Joyce Vincent: A Tragic Death That Went Unnoticed For Two Years

The tragic life story of Joyce Carol Vincent is as sad as it is strange. On 25th January 2006, housing authorities forced their way inside a London flat to repossess it due to unpaid rent.

However, once they got inside they were not prepared for what they would find inside the skeletal remains of a woman who had been dead for over two years.

Imagine if we die alone in a flat, who would discover our death first? Our parents? Friends? Colleagues? Wait, none of them?

Maybe 1 week later, the milkman or any service related guy? Or 1 month later, when the house owner comes to collect rent? Legit?

But what if I told you that someone died and their death wasn’t discovered for over 2 years? How did someone’s death was not known for such a long period?

Joyce Carol Vincent

Joyce Carol Vincent was born on 19 October 1965 in Hammersmith, London. Joyce’s mother died after an operation when she was just 11, her 4 sisters took care of and raised her.

When Joyce was 16, she dropped out of school and left with no qualifications. In 1985 she joined as a secretary in a container shipment company called OCL.

After working in two other companies, she started working at EY. Being employed for 4 years in that company’s treasury department, she left her job in March 2001 for some reason.

After resigning, she stays in a domestic abuse shelter in Haringey and joins as a cleaner in a budget hotel. Also during this time, she starts drifting away from her family.

In February 2003, Joyce moved to a bedsit flat for domestic abuse victims. A bedsit is a small room with all necessary house appliances with occupants usually sharing a bathroom.

Discovery

On January 25, 2006, the officials from a north London housing association walked into Vincent’s apartment because of unpaid rent.

They were greeted with piles of unopened mail by the door, and upon entering the apartment it was totally messed up with a sink full of dishes.

The glow from the television which was still running playing BBC1 and a pile of wrapped Christmas presents waiting to be sent out. Vincent was there too. However, she was almost entirely unidentifiable.

Vincent was found on the floor, completely decomposed, as she had been dead for over two years. She was clutching a shopping bag and near the shopping bag, were presents wrapped by Joyce to deliver during Christmas.

There were many food containers in Joyce’s refrigerator, and the expiry date on the labels of the containers read “2003”. With these two things, it is believed that Joyce might have died around December 2003.

Cause of Death

Since Joyce’s body was too decomposed, a full post-mortem couldn’t be done and instead was done through dental records. Since there was no foul play found, police ruled it a natural death and closed the case.

According to the pathologist who examined Joyce’s dead body was “mostly skeletal”, and hence the cause of her death couldn’t be found.

In one report, Joyce was admitted to North Middlesex Hospital in November 2003, because she vomited blood. It was confirmed that she had a peptic ulcer and was given bed rest for 2 days.

Some say that she died due to an asthma attack and others say that Joyce died because her peptic ulcer turned severe. With a cause of death essentially placed, only one question remained: How did Joyce’s death remain undiscovered for 2 years?

Why she remain undiscovered?

In the investigation, it was said that Joyce diverged on her own and that Joyce’s family were good people. On 25 January 2006, in Joyce’s room, near a shopping bag, her dead body was found.

After Vincent Joyce had died, the smell of her body decomposing came out, but the neighbors assumed it was from a nearby trash can.

Also since Joyce’s room had no direct sight from the outside, people had no idea what was happening inside. An interesting thing is that Joyce had turned her TV on before she died and it had been running till her body was discovered.

But since the flat was noisy, nobody around had noticed it. Since half of the rent for Joyce’s flat had been coming from benefits agencies, the Housing Trust of the flat believed that she was alive.

But since Joyce didn’t pay 2 years’ worth of rent totaling 2400 pounds, on 25 January 2006, only when the housing officials came to take back the house did they find out that Joyce was dead.

When Joyce’s body was recovered, her room heater and TV were still running. You might ask how a room heater and TV have been running for 2 years.

There is a concept called debt forgiveness. According to this concept, to reduce the pressure on debtors, a part of their debt or their total debt will be canceled and due to debt forgiveness, her room heater and TV were still running.

What went wrong with Vincent?

Related article:- 10 creepy unsolved mysteries that baffle the world

It was baffling that nobody seemed to know Joyce Carol Vincent had passed away as no one deserves to die and go unnoticed for several years.

Joyce Carol Vincent worked for most of her life, she had family and friends and wasn’t known to be on the negative end. She had isolated herself from her family in the years before her death, presumably because of the man she had chosen to date.

Also since Joyce was a victim of domestic abuse in her relationship, many people guess she was alone because she was embarrassed to talk about it or she wanted to hide from her abuser’s sight.

Her friends described her as someone “who walked out of jobs if she clashed with a colleague, and who moved from one flat to the next all over London.”

She never answered her sister’s phone calls and didn’t appear to have any friend circle, instead relying on the company of relative strangers. At the time of her death, she had a boyfriend and police tried to locate him but didn’t succeed.

Dreams of a Life

A filmmaker, Carol Morley, who read about Joyce Vincent in the news, decided to make a film titled “Dreams of a Life” which was released in 2011, based on Joyce’s life.

When the director of this movie interviewed Joyce’s relatives and friends who could shed some light on her mysterious death, they described Joyce as a beautiful, intelligent, and socially active woman.

Martin Lister, the guy Joyce Vincent dated for three years only learned of her death when he saw Morley’s ad for people connected to Vincent. He said that he kept in touch with her sporadically until 2002.

Wish people like Martin Lister who knew her personally had stayed in contact and checked in with her more often.

What do we learn?

It’s an ironic and coincidental tale. The idea that a seemingly average person could remain dead for over two years in the age of social media, where everyone is so connected, sounds crazy.

But at the same time, just as people tend to post their best selves on social media, it’s possible Joyce Vincent did this periodically. Nobody knows what happens in real life.

The tragic story of Joyce Vincent serves as a reminder that person-to-person communication still has its place and is important.