Meet Mary, The Missing Texas Woman Who Was Found Inside A Wall

For many, the worst, most unimaginably horrible fear is dying alone.

To the American Victorians, a good life was only properly concluded with a "good death" -- that is, one surrounded by family and at peace with God. However, as technology advanced and lifestyles changed, people began to live more independently. This is especially true for single elderly folks, people whose age or health may render them vulnerable and alone in the modern world.

This fear rendered real for many has become so prevalent that a new, related term was coined in Japanese: kodokushi, or "lonely death," the phenomenon of people dying alone and not being found for extended periods of time. One theory for the rise of kodokushi is that those who experience it withdrew from a stressful and apathetic world; a world that ignored and excluded them.

Mary Cerruti (61) of Houston, Texas was one of those people. Cerruti's parents passed early in her life; she was an only child, and both of her marriages had failed. Her neighbors in her Houston Heights neighborhood cared about her, but when Cerruti went missing in 2015, there was little they could do to advocate for her. What were they supposed to do? Break in?

For two years, no one knew what had happened to Mary Cerruti. They only knew that she had been a hold-out against property development near her historical home and could only wonder: what had happened to all her cats? Who was going to deal with the horribly overgrown lawn?

Without Cerruti to pay the mortgage, her home (pictured above) was eventually foreclosed. While cleaning the house out, the new owners found the corpses of six of her eight known cats. Eventually, they also found Cerruti.

In March 2017, new tenants were moving into her home. One went up into the attic, looked down into a hole in the floorboards and saw the jumble of human remains.

He saw Mary.

How could such a thing happen? No one will ever know exactly for sure, but investigators concluded that the reclusive and very tiny woman fell from the attic and got stuck in the walls. Living alone, no one would have heard her screams, or pounding on the walls. Had the new owners not discovered a broken board in the attic, Mary Cerruti may have remained in the walls forever, while new tenants lived directly beside her.