Why was my neighbour's body not found for two years?
- Published
Audrey says the neighbours did all they could to raise the alarm that something had happened to Sheila
Residents in a south London block are considering legal action against the housing association Peabody after their neighbour lay dead for two and a half years before her body was found - despite their efforts to raise the alarm. How could someone remain undiscovered for so long?
Warning: This article contains distressing content.
Audrey has lived in Lord's Court, a modern three-storey block of flats in Peckham, since 2018. She vividly remembers the day police broke down the door of the flat directly opposite her.
"As soon as the door was opened I knew something bad had happened. You could just see it on their faces," Audrey says.
Inside the tidy one-bed flat, police found the remains of 58-year-old medical secretary Sheila Seleoane. She was little more than a skeleton, dressed in blue pyjama bottoms and a white top. The police did not consider the death suspicious.
Inside the fridge, a trifle dessert gave an indication of how long her body had lain there. It had gone out of date two-and-a-half years earlier.
For Sheila's neighbours, it had been obvious for a long time that something was wrong.
Weeks after Sheila is thought to have died in August 2019, Chantel, who lived in the flat directly below, changed her light bulbs. As she removed the old bulb, a pile of maggots fell from the ceiling. In the weeks that followed, the problem only got worse.
"I've got them in the bedroom, the living room, and the bathroom. And more or less all over my furniture," she recalls. "You'd sit down on the sofa and after a period of time you'd find a squashed maggot," she says. "It was like living in a horror movie."
Chantel, who asked us not to use her real name, says she called Peabody but was told it does not deal with maggots.
"It's just really sad that somebody could be in their flat for so long and not be found, nobody going out of their way to gain contact with her," she says.
She wasn't the only neighbour to raise concerns in the weeks and months that followed. Audrey remembers coming back from a work trip to a foul stench "like a dead body" as she took the lift up to the third floor.
"It made me feel sick," she says. "I could taste it. It was just horrible."
An independent report found there were multiple "missed opportunities" to find Sheila's body sooner
Other neighbours on the same floor say they tried putting towels and sheets under the door to try to keep the smell out.
"We couldn't even sleep in the flat. You couldn't even eat because it was a very, very bad odour," says Donatus Okeke, who lives in a two-bed flat with his wife Evelyn and their three children.
It was clear that Sheila was no longer living there. Her post began to overflow from her letterbox and her doormat - propped up against her door by cleaners - was never returned to its place.
Evelyn says she called Peabody "many times". She shows me a written record of the first time they called - 10 October 2019 - two months after Sheila is thought to have died.
Iyesha, another neighbour from the same floor, also contacted Peabody multiple times. "I kept calling saying there's a smell of death," she says. "Nobody came."
Audrey says the neighbours did everything they could to raise the alarm and describes being repeatedly reassured when she called Peabody's customer care line that someone would investigate.
"That's the one thing that I regret - that I believed Peabody. I regret not calling the police sooner, because I just trusted that they were going to do something."
Peabody told the BBC it was "devastated" by what happened to Sheila, adding it had been "open, honest and transparent about what went wrong".
Sheila was employed by an agency, so it is likely she had no regular place of work or colleagues
So why wasn't Sheila discovered earlier than February 2022?
After Sheila died, her rent stopped being paid, so Peabody sent letters, emails and left voicemails. But in the following year, no-one visited to check up on her. This is despite her always paying her rent on time since she'd moved into the flat in 2014.
Instead, without having spoken to Sheila, Peabody applied for universal credit to be paid directly to it on her behalf. It did this via a government scheme called Alternative Payment Arrangements, which is intended for tenants struggling to pay their bills.
Its application was successful, which meant by March - seven months after Sheila had died - her rent was being paid in benefits from the Department of Work and Pensions directly to Peabody.
Then, in April 2020, her gas safety check - an annual obligation for landlords - was due. When Peabody's contractors could not get into the flat, again no-one from Peabody visited. Instead it wrote letters and then cut off her gas supply.
A year after she died, Peabody did eventually visit the block in response to the neighbours' complaints. It asked the police to check on Sheila but when officers knocked on her door and no-one answered, it decided it didn't have enough justification to knock it down.
Crucially, a mistake by the police operator meant a false message was sent to Peabody saying Sheila had been seen alive and well. It would be another 16 months before Sheila's body would be discovered. The Metropolitan Police apologised and said if the operator responsible had not since retired, he would have been referred for an investigation.
Until this moment, at no point during the year after Sheila died did her rent arrears, her missed gas check or her failure to respond to letters and emails raise a concern to prompt anyone from Peabody to physically visit the flat and find out what had happened to her.
The trauma of what happened is still with the neighbours of Lord's Court
An independent report commissioned by Peabody after Sheila was discovered found there had been multiple "missed opportunities" to find her body sooner.
It said Peabody's "silo working" meant all the reports from neighbours and incidents like the unfulfilled gas safety check were dealt with in isolation.
The organisation "appears not to have seen the triggers, listened to… neighbours, or to have joined the dots", the report said. It describes a bureaucratic and "target-driven culture" in Peabody that "did not put the customer at the heart of the actions".
Housing charity Shelter says there is a trend for housing associations to merge and become large corporations. Its head of policy, Charlie Trew, says the risk is they lose their original mission "to put the tenant first and profit second".
Sheila's neighbours point to a clear change in 2017 when the smaller housing association that used to run Lord's Court, Family Mosaic, merged with the much larger Peabody.
Audrey says the block used to be a strong and friendly community. She says, "When you go to Lord's Court now, it just feels very cold, very bleak, very uninviting".
She says Family Mosaic had employed a building manager who was familiar with everyone and would visit "quite often" to speak to residents. "I feel like Peabody just has no sense of care," she adds.
This could partly be due to the large "patch sizes" Peabody had at the time. Housing associations generally divide their social housing into "patches," usually based on a geographic area. Each "patch" has a neighbourhood manager or housing officer whose job it is to know residents' issues and concerns, resolve problems and to provide support.
But whereas typical patch sizes are around 250-500 properties, Peabody's patch size at the time was 800-1,000 properties, meaning the neighbourhood manager was spread more thinly around their patch.
Peabody told BBC News it had reduced its average patch size to around 500 since Sheila's body was found.
Sheila's neighbours at Lord's Court say she was "reserved" and "shy" but friendly
Charlie Trew, from Shelter, says housing associations are under increasing pressure because of "foundational problems with the funding model".
He said government cuts since 2010 have forced housing associations to find alternative funding, often through building and selling private homes to fund the cost of building social homes.
"What that results in for the tenant is a worse experience, because those housing associations are focused more and more on the financial performance of their organisation rather than on tenant experience," he says.
A Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson said: "The tragic event surrounding Sheila Seleoane's death shine a light on the utterly devastating impacts of social landlords ignoring their tenants."
They added the government had delivered more than 162,000 homes for social rent since 2010.
"We are also committed to building more social homes and are investing £11.5bn through our Affordable Homes Programme to deliver tens of thousands of homes for rent and sale right across the country," the spokesperson said.
Shelter's Charlie Trew says he is concerned that as housing associations merge and focus more on profit, tenants can sometimes be treated as "a problem, or an issue, a task that they need to be got rid of."
"That fundamental culture needs to shift so that housing associations, once again, prioritise the health and wellbeing of their tenants, they listen to them, and they feel like they have a duty of care to make sure their tenants are living happy and fulfilling lives."
Flowers were left by well-wishers after Sheila's body was found
Another factor in why Sheila wasn't found sooner was how isolated she was.
A video of her funeral shows just one person standing at the front of an empty crematorium - her estranged half-brother Viktor, who said he hadn't spoken to her for years. Another person, a representative from Peabody, walks in late.
No other family. No friends.
Sheila was employed by an agency, so it is likely she had no regular place of work or colleagues.
Online searches reveal a very limited social media presence. One post on Facebook from 2012 suggests she was searching for an old school friend who she had lost touch with. "I can't remember your address and made the mistake of not writing it down," she wrote. No-one replied.
The Office for National Statistics says about 7% of British adults often or always feel lonely, and 25% are lonely at least some of the time.
Some scientific studies have suggested loneliness can increase the chance of an early death. We don't know how Sheila died, but her medical records suggest several health complications.
Her neighbours say she was "reserved" and "shy" but friendly. They would say hello on the staircase but didn't know her.
"It's made me look at my neighbours and my community differently," says Audrey. "We should really look out for other people."
In a statement, Peabody said it had not done enough to understand what had happened in the block.
"We wrote and phoned repeatedly without recognising that this wasn't enough," a spokesperson said.
Unopened post was found in a mailbox on the ground floor of the building
Peabody said it had changed the way it investigated complaints. Rent collections and gas safety checks had also changed as a result of Sheila's case.
"We have new ways of working to put people and their wellbeing at the centre of our operations," the statement said.
"This is in part a cultural change which takes time, and we know very well that our services are not as good as they need to be. But we are determined to live our values, learn our lessons and continuously improve for the benefit of residents."
The organisation admitted its relationship with residents in Lord's Court was poor and said it had apologised to them.
Despite Peabody's efforts to improve, the trauma of what happened is still with the neighbours at Lord's Court. The BBC has been told they are speaking to lawyers about legal action for damages to compensate for their experience.
Audrey finds being in the block triggers horrible memories of those two and a half years living within metres of a corpse, and her multiple attempts to warn Peabody.
"I always wondered what was going on behind that door," she says.
She asked Peabody to move her as soon as Sheila was found, but after a year, she has not been found a suitable alternative.
"They don't know the sleepless nights that we had after this and how it's affected us," says Audrey. "It still affects me every time I leave the house - I see Sheila's flat and I'm reminded constantly of what's happened there."
Evelyn and her family are trying to leave too. Ever since Sheila's body was discovered, Evelyn's 12-year-old son Chialuzue has struggled to sleep and his performance at school has suffered. She says it is as a result of realising they had lived next to a corpse for so long.
"We are being neglected. They don't care about us. They only care about the money and nothing else," she says.
Peabody said there was a desperate shortage of social housing in London but it would look at what other support they could offer Audrey and Evelyn.
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