104-Year-Old Tokyo Woman Found in Backpack

After discovering that Tokyo’s (supposedly) oldest man had been dead for 30 years and its oldest woman is missing, police began a search for other Japanese centenarians—and found one in her son’s backpack. The remains of the 104-year-old woman were stuffed in the pack for nine years, AFP reports. Her 64-year-old son, who couldn’t afford to bury her, “laid out her body for a while, washed it in the bath, then broke up the bones and put them into a backpack,” he says.

More than 40,000 people over age 100 are registered in Japan, but almost 200 of those were discovered to be missing during this investigation. Relatives are suspected of attempting to draw out pension payouts by not reporting the deaths.
(More elderly stories.)