New Mystery in Pontiac: How Could Mummified Body Vote in 2010?
More: New Mystery in Pontiac: How Could Mummified Body Vote in 2010?
Sometime before she is believed to have died, Pia Farrenkopf asked her mail carrier in Pontiac not to drop mail off at the home, saying she often traveled for work and did most of her correspondence online.
“There was a long-standing agreement with her carrier that her mail should be returned,” said Ed Moore, spokesman for the Detroit district of the U.S. Postal Service.
With no mail stacking up at Farrenkopf’s home on Savanna Drive where she lived alone, a neighbor mowing the lawn, bills automatically being paid from a bank account and neighbors thinking she moved or was traveling, there was nothing to raise suspicions that the garage of the ranch house for years held a secret — mummified remains, believed to be Farrenkopf.
“All these things kind of led to the perfect storm of no one saying, ‘What’s going on there?’ ” Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said.
And Monday, a new mystery emerged about the woman thought to have died in 2008.
Voting records in Oakland County show Farrenkopf, who has not been positively identified by the Medical Examiner’s Office, is shown as voting in the November 2010 gubernatorial election.
Pontiac city records indicate Farrenkopf registered to vote in 2006 and had not voted until 2010, but officials point out that could have been an administrative error and she may not have actually cast a vote.
The city clerk, who was not in that job in 2010, said infrequent voters tend to vote in presidential elections, like 2008, over gubernatorial elections like the one in 2010.
“Everything to date points toward late 2008,” Bouchard said of the woman’s death. “This information, obviously, has to be run to its logical conclusion.”
Of course all the wingnuts on Teh Twitters are all HURR HURR!!!!! OBAMA VOTER!!!!! when 2010 was not a Presidential election year so at the very most, the person using Farrenkopf’s voter registration MIGHT have voted for the candidate who lost to Rick Snyder. But there is no way to tell because (1) the voter records have been destroyed (2) Michigan uses the secret ballot.