Landlords of flat where woman lay dead for two years 'made no contact'

2022-07-21

Britain’s forgotten woman: Landlord of medical secretary who lay dead in her flat for two-and-a-half years cut off her gas and took her rent directly out of her benefits payments – but made NO contact

Sheila Seleoane’s skeletal remains discovered by police in her flat in Peckham, south London, in February
Residents complained to building owner Peabody Housing of smell coming from her flat in October 2019
Met Police officers broke down the door in February this year and found her skeletal remains on the sofa
Inquest in Southwark heard Ms Seleoane, who was identified by dental records, likely died in August 2019
Ms Seleoane, who was on medication, had attended the GP complaining of breathing issues before death
Peabody Housing told the inquest they had taken rent from benefits but not contacted her in two years

The landlords of the flat where a ‘forgotten’ medical secretary lay dead for over two years failed to make contact with her despite cutting off her gas for non payment of rent, an inquest heard today.

The skeletal remains of Shelia Seleoane were discovered by police after they forced their way into her third floor flat in Peckham, south London.

The 61-year-old was identified by her dental records with police determining there were no suspicious circumstances to her death – which likely occurred in August 2019.

The body of the spinster was found in February 2022, with some residents of her block of flats managed by Peabody Housing claiming they had repeatedly reported a foul stench coming from her flat.

Today, at an inquest into her death, Southwark Coroner’s Court was told how Ms Seleoane had visited her GP in the months before she died.

Ms Seleoane, who was in medication at the time, complained about being ‘wheezy’ and short of breath.

Meanwhile, Wells Chomutare, director of neighbourhood at the Peabody Housing, told the inquest members of his staff last saw Ms Seleoane in April 2019 when she let them into her third floor flat for a routine gas inspection.

Sheila Seleoane’s (pictured) skeletal remains were discovered in her one-bedroom flat in Peckham, South London, in February

Harriet Harman, Labour MP for Camberwell and Peckham, has demanded a full investigation into why Peabody ignored repeated calls from neighbours who complained of a horrendous smell more than two years ago. Pictured: The Lord’s Court flats where Ms Seleoane’s body was discovered

However the coroner heard that when she failed to pay her rent and allow engineers into her flat her gas supply was cut off.

Former medical secretary Ms Seleoane last paid her monthly rent in August 2019 and attempts by members of Peabody’s rent team failed to her by email and phone.

After she fell into arrears an application was made to have the rent paid directly from her Universal Credit payments.

This was approved and from March 2020 the rent was paid each month to Peabody Housing – even though no one had made any contact with her.

The inquest heard that in June 2020 officials had tried to gain entry to the flat to carry out a routine gas inspection.

When no one responded at the third floor flat, Mr Chomutare said the gas supply was cut off.

He said no further attempt was made to contact Ms Seleoane and he did not have the power to force entry to the flat.

The inquest was told his office had received three reports that expressed concern for Ms Seleoane’s welfare.

Despite promises to sensitively refurbish and re-let the flat in which her body was discovered, residents have reported that Peabody has not taken any action since

Neighbours began complaining to the housing association landlord about a ‘foul smell’ in the building in October 2019

Neighbours say they complained about the smell for more than two years, as well as raising concerns about the number of unopened letters

One resident complained about mail building up at the flat and another about an open balcony door banging in the wind.

Mr Chomutare said after police visited the flat twice in October 2021 they were told by police that Ms Seleoane was safe and well.

The police attendance was noted in the logs kept by Peabody Trust who later launched an investigation into their handling of the failure to make any contact with their tenant.

The inquest was told that contact with tenants had been affected by the lockdown rules imposed during the pandemic.

Questioned by the coroner Dr Julian Morris about Peabody’s failure to make any contact with their tenant Mr Chomutare said: ‘We did not connect the dots to paint the picture of Ms Seleoane.’

Southwark Coroner’s Court was told that in the months before she died Ms Seleoane had visited her GP and complained about being ‘wheezy’ and short of breath.

The court was told a follow-up appointment was made but Ms Seleoane did not keep the appointment.

She had also visited Lewisham Hospital to undergo an MRI and colonoscopy in the months before her death, according to records read out at the inquest.

The inquest was told Ms Seleoane had no contact with social services and no serious health issues in the months before her death.

Detective Sergeant Scott Fisher, one of the first police officers on the scene, told the inquest he found Ms Seleoane in what he described as the ‘recovery position’ lying on her side.

No one in the block can recall exactly when they last saw her striding purposefully to the bus stop or returning home with shopping. An ambulance is pictured outside the building

He said her body was partially covered with the remains of blue pajamas bottoms and a white top.

Giving evidence remotely he described the flat as being very tidy with no sign of forced entry.

He said there was no visible sign of trauma to the skull or chest area.

The inquest was told that police had called at the flat twice in October 2020 after concerns that she had not been seen for several months.

DS Fisher said the first officer who called at the flat had not noticed ‘a smell of death’ and had no reason to force entry.

A second officer who visited a week later on October 21 also came to the same conclusion and no further action was taken.

Ash Fox, deputy chief executive of Peabody, wiped away tears as she said everyone at the housing group was devastated by the circumstances surrounding the death of Ms Seleoane.

She told the inquest an independent investigation into why Ms Seleoane’s body had been undiscovered for over two years had resulted in 37 recommendations to the way they deal with their tenants.

‘It is clear from the investigation that processes were followed successfully, but perhaps there was an opportunity where the dots could have been joined up sooner and done more to raise the alarm,’ she said.

The housing executive said one of the recommendations was to make contact with all their tenants who have not been spoken to for a year.

Staff would also look for changes in regular behaviour, such as the failure to pay rent.

She said so far only nine people who rent homes from the housing group have not been spoken to while there are 25 others who have recently had their gas supply cut off.

Ms Ash said it was now up to the Peabody to apply the ‘human touch’ as a social landlord.

She wiped away tears as she was asked by the coroner the affect of the death had on staff.

‘Everyone is devastated, she said. ‘ We recognise more could have been done.’

Before delivering his verdict the coroner said the cause of death was unascertained due to the decomposition of the body.

Dr Julian Morris said the cause of death would remain open.

How did a woman lie dead in her home for TWO AND A HALF YEARS without a single person noticing? Story of medical secretary, 61, with a smile for everyone is a wretched indictment of modern Britain

By David Jones for the Daily Mail

Nothing about the woman in Flat 16 betrayed the depths of her isolation. Even Sheila Seleoane’s nearest neighbours were blind to the poignant truth: that this prim medical secretary didn’t have a single friend or family member close enough to her to care for her welfare.

On weekday mornings, when it seemed that she was heading off for work, she wished everyone she saw a cheery good day. In the evening, when she returned to her fourth-floor flat in the bustling South London community of Peckham, she was equally affable.

‘She was always well put-together, and wore a smart black coat, black trousers and black court shoes, with her hair tied in a bun,’ recalls a young professional woman who lived opposite Miss Seleoane. ‘But I didn’t really speak to her. It was more just, ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye’.’

Miss Seleoane was similarly detached from other residents of Lord’s Court, a modern building containing 20 flats owned by the Peabody Trust, the affordable housing charity.

However, mother-of-three Lyesha Bent, who resides on the same corridor, says she wore gym clothes at weekends and, with her petite figure, looked younger than her 61 years. So everyone assumed her to have a busy career and social life.

No one in the block can recall exactly when they last saw her striding purposefully to the bus stop or returning home with shopping.

Some time in the late summer or early autumn of 2019, though, Miss Seleoane vanished. For reasons pathologists are trying to establish, we now know that she had died — presumably alone — in her flat.

Astonishingly, she lay undiscovered for two-and-a-half years until, on February 18 this year, police broke in to find her skeletal remains on the living-room sofa.

Having failed to enter her flat, despite being alerted as early as October 2020 to the possibility that harm might have befallen its occupant, they finally responded to a report that her balcony door was still swinging open, following Storm Eunice.

Beside her body were some deflated pink party balloons, according to Ms Bent, who says she gleaned this puzzling detail from one of the officers who made the grim discovery.

That this woman had been so shamefully forgotten is a damning indictment of the depersonalised, look-the-other-way attitude that pervades so many neighbourhoods in modern-day Britain.

That her death went unnoticed for more than two years, when our every move is now monitored, whether by social media, CCTV, mobile phone cameras or other digital devices, almost defies belief.

It says much about her isolation that, having spent a fortnight investigating this harrowing case, I haven’t found a solitary photograph of Miss Seleoane, nor anyone who knew her well, except for a few school friends who long ago lost touch with her.

Her only known family member in this country, her estranged older brother Victor Seleoane, 64, has proved equally elusive.

His conviction for murder, 41 years ago, might explain his determination to remain in the shadows.

One person I have traced is Miss Seleoane’s half-sister, Julia Bella Brooms, who lives in South Africa. For reasons that will become clear, the two women never met.

But they briefly corresponded after the death of their mother, in 1987, and Mrs Brooms, 72, became emotional this week, when, as sensitively as possible, I told her what had become of her sibling.

‘This is too much. Awful. I don’t understand how anyone could pass away and be left for so long,’ she said, speaking through an interpreter in the Sesotho language.

‘Where were Sheila’s neighbours? Where were her work colleagues? People from the local municipality? Her landlord? This could never happen in South Africa. Here, when your neighbour isn’t seen, even for one or two days, you go to check up on them. We live as a community.’

Her plaintive questions are understandable. But more and more of us are now living alone. The number of Britons living on their own has increased by nearly ten per cent in a decade, it was revealed this week, with the Office for National Statistics reporting that 25.8 per cent of Londoners live alone.

Miss Seleoane’s death ought to have been obvious for all manner of reasons — not least the nauseating stench that filled the fourth-floor hallway in the autumn of 2019, and throughout that winter.

Her nearest neighbour, who asked not to be named, showed me a text from her mother saying the smell she described sounded like that of a ‘dead person’.

Neighbours became increasingly concerned when letters began to pile up in the letterbox

There were countless more clues. Miss Seleoane had lived in her flat since 2014, and until August 2019, paid her £109 weekly rent by debit card. Yet by March 2020, she had fallen heavily into arrears, and the housing trust had begun legal action to recover the debt.

She was summoned to Clerkenwell and Shoreditch County Court on March 18 — by which time she would probably have been dead for about six months.

Deeply concerned by this case, Miss Seleoane’s local MP, Harriet Harman, has compiled a timeline of events.

In it, Peabody states that from April, her rent was being covered by universal credit.

The Department for Work and Pensions wouldn’t comment on her individual case. But it explained that a landlord can apply for universal credit to be paid directly to them when the tenant defaults.

As her bank account drained, Miss Seleoane must also have missed paying other bills, including those for her household utilities and perhaps her mobile phone.

Southwark Council says her council tax payments stopped around the time of her death, but this wasn’t considered unusual because many people default. It adds that debtors were not pursued in the usual way during the pandemic.

In March 2019, Robert Heath Heating Ltd, an energy firm contracted by Peabody, made two attempts to check her gas supply. Finding no one at home, they taped notices to the door, warning that they would enter the flat forcibly if she didn’t let them in by early April.

If only this threat had been carried out, Miss Seleoane might have been spared the indignity of lying unburied for two more years. The company declined to comment.

Meanwhile, her post-box overflowed, and her unopened letters littered the entrance hall, yet the postman kept cramming them in regardless.

At one point, a team of decorators painted the exterior of Flat 16, failing to notice her body through the unlocked balcony window. Nor, it seems, were their suspicions aroused when her front door couldn’t be opened to stop the wet paint sticking to the frame.

When cleaners removed her doormat to mop the corridor, in autumn 2019, it was never put back. Didn’t anyone think to ask why? This week, the mat was still propped against the flat’s wall, alongside a withered bouquet and children’s paintings left as a token of remembrance. As one neighbour remarked: ‘Surely all this should have set alarm bells ringing?’

The bare details of this story first emerged three weeks ago, soon after Miss Seleoane was found. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine dominating the news, however, it soon slipped out of the headlines. Doubtless this came as a relief to the many people who, either through indifference or ineptitude, failed to inquire into her disappearance.

By my assessment, the number of individuals and organisations who might have suspected something runs into double figures.

However, surely the most culpable are Peabody and the Metropolitan Police.

Named after its founder, a Victorian philanthropist, the housing trust provides 67,000 homes for 155,000 people in London and the South-East. Its grandiose mission statement claims it places community spirit at the heart of its values.

‘We are able to tell the stories of our residents and customers and make sure their voices are heard,’ its website proclaims.

The trust should try telling that to the residents of Lord’s Court, who lodged innumerable complaints about the sickening odour emanating from Miss Seleoane’s flat many times, only to be fobbed off or ignored.

Everybody on the fourth floor has asked to be moved to another building. Evelyn Odintru says her children, 12, 11, and three, are so frightened from living close to a corpse that they have nightmares.

Though concerns were allegedly voiced as early as the winter of 2019, Peabody says nothing was logged in its records until the following June. The trust then claims it made repeated attempts to contact her but didn’t have the legal right to enter the property.

A full year passed before finally, in October 2020, the trust asked the Met Police to make a welfare check. According to Peabody’s records, the police reported back that they had ‘spoken to the resident and that she is safe and well’.

Yes, you read that correctly.

How could such a basic error have been made? Was there some miscommunication? Did an officer go to the wrong flat and speak to the wrong woman?

These are among many questions to be addressed by the outside consultants tasked by Peabody with investigating this deeply distressing matter. Whatever the truth, Peabody says the police’s reassurance led its staff to believe ‘everything was fine’ and on October 22, 2020, it closed the case.

However, the trust’s chief executive, Ian McDermott, admits it made mistakes. ‘We are all devastated by what has happened. Quite rightly, everyone wants answers, and so do we,’ he says.

‘Clearly, looking back, the red flags were there. It should have been obvious to us that Sheila had either abandoned the property or something was very wrong. Even with the challenges of lockdowns, we should have done better.’

The Met would only say it was aware of the trust’s claims, and was ‘working to establish what messages were relayed after officers attended this location.’

But back to Sheila Seleoane. What do we know of this forsaken woman, and how should she be remembered? With the help of her school friends, distant relations, and public records, I’ve pieced together fragments of her story.

It begins in post-war South Africa under the ever-tightening yoke of apartheid. In 1949, her mother, Adeline, gave birth to a girl called Bella, whose father is unknown. But when, five years later, she was offered the chance of a new life in England, she grasped the opportunity.

Adeline was the nursemaid to the two daughters of a Dr Thomas Forrest, and when he took up an appointment in London, he asked her to accompany them.

Passenger records from the mail ship Carnarvon Castle show that she made the 12-day voyage with the doctor, his wife Lillian, and their children, arriving at Southampton, in September, 1954.

Three years later, by then living in Hornsey, North London, Adeline had given birth to a son, Victor Patrick Seleoane; and on January 9, 1961, Sheila was born. Their father is not named on their birth certificates, and it seems Adeline was unmarried.

Accounts of his murder trial, at the Old Bailey in 1981, suggest Victor was an unsavoury character. Embroiled in a gangland dispute, he stabbed a man to death during a pub brawl, and though he claimed to have been defending a friend, who was being attacked with a knife, he was jailed for life.

He was then 24. It is not known how long he served in prison but after his release the Department of Justice says he was jailed again, for burglary, and was freed five years ago.

Since then, he, too, has vanished without trace. His last listed address, in 2014, was an unprepossessing flat, in Plaistow, East London.

On the Lord’s Court grapevine, it is rumoured that he and his sister fell out several years ago, but as her immediate next-of-kin, he is believed to have been contacted about her death.

As the coroner will need to establish Miss Seleoane’s identity beyond doubt, experts believe her brother could be asked to provide a DNA sample.

Commendably, Miss Seleoane overcame her difficult beginnings.

According to Valerie Meade Hussey, a friend from Woodberry Down Comprehensive School, North London, she was ‘quiet at first’, but a ‘bubbly’ character when she felt comfortable in people’s company.

They remained friends into their late teens, and enjoyed nights out together, but lost touch. They last bumped into each other shopping about 30 years ago. ‘We chatted for a while and she seemed fine,’ says Mrs Hussey. ‘This is just so sad. Why was nobody there for her?’

Perhaps Miss Seleoane chose the job of medical secretary because her mother worked for a doctor and in hospitals. At all events, in her 50s she was temping for a company called Lifeline Personnel. However, it says it has no payroll record of her after February 20, 2015.

From that date, her life becomes a complete mystery.

If she was working, as neighbours believe and her smart outfits suggest, who employed her and why weren’t they concerned by her disappearance? If she wasn’t, where and how did she pass her days?

Though the police are describing her death as ‘unexplained’ but not suspicious, there is, of course, another unanswered question: how did she die?

Given that her body had decomposed, renowned forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd (who conducted the autopsy on Princess Diana) says the cause might be deemed ‘unascertainable’.

Ironically, it seems that the only person demanding to know the truth about what became of Sheila Seleoane is her half-sister Bella Brooms; someone she never met.

She also wants her remains flown to South Africa and buried in the family plot with their mother.

Then, at last, there would be people to care for the occupant of Flat 16. A woman Britain so shamefully forgot.

Additional reporting by Tim Stewart and Stephanie Condron

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