Joshua Lott/Reuters
Police say they discovered a headless corpse in a fish tank in a San Francisco home after neighbors stopped seeing the missing man and strangers told them they were “housesitting” for him. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that a neighbor called police after he saw a “private crime-scene cleanup crew” show up at David Egg’s home in the South of Market district. Officers found the heavily decomposed torso inside a fish tank; they are trying to determine if the body is Egg’s, and consider the case a missing person’s investigation until it is positively IDed. Police reportedly arrested 39-year-old Lance Silva on Aug. 16 “on suspicion of fraud, theft from an elder, grand theft and motor vehicle theft” in connection with the case. Neighbors told the Chronicle they started to get worried after Egg, who was usually seen outside daily walking his dog or going off to another part of the city, had seemingly vanished. Two strangers also started answering Egg’s door around the time he went missing. When neighbor Scott Free called police to conduct a welfare check on Egg, the two told officers that he went on “vacation.” After the welfare check, another neighbor told the newspaper that a man in his early thirties “began bleaching the outside of the home, painted the front door, and loaded up his car and took off.” Egg, who had been a resident since the 1970s, reportedly had the habit of letting “drifters” stay in his home. “It’s horrifying,” Free told the paper. “A dead body was in the house this entire time.”