You're in a heated argument with your parents.
They won't listen to you.
They think you've gone mad.
But you know the truth.
Someone has been following you.
You're realizing there's no point in trying to convince your parents.
Your pursuers will be here soon, and you've wasted too much time as it is.
You run for the front door, and wrench it open.
Cold wind and snow rush in from the dark.
You pause for a moment...
Realizing you don't have your wallet, coat, or even your shoes.
But if you don't leave this second, they'll try to stop you.
And without another moment's hesitation...
You plunge into the abyss.
January 2019.
A light snowfall was gently coating the ground on a cold winter morning,
as a group of contractors entered an old No Frills in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
The grocery store had sat abandoned for the past three years, and they were there to tear down the store to prepare it for renovation.
Inside was reminiscent of a ghost town.
It looked like nobody had been there for a long time.
However, as they would soon find out, that wasn't entirely true.
One of the workers was tearing apart a freezer in the back of the store,
when to his horror, a limp body fell out from behind it.
The decayed flesh was dark and flaky.
The cold and lifeless eyes stared out blankly, right into his soul.
Nauseous, the worker felt the image of the corpse seep into his mind where it would live rent free.
Swallowing, he fished out his phone and dialed 911.
When police arrived to inspect the scene, they found the body's decomposition was so far along that gender and age were unidentifiable.
Council Bluffs Police Sgt. Brandon Danielson, however, immediately noticed the clothing, which matched a missing person's report.
He contacted the parents of the person for a DNA swap,
and confirmed that the corpse belonged to 25 year old Larry Eli Murillo Moncada, an employee of the grocery store who had gone missing 10 years prior.
Seven years before the store had closed down.
But how did he end up behind the freezer?
And surely the smell of a decomposing body must have been unbearable to customers and employees alike.
Well, apparently, it was.
Customers on a local Facebook page complained about a rancid smell throughout the aisles.
With one person saying that
"The smell was so strong back there by the coolers that it made me sick. I had to leave. Never went back again."
Another woman even asked a butcher employee if there was rancid blood from cutting the meat in the store.
It was no surprise to anyone that the store ended up closing,
with a Google review even describing the store as "pretty dumpy".
But how did he get behind the fridge in the first place?
In order to fully understand all the facts and hopefully answer this question,
we first need to go back 10 years to the night of Larry's disappearance.
It was November 28th, 2009, two days after Thanksgiving.
A snowstorm was brewing outside, and so was Larry's foul mood.
Instead of cozying up inside, beside the fireplace with his family,
Larry was in the midst of windy flurries, in only a pair of jeans and a hoodie, running barefoot through the snow.
Biting wind blew through the dark skies, nipping at bare skin and blinding the young man.
But to him, that was the least of his worries.
His only focus was running away,
away from the person who was following him.
But his family's worries began the previous morning after their son got home from a late night shift
on Thanksgiving at the local No Frills.
He had been working at the store for five years now and had a seemingly normal day, but he was acting erratically.
He complained about his racing heart and craving sugar,
saying only sweet food could tame his heartbeat.
Like any concerned mother would, Anna rushed him to the doctor's to be prescribed antidepressants.
Believing things would get better in the morning,
Anna sent him to bed, but unbeknownst to her, his mental health would only further deteriorate.
The next morning, Larry began hearing voices,
persistently telling him to eat sugar, and was convinced someone was following him.
He was becoming more irritable, anxious.
Around 6:15PM, as the snowfall outside began to storm,
Larry was in the middle of an argument with his parents
when he suddenly snapped, and without warning,
ran out of his house, leaving his coat, shoes, and wallet behind.
His father, Victor, went chasing after him,
but soon lost Larry in the darkness and powdery gusts of wind.
"It felt like the earth had swallowed him whole," his father later recalled.
Victor and Anna Murillo had no idea where their adult son had gone.
After he failed to come back home the next morning, the parents filed a missing persons report
with the Council Bluffs Police Department.
Enlisting friends and family, they created a search party.
They began with scouting out places Larry frequented, checking the most obvious locations he could be at.
This brought them to his place of work.
The group searched for clues inside and out of the No Frills, only to come up empty handed.
When employees were asked if anyone had seen Larry, or if he'd been acting strangely,
they were met with blank stares and shrugged shoulders.
All signs led away from the store, but deep in Anna's heart,
she knew the supermarket was more important than it seemed.
The police were doing their due diligence in the case,
calling other law enforcement agencies and nearby detention centers.
Yet they continued to come up short.
When they investigated the store, there was no sign of him on the security footage,
and the manager just said Larry wasn't working the day of his disappearance.
Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years.
Life seemingly moved on around the Murillo family,
but they still couldn't shake the feeling that their son was still out there. And he was.
In fact, turns out he had been secretly hiding right under everyone's noses.
Anna and Victor received a call from the police department in January of 2019,
notifying them that a body had been found in the abandoned No Frills
by workers who were preparing the building for renovations.
The corpse had decayed past the point where visual identification was possible,
but the clothes it was wearing had not, and the police believed them to be the same clothes
that Larry had been wearing the night of his disappearance.
To be sure, police needed samples from the parents to conduct a DNA test of the remains.
The results confirmed their suspicions.
It was the body of Anna and Victor's son,
trapped impossibly between the back of a freezer and the wall.
What they couldn't prove for sure, though, was how
he got there, but they had a pretty solid theory.
Larry was paranoid, hearing thoughts running through his head.
Fleeing from his family home in the middle
of a snowstorm, barefoot and undressed.
Finding a safe and warm place to hide from the pursuer
would have most likely been the first thing in his mind.
The grocery store he worked at was warm and familiar,
and being an employee at the No Frills, he likely had access to an alternative entrance,
which would explain the lack of video surveillance.
Once inside, likely still feeling anxious,
he scoured the store for a safe place to hide from his imagined pursuer.
And what better hiding spot than the one place in the store that not even management knew about?
It was supposed to be used for storage, but employees
would often hide up on top of one of the freezers in the back of the store to take unofficial breaks.
However, there was an 18 inch gap between the wall and the freezer.
Easily avoidable during well lit store hours,
but the darkness of the store at night combined with his erratic state at the time
could have turned the gap into a gaping death trap that led him to fall 12 feet down
into the space behind the freezer, about the size of a car tire.
Talk about claustrophobic.
There's even a possibility that he accidentally rolled over into the gap if he fell asleep up there in his hiding spot.
Depending on how he fell, it would have made it difficult for him to navigate the section between the freezer and the wall.
12 feet is a high enough jump with a head start.
There was no evidence of foul play being involved, and his death was deemed accidental.
Whether it was from dehydration over a couple of days, immediate impact, or heart attack from panic,
the ultimate cause of death remains unknown.
What we do know is that Larry's paranoid thoughts of someone following him led to an absolutely horrifying and tragic fate.
One of the weirdest parts to this story is that, apparently,
employees continue to use their secret on top of the freezer break area up until the store closed down.
Which, honestly, is insane.
It's not exactly easy to ignore the putrid smell of a decaying body literally right underneath your nose.
But... why didn't they tell anyone?
Sadly, it's likely the employees were more interested in keeping their hiding space, as well as their jobs.
If they mentioned the smell, they would have also had to explain what they were doing up on top of the freezer,
and who wants to tell their boss they've been slacking off?
Tragically, the Murillo family never got the closure they wanted.
The negligence and time it took to find his son still shakes Father Victor to the core.
"Our heads are spinning, finding this out after so many years, and it is distressing, it makes us feel a lot of pain."
"They closed the building. The freezers weren't working anymore. So how can a body just be there?"
he pleaded in an interview with the Daily Mail.
Unfortunately, we may never know.
Larry's body was found seven years after the freezers he was trapped behind turned off and went warm.
But somehow, this cold case still feels frozen.
While bodies showing up in grocery stores is far from the norm, this isn't a totally isolated incident.
Just a year before Larry was found, a store manager at a WinCo food supermarket called a plumber,
claiming to smell what he thought was sewage seeping from a pillar outside the front entrance of his store.
A witness described it as "some gooey liquid, and it smelled really foul... it was oozing out of the pillar onto the pavement... smelled like death."
Which turned out to be a very apt description, seeing as after the plumber chipped away at the pillar,
a decaying human leg was revealed.
Firefighters were called to help remove the corpse.
The more pillar they chipped away, the more horrifying the state was.
The person had been stuck in the pillar with one arm behind their head.
And like Larry's, the body's decomposition was so far gone, that not even the gender of the body was able to be identified.
Because this happened in the summer,
the body was literally being baked inside of the pillar at upwards of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or about 38 degrees Celsius.
The body was identified at the county corridor's office to be Raymundo Rivera.
Raymundo had been fleeing the police in what they believed to be a stolen vehicle.
After crashing the vehicle, he managed to scale up the roof of the supermarket,
but that was the last time he was seen.
Seeing the access point from the roof, the assailant likely chose the pillar to hide out in,
but didn't anticipate falling deep in the pillar and getting stuck, where he was literally baked alive.
Unlike Larry's story, police were able to pinpoint exactly what happened, but like Larry's,
Raimundo's death was a terrible way to go.
So, in the end, next time you're at the grocery store,
if you smell something rotten, it might not be the food that's past its expiration date.