deaths within the home became public.

The owner of the home had been a single woman, who had confided with others a desire to one day have children. However, for one reason or another she was never able to find someone, and so, much of her time was spent alone. She had been supported by a group of wealthy relatives, which allowed her to spend much of her time gardening. Her garden was one of the prizes of the neighborhood, and it was not uncommon for people to ask her for advice concerning their own gardens.

When she was not gardening, she would on occasion hold parties in her home for her neighbors and friends. She was described as being a wonderful host, if not a little too flirtatious with the male company. Her parties would often go long into the night, and it was considered to be well worth attending. She seemed by all accounts to be caring woman, leaving many to wonder what caused her to be alone.

During one of the parties, the festivities were inter-rupted when one of the guests began to complain about a noise coming from upstairs. He said it sounded like scratching. The woman passed it off as some animal in the attic, and vowed that she would get it checked out.

Soon after the party, people began to talk. Although the woman had been known for her isolation, no one had noticed her coming out of her home in several days. After a couple more days without a word, neighbors called the police to investigate.

Unable to get an answer, they entered the home.

They were unable to find anything on the ground floor save for some old food left out from the night of the party. Afterward they headed upstairs, calling out the owner’s name. They found that the beds had not been slept in, and no trace of the woman could be found. They were about to leave when one of the officers noticed a stain on the ceilings. Contained in one of the bedrooms, it was nearly two feet wide and some liquid was dripping onto the hardwood floor underneath. The officers quickly found the trap door to the attic and headed up.

Reportedly, what they found caused several officers involved to require psychiatric evaluation.

The attic was dimly lit, but it was easy to identify the source of the smell of death. Looking around, the officers found two bodies, along with a journal of some kind. One of them was immediately identified as the woman, matching a description of what she was wearing the night of the party. She was already showing a great deal of decomposition, though her cause of death was clearly due to suffocation, indicated by the heavy bruising around her neck. Her eyes were also missing, seeming to have been removed from her head postmortem.

The other body was of a young girl, approximately fourteen years old. Her eyes were severely underdeveloped, as were her muscles and other systems. She more than likely had spent the majority of her life in the attic, as would be evident from her small size and low weight. Her cause of death was more difficult to determine, though the record says that her body simply gave out after years of malnutrition, exacerbated by an underdeveloped heart. Despite her seeming health problems, her mind was well developed in several areas, suggesting that there was a possibility that the journal was written by her. Although the journal was extensive, the writing was never able to be translated into anything legible.

DNA testing verified that the woman was the girls birth mother, though the identity of the father could not be determined. Neighbors claim they never saw any evidence of the girl’s presence, even during the time when the woman had moved into the home some ten years before.

At first, the location of the woman's eyes could not be determined. However, autopsies revealed they were in the young girl’s stomach. At first it was assumed that the girl had killed the woman, then consumed her eyes. However, time of death on the two corpses were different, and it was clear that the girl had died several days before the end of the party.

Stranger than any other part of the case was the quality of the girl’s corpse. Though several methods had been employed to determine her time of death, great efforts had been made, amateur as they may have been, to preserve her body.