Skeleton of German woman missing 40 years found in attic

The remains of a German woman who vanished in 1977 were found in a farmhouse attic where she likely froze to death in her sleep, police said.

Investigators in Cloppenburg confirmed the skeleton’s identity through
an autopsy, bite analysis and her clothes, the German tabloid Bild reported Thursday.

A 33-year-old man renovating his father’s rural estate discovered the skeleton the previous weekend in an attic he said no one has looked into for the past 40 years, according to the Central Criminal Investigation Service.

“A discovery of this type is a very unusual event,” spokesman Josef Schade told Bild. “We assume she lay down to sleep and froze to death in the attic.”

The man told police she was covered in leaves and straw and lying down, wearing several jackets, pants and shoes. The newspaper didn’t report the woman’s name or age.

She lived with her husband, who died in 2012, and their three children about five kilometers from the farmhouse in the town near the Dutch border in Lower Saxony. She suffered from a mental illness that had caused her to go missing a year earlier for six weeks.