House not inherited

USA: Man “stored” dead father in freezer

Because he did not want to lose his father's house, Joseph Hill covered up his father's death.

An anonymous caller contacted the US police at the end of October and claimed to have found a body in a freezer in the garden of a house in Tempe, Arizona. The officers were initially skeptical due to the approaching Halloween holiday, but eventually had to confirm the gruesome find.

Neither a figment of the imagination, a plastic skeleton nor a horror decoration - a real body really was discovered in the freezer in the garden of the house in question. 

According to "AZFamily", the property in question belonged to Joseph Hill Senior. However, the police officers were met by his son, Joseph Junior. He claimed that his father had died in Oregon in 2020 and that, as a son, he had naturally inherited the property. He was unable to produce a death certificate for his father. The officials quickly discovered that Joseph Senior had received pension payments until 2023.

Tempe in the US state of Arizona

(Bild: stock.adobe.com/Tim Roberts Photography, stock.adobe.com)

Joseph Junior did not want to allow the officers access to the garden. They eventually returned with a search warrant. As stated by the caller, they found the body there. It was hidden in a large freezer wrapped in plastic.

The police officers smelled a strong odor of decomposition when they uncovered a "human skeleton" and "a large amount of biological matter".

No will: son did not want to lose house
Hill then admitted that the body was that of his father, who had died of natural causes four years earlier. Because he did not want to lose the house - his father had not left a will and therefore had not officially bequeathed the house to him - he had decided to "put the body on ice" and cover up the death.

Body to be buried
This worked for more than three years, but eventually the freezer broke down and the smell of decomposition resulting from the lack of refrigeration attracted the attention of neighbors. By this time, Hill Jr. had already bought a small piece of land in a remote area where he wanted to bury his father. However, he had to postpone the burial plan several times "because people kept walking around". He was arrested.