A 60-year-old man from Wales was sentenced to more than two years in prison on Monday after concealing his mother’s death by hiding her body in a freezer for years.
Christopher Phillips pleaded guilty in March to preventing the lawful and decent burial of a dead body and to fraud by false representation, the South Wales Police said in a statement.
According to the police, officers found the body of his mother, Sylvia Phillips, in a freezer in his home in Porthcawl, a town in southern Wales, in February.
Police officers said they had been called to the address to conduct a welfare check on Ms. Phillips, who they said was in her 80s and “had not been sighted by medical professionals since 2022.”
When officers asked Mr. Phillips where his mother was, he told them that she was in London with family. But when the officers searched the house, they found a freezer with flowers laid on top. Later, officers discovered Ms. Phillips’s body inside.
According to the police, Mr. Phillips’ decision to not notify the authorities of his mother’s death was motivated by financial benefit.
“This is an extremely sad case where Phillips concealed his own mother’s death and financially profited for a significant period,” Detective Chief Inspector Claire Lamerton of South Wales Police said in the police statement.
Mr. Phillips received about £78,000 (around $105,000) in welfare benefits and pension payments in the period following his mother’s death that should have stopped after she died, according to the Crown Prosecution Service. The police said that Ms. Phillips had died on March 8, 2023.
“You deliberately concealed your mother’s death and took steps to give the impression that she was still alive. You continued to collect her prescriptions, and lied to medical professionals, and eventually the police,” Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke said in a court hearing, according to British news media reports.
The police said the authorities would conduct an inquest to determine the official cause of Ms. Phillips’ death.
At least two similar cases have been reported in the United States in recent years. In Portland, Ore., Richard Vinyard was charged in January with abuse of corpse after the police found the body of his mother, who was 104 when she died, in a refrigerator in his apartment. Prosecutors said that “he intended to place her body in the freezer to conceal her death from authorities so that he could collect her money” from Social Security.
In 2023, Eva Bratcher was charged with felony concealment of a death and possessing a fraudulent ID after police discovered the body of her mother, Regina Michalski, in a garage freezer in Chicago. Ms. Michalski had died nearly two years earlier at age 96. Ms. Bratcher had misled neighbors and tenants into believing her mother was in a nursing home, officials said, and she continued collecting rental payments from tenants in a building owned by her mother.
Adeel Hassan contributed reporting.
