Last month, Utah police arrived at the home of a 75-year-old woman to conduct a welfare check.

They discovered not only her body, but a man's corpse tucked inside a deep freezer in her utility room, Tooele City Police Department Sgt. Jeremy Hansen said.

It was the woman's husband, who had died more than 10 years earlier.

This week, Hansen told news outlets that investigators had since discovered a notarized letter in the home, apparently from the woman's husband, declaring that his wife was not responsible for his death.

Hansen also said the woman collected roughly $177,000 in Veterans Affairs benefits in the decade since her husband died.

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When the police arrived at a retirement community in Utah to conduct a welfare check last month, they were disturbed to find not only the body of the elderly woman who lived there, but a man's corpse tucked inside a deep freezer in her utility room.

That man was eventually identified as Paul Mathers, who was 58 years old when he was last seen in 2009. He was the husband of the 75-year-old woman also found in the home, Jeanne Souron-Mathers.

"I've been here 13 years — this is one of the strangest cases," Tooele City Police Department Sgt. Jeremy Hansen told news outlets, adding, "We've never had anything like this."

He said police officers had opened Souron-Mathers' fridge and freezer hoping to find food that would indicate "some type of a timeline" for when she died. But when a detective opened a deep freezer in the utility room, he "immediately finds an unidentified deceased adult male in the freezer," Hansen said.

The police made the discovery on November 22 and initially called the incident "very suspicious."

But after several weeks of investigating, the police announced on Monday that they'd found several equally bizarre clues that might help explain the incident.

Hansen said investigators searching through Souron-Mathers' home found a notarized letter from December 2008 that appeared to be from Mathers, declaring that he was not killed by his wife.

"We believe he had a terminal illness," Hansen told KSTU, adding that Mathers likely died sometime between February 4, 2009 — the date of his last appointment at a Veterans Affairs hospital — and March 8, 2009.

Hansen also told The Salt Lake Tribune that experts had not yet verified whether the signature on the letter truly belonged to Mathers. He added that the woman who notarized the letter in 2008 told the police she never read the document before stamping and signing it.

Investigators also discovered that Souron-Mathers had collected roughly $177,000 in Veterans Affairs benefits after her husband's death and are still looking into whether she continued to receive Mathers' Social Security benefits, Hansen said.

Hansen told The Tribune that they were still awaiting an autopsy report to confirm the cause of Mathers' death but that detectives were "wrapping up" their investigation.