Brothers Living In Deplorable Home Reveal They Buried Mom, Sister In Backyard; Remains Discovered

Two brothers from Chicago have been taken into custody after they revealed that they have buried their mother and sister in their backyard, police said. The police recovered the two bodies from the backyard of the siblings' house in Lyons on Saturday.

The bodies were found buried in separate containers just about a foot below the ground. The officials have not yet confirmed the identities of the bodies, and the unidentified brothers, aged 45 and 41, have not been charged.

The investigators are awaiting an autopsy report to determine the exact cause of the deaths. The brothers claimed their mother and sister were buried after they died out of illnesses in 2015 and 2019, respectively, ABC 7 reported.

The property was first investigated after authorities from the water department alerted that there was no usage of water in the house for years. Upon arrival, the responding officers found a severe case of hoarding in the house. The house that was in deplorable conditions had jars filled with urine and no functioning toilets. Multiple cats and dogs were running around the property.

"I've never seen anything this bad. There were numerous bottles of urine -- two-liter containers, five-liter containers. You come in and they're just thrown about the house. There's not a room in this house that I cannot - and I was in there personally, along with two other officers - that I could go into without stepping into something," Lyons Police Chief Thomas Herion told NBC Chicago.

During interrogation, the brothers told the police that their mother who was in her seventies died of injuries in December 2015, a week after she was pushed down the stairs by their sister. The brothers claimed that their sister was mentally ill.

"My sister came down with a sickness, an illness, we couldn’t take care of her any longer and she subsequently died in 2019," one of the brothers told the police, as reported by CBS local.

“He indicated that they didn’t know what to do. It was a financial situation, and he just chose the best angle was to just bury them in the backyard,” Herion said. The state had no record of these deaths.

Meanwhile, the police said they are treating the case as a homicide investigation and will take the help of expert agencies to collect evidence from the house.