An Ohio woman has been charged with abuse of a corpse after Toledo Police found the decomposing body of a man who’d been missing for 11 days inside her apartment last week.
Josephine Torres, 39, was arrested on August 9 after police accompanied the victim’s friend and boss to her apartment, according to WTVG.
Officers had made a traffic stop on the boss’s vehicle shortly before going to Torres’s apartment after the boss was reported as a suspicious person, Fox News reported. He explained to the offices that he’d seen his missing friend’s vehicle traveling down the road and had been following it until he lost track of it.
“At that point, I gave follow up within two minutes. I was probably on the phone with 911,” the victim’s boss told WTVG. “Something in me said, maybe they’re going back to where his last known address was. So I drove back there.”
After explaining the situation to police, they went to the apartment where the missing man was last known to live. The boss waited downstairs while police first checked with the downstairs tenant and then the upstairs tenant.
“When they open the door to that apartment even being downstairs 15, 20 feet away from the door, the smell was horrific. I mean it was something I’ve never smelled in my life,” the victim’s boss said. “The next thing probably two, three minutes later, I heard them talking to a female and I had a little bit of hope at that point. Like someone’s up there. The next thing you know, they brought her down in handcuffs.”
“The other officer hadn’t come down yet. I heard him keep saying, ‘is there anybody else in the apartment, is there anybody else in here?’ and he came down and gave me a look of disgust and sadness,” the boss said.
Police said that Torres initially said she hadn’t seen the missing man for about two weeks, but officers found the body in a second bedroom, Fox said.
Police have not released the man’s identity or said how he died. They said Torres had been living in the apartment with the corpse and her cat for some time.
Torres was released on bond and is due back in court on August 24, jail records say.
For the latest true crime and justice news, subscribe to the ‘Crime Stories with Nancy Grace’ podcast.
[Featured image: Josephine Torres/Lucas County Jail]
