Secretly living with dead relatives. Discovery of a further deceased after noticing a flawed external inspection of the corpse

The investigation of deaths in which corpses are decomposed or mummified is often challenging for physicians carrying out the external examination and police detectives. Here we report how the inadequate external examination of a putrefied male corpse resulted in the mistaken assignment of female gender by the police, in line with the gender of the female inhabitant registered as living in the flat. Following the subsequent identification of the corpse by medical staff as being male, the flat was searched again, revealing a mummified female corpse located in a box on the balcony, most likely the mother of the deceased male. The external examination of corpses and associated challenges are discussed, as are the sociomedical aspects of dying alone in densely populated urban areas.