If you get the Courant, it’d today’s top story.  If not, the story is also here.  Basic premise is that a brother and sister from Middlefield left their dead mother’s body to rot in their Middlefield home for eight years, and visited her body bi-yearly for the entire time.  I might have normally written about it, anyway, since its a crazy story in itself, except that there’s a personal component to it.

In December 2005, Diane and John Simmeck Jr., the brother and sister, were portraying themselves as poor and homeless to the congregation of the Church of the Nazarene in Keene, NH.  The family (bro, sis, and mother while still alived) had lived in NH for a few years after the mother divorced her the kid’s father in 1996, so there was a residence connection in NH.

Well, my father’s aunt and uncle (my great-aunt and uncle), the good people that they are, hosted the brother and sister in their home for a year.  My dad’s aunt and uncle are pretty poor themselves, so they essentially ended up being used by the two.  In December 2006, the Simmeck siblings got kicked out of the house because John stole some tools and gutted the house to the point it was structurally unsound.

I knew all about that part of the story, since my family learned about it at Christmas that month.  But nobody knew everything, apparently.

Truth really is sometimes stranger than fiction.