3 House Visits Yielded Nothing. On 4th, a Body in a Fish Tank

2 suspects identified in case of missing SF man
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 29, 2018 9:50 AM CDT
3 House Visits Yielded Nothing. On 4th, a Body in a Fish Tank
Brian Egg   (San Francisco Police Department via AP)

It had been months since Scott Free last saw his neighbor when a crime scene cleanup crew arrived at that neighbor's home on Aug 14. Thanks to Free's 911 call, San Francisco police are now trying to identify a body without a head or hands, found so badly decomposed in a fish tank in a concealed area of the home that its sex wasn't immediately clear. "It's horrifying," Free tells the San Francisco Chronicle. "A dead body was in the house this entire time." He first noticed neighbor Brian Egg had stopped walking his dog and watering his plants in June. Though strangers answered Egg's door, this wasn't entirely odd since Egg often invited homeless people to stay with him, Free says, per BuzzFeed. The odd part was that a voicemail recording not in Egg's voice claimed Egg was on vacation, which was highly out of character, Free says.

He requested a wellness check in July, but officers "received no response at the door and saw no suspicious circumstances" during two visits, Police Commander Greg McEachern tells ABC 7. A third visit on Aug. 7, the day Egg’s sister filed a missing persons report, yielded the same result, per the Chronicle. It was on the fourth visit that police entered the home and found the corpse among "cleaning products and suspicious odors," says McEachern. Police initially arrested 52-year-old Robert MacCaffrey, who was at the home, and 39-year-old Lance Silva. However, fraud and theft charges were dropped as authorities said more time was needed to investigate. They're awaiting an autopsy report and DNA test results while Silva is held in Alameda County on a probation violation charge. MacCaffrey was released. (More corpse stories.)

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