How well do you know your neighbor?

How good of a neighbor are you?  Are you familiar enough with them to know for certain if they were to pack up and leave, you would know about it?   Consider those who lived next to Hedviga Golik who found her dead back in 2008, 42 years after she apparently sat down in her favorite armchair in front of her black and white television for a quite evening in front of the telly.

“Croatian police said she was last seen by neighbours in 1966, when she would have been 42 years old.  Her neighbours thought she had moved out of her flat in the capital, Zagreb.”

Did this poor lady have extremely bad body odor (before she died) or had she been ostracized by the community for some social lapse of grace, like yelling “Get out of my yard you filthy little beasts” to the neighbors children.

Could the community have been in on this?  Did one of them, as part of a conspiracy, slip a mickey into her evening tea and then go about their lives as if nothing had happened?

This wouldn’t be the first time an entire community was in cahoots about removing one of the  more unpleasant characters that lived amongst them.  Take the case of Kevin Rex McElroy who was apparently “mean enough to unite a town of plain, good folks to do murder. He had terrorized Skidmore, MO. for years. He allegedly stole livestock, burned houses, chased women, preyed upon young girls — and threatened a bullet or buckshot for anyone who got in his way.”  To date, no one has been brought to trial for the murder of McElroy.

But McElroy’s case appears to clearly be a case of vigilantism.  That is not so apparent in Hedviga’s situation.  According to one witness, Jadranka Markic, who was nine when Hedviga went missing, “I still remember her” Markic said. “She was a quiet woman who kept herself to herself but was polite. We all thought that she had just moved out and gone to live with relatives.”

There is a bright note in this unfortunate event however for Hedviga Golik.   She never had to deal with the complexities of getting cable hooked up and then fighting with the billing department each month about questionable charges attached to her bill.   

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4 thoughts on “How well do you know your neighbor?”

    1. I suspect that is a cleaner image than what they actually found after 42 years Eric 🙂

  1. I saw the Lifetime movie about the McElroy guy! I cannot believe the town let it get so far, but it’s true, no one has been charged. I sort of think: good for them. LOL

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