A 57-year-old Italian man from Lombardy is accused of welfare fraud and concealing a corpse after hiding his mother's body for three years to collect her pension, even going so far as to disguise himself as a woman.

A skirt suit, lipstick, nail polish, a bob haircut. At first glance, it's indeed an 85-year-old woman entering the town hall of Borgo Virgilio, an Italian town in Lombardy, to renew her identity card. But the municipal employee who greets her is perplexed: the woman is heavily made up, tufts of beard are protruding from under the foundation, and her voice, though feminine, sometimes takes on a deeper intonation.

An investigation was launched, and within a week, local police discovered that the elderly woman had actually died in 2022, that her son had concealed the body and even assumed her appearance in order to continue collecting his mother's pension. The 57-year-old man, who had allegedly received

He was unduly defrauded of thousands of euros and is now accused of welfare fraud and concealing a corpse.

"Mummified body"

“It all started with the intuition of this employee at the civil registry office,” reports the city's mayor, Francesco Aporti, in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. “All these oddities, I probably wouldn't have noticed them without her,” he admits. After checking their databases in early November and thanks to witness statements, the authorities realized that there had been no trace of Graziella Dall'Oglio, the elderly woman, for several years.

They then set a trap for the imposter, claiming that his application for an identity card had been unsuccessful and that he needed to go to the police station to finalize it. "During questioning," the mayor recounted, "he confessed to being the son. The police then asked him to search his mother's home, which he agreed to do. They searched the house and discovered a mummified body." Her remains were taken to the morgue for examination. According to initial reports from Corriere della Sera, the elderly woman died of natural causes.

The most surprising thing is that the son "had no financial problems," emphasizes Francesco Aporti. The man in his fifties is a retired nurse who receives unemployment benefits and owns three properties, as well as a plot of land. With his mother's pension, he had an annual income of 53,000 euros. His father, a retired doctor, died long ago, and he was not known to have any other relatives, especially since he was an only child. "They seemed cut off from the world," the mayor points out. "It's truly very sad. It's certainly a story of profound loneliness."