104-Year-Old Remains Found in Backpack

Japan’s nationwide search for missing centenarians led to a gruesome discovery on Thursday: The remains of a Tokyo woman, who was believed to be 104, were found in her son’s backpack. This comes on the heels of the police finding a 30-year-old mummified corpse of a man thought to be 111. In the most recent find, the dead woman’s 64-year-old son claimed that he had been unable to pay for his mother’s funeral—and therefore didn’t report her death when she died nine years ago. “I laid out her body for a while, washed it in the bath, then broke up the bones and put them into a backpack,” the son said of his makeshift handling of her remains. A government report in July said that Japan has the world’s best life-expectancy rate, with 40,000 registered people aged over 100.