Cristela Guerra

cguerra@news-press.com

It's the Cape Coral home that became a mausoleum. It houses secrets of a life lost. The identity of the body remains in question.

But, the neighbors along SE 19th Lane long suspected the previous owner had died inside. The corpse has become the street's Eleanor Rigby and symbol of a familiar fear: dying alone.

"I figured that's what happened," said Ron Lane, 61, of Cape Coral. "We couldn't get through to check on her because of the bars."

The home looks like it may have been fashioned after similar structures in Hialeah with metal gates and bars on the windows. The 911 call tells a story all its own in bizarre detail. When the new owner of the house called to report a dead body in his newly acquired property, he said he believed it to be the former owner. The reclusive Carmen Garcia-Viso moved from Miami and built the house. Nobody had seen or heard from her in three or four years.

"I bought a house at a tax-deed auction," William Wilson told dispatch at Cape Coral Police Department. "Apparently the reason it was full of unpaid taxes, the owner died and she couldn't pay her taxes. Nobody ever came and got her, so she's still in the house."

"The owner of the house?" dispatch asked over the phone. "Are you at the house now?"

"I can't imagine it would be anyone different," Wilson replied. "I mean I can't identify who it is. I'm outside the house."

"Where did you find the person?" dispatch asked.

"Master bedroom … on the floor," Wilson responded.

"And you said it appears to have been quite some time?" dispatch asked.

"It's been at least three or four years," Wilson said.

The Cape Coral Police Department had checked the house twice — Jan. 29, 2013, and April 28, 2013, according to Detective Sgt. Dana Coston. Both times the zone officer was checking a vacant home on his beat. There were no calls for service and no other notes other than the house looked OK. Code enforcement officers had also been to the home several times in the last six years, according to public records from the city of Cape Coral. In 2008, they made contact with Garcia-Viso over a watering violation.

She could not afford to pay the $100 fine and could not speak English. She told code enforcement she paid a sprinkler company twice to come out and was told there wasn't a problem with the timer. The city later rescinded the violation. The light pink house had three years of unpaid taxes totaling $3,980.96. The city mowed the lawn a handful of times and treated it like any other vacant home. In May, next-door neighbor Liz Palma, 55, called code enforcement again.

"She said that she has been calling on this house forever," the case history read. "I (the code enforcement officer) told her that I have not received any complaints."

Palma said she believed the owner died, her daughter lives in the Miami area and she is not taking care of the house resulting in rats and snakes from the overgrown grass.

Wilson described the interior like a time capsule, full of boxes, files of paper, shredded trash, old food, pizza boxes and bird feces. He said the mummified body had been eaten, whether by cockroaches or by a pet bird that lived after the individual passed. He now has to decide what to do with the house and its contents.

Nancy McCrum, a broker associate with Blue Water Realty in Cape Coral, called the incident a fluke.

"If I get assignments, I go in, walk through it and make sure everything's secure," McCrum said. "Somebody should've been in there at some point in time. But, I don't think you can blame the neighbors, you see vacant, overgrown houses all over."