ROTTERDAM, Netherlands, Nov. 24 (UPI) -- Police in the Netherlands said they found the corpse of a woman who died 10 years ago in her Rotterdam apartment.
Police found the 74-year-old woman, whose name wasn't reported, after construction workers tried to ring her doorbell and call her in an attempt to replace her gas pipes, DutchNews.nl reported Saturday.
When police arrived, they found a pile of the woman's mail inside her door, the oldest of which was dated 10 years ago.
The woman's daughter, who was identified only as Evelyne, 68, said she hadn't seen her mother in 20 years.
"I was an unwanted child and she showed me that continually," she said. "I always expected a police officer would turn up on my doorstep one day to tell me my mother was dead. I would not have been surprised if she had been dead at home for several months, but 10 years?"
The dead woman's son-in-law said the woman suffered a serious trauma when she lived in the Dutch East Indies during the time of the independence wars, but she never spoke about it.
Officials said they launched an investigation into how the woman's dead body went unnoticed for so long. The woman's bills were paid automatically through her state pension, DutchNews.nl said.
