A Boston-area widow kept her friends close and the corpse of her late husband closer.

In the shadow of Boston sits the town of Somerville, Massachusetts, a little community that, until recently, harbored a very strange secret. It was in the keeping of Geraldine “Geri” E. Kelley, a California transplant who passed away November 12, 2004, at the age of fifty-four. On her deathbed she offered an unexpected confession that stunned not only her family, but the community at large.

Geri had always claimed that her husband, John, had been killed years earlier in a Las Vegas traffic accident. But this wasn’t the whole truth. Actually, it wasn’t the truth at all. Her husband wasn’t done in by a car, but by a couple of bullets to the brain, courtesy of Geri’s own gun. Incredibly, that wasn’t the worst of it. Geri had told everyone that he was buried someplace out West. But John T. Kelly wasn’t resting in peace in a grave half a continent away. He was right there in Somerville, stashed in a storage locker, resting in pieces.

Specifically, he was in a bin Geri rented at a facility called Planet Self Storage. The police, when informed of her claims, paid the place a quick visit. There, in a musty, rank-smelling room, they found John. Or rather, all that remained of him after spending the last of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first inside two plastic garbage bags stuffed in a six-by-three-foot (1.8 x .9 m) freezer, which had been locked and taped shut.

John Kelley, all in one piece.

Apparently, police surmise, he came to this unhappy state of affairs back in 1991. Geri and John were live-in comanagers at the Victoria Motel in Ventura, California. The couple got in loud, regular fights, and Geri would tell anyone who cared to listen that John was an abusive drunk. Finally, she must have snapped. Staffers recall that one night she called and asked for someone to cover for her at the hotel because her husband had been in a bad accident.

And that was the last anyone ever saw of John.

Planet Self Storage, John Kelley’s almost-final resting place.

Anyone save for Geri, who must have spent a considerable amount of time bagging, taping, and (because he did, after all, wind up in two bags) chopping. No one knows where she kept the body while in California, but a year after she moved to Somerville in 1997, she shipped the trussed-up freezer to Planet Self Storage, where it languished until police found it. “It’s not every day that they find a dead body in one of my storage facilities,” Bryce Grefe, the facility’s owner, told the Boston Globe. “It just doesn’t happen on a regular basis.”

What truly boggles the mind is how, in this age of forensics experts and DNA evidence, Geri got away with it. Indeed, that old freezer would probably still be sitting in a dank corner somewhere had its owner not ratted herself out. It’s not as if she had a fantastic alibi—or any alibi at all. To explain her husband’s disappearance, she fibbed about a Vegas car accident. This humongous whopper could have been blown apart with a couple of quick calls to Sin City hospitals. But it seems no one ever bothered to make those calls. Not even the couple’s daughter, who over the years became estranged from her mother because she refused to say where her father’s grave could be found. Reportedly she told her child, “Nobody needs to know.”

Which leads to the biggest mystery of all. Why didn’t Geri just dump the body somewhere, rather than keep it around for years and then risk discovery by having it shipped cross-country? Perhaps she believed in the old saying that you should keep your friends close and your enemies, even the dead ones, closer. We’ll never know for sure, because that was one question she declined to answer before passing. Only the murder was too much for her to keep quiet about. That secret was simply too big to take to the grave.