The Body Next Door: How a skeleton prank led to a murder investigation

When the friends started cutting the package open, they got fluid on their hands – and phoned the police.

PC Joy Nicholls of South Wales Police, one of the first on the scene, said the smell was “overwhelming”.

“It obviously wasn’t a medical skeleton,” she told the documentary.

A pathologist suspected the body, which had been wrapped in up to 8in (20cm) of carpet and plastic, was weeks or months old.

They concluded that it was that of a man, aged in his 40s, who had died as a result of blunt-force trauma.

Ms James identified Leigh Sabine, a previous tenant of the flats, who had died one month earlier.

She said Mrs Sabine was the person who had told her that the package contained a medical skeleton.

But little was really known about Mrs Sabine – an “eccentric” woman who had told locals a number of stories about her past, including that her husband had left her.