Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 27, 1993 TAG: 9310270167
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WORCESTER, MASS. LENGTH: Medium
All the while, the recluse lay dead, probably for four years, in trash on the kitchen floor. Authorities found her body Monday with a phone nearby, as if she had been trying to make a call when she died at age 73.
"She didn't want anyone bothering her at all," said an old friend, June Tsiokas. "She just wanted to be left alone. I guess she got her wish, but it's awfully sad."
Neighbors had inquired about Gaboury about four years ago, after they noticed she was missing. But one of her brothers, with whom she wasn't close, told police she had gone into a nursing home. Police say a formal missing-person report was never filed, so there was no full-scale investigation.
"A brother had located a woman with the same last name and assumed it was his sister. It wasn't," said police Capt. James Gallagher.
With the search for Gaboury ended, neighbors began to tend to her two-story house, which stood out in its decay in a middle-class neighborhood of the central Massachusetts city.
The mailman kept delivering her mail through a slot in the door, until neighbor Michael Crowley noticed a pileup. He opened the door and hundreds of pieces of mail fluttered into the yard. Crowley notified police, who got the deliveries stopped. Subsequent mail was stamped return to sender.
Next-door neighbor Eileen Dugan, assuming Gaboury was in a nursing home, started paying her own grandson $10 twice a month to mow Gaboury's lawn to keep the neighborhood neat.
A utility company was called to shut off the water when Dugan's son noticed Gaboury's pipes had frozen and sent water spilling out the door.
No one could imagine Gaboury was inside. Even when police searched the home Friday, after a neighbor complained about it as a health hazard, they missed her badly decomposed body in 6 feet of trash, which police say Gaboury probably had allowed to pile up in her home before she died.
Authorities still suspicious returned Monday for another look and found the body.
Police said they believe Gaboury died of natural causes four years ago, when her bank transactions ended. The state medical examiner's office was investigating.
A brother, Joseph Gaboury, 70, of East Brookfield, said the family hadn't been close since their mother died in 1979. He told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette: "Someone should have noticed something before now."
Adele Gaboury apparently had worked at a nursing home and had been living with a male companion until he died six years ago. Florence Stearns, administrator of the Anna Marie Rest Home, said she knew little about Gaboury. "She was rather a private person," Stearns said. "She kept her own affairs to herself."
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB