Sobering simulation showed what happened to man stuck behind fridge for 10 years

The day after Thanksgiving 2009, the family of Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada reported him missing, saying they'd last seen him leaving his parents' house barefoot in a blizzard.

According to his relatives, he had left his keys and his car at the time of his disappearance.

For the next 10 years, nobody saw anything of the Iowa man, and it appeared as though he'd just vanished, until a decade later, when a team of workers were taking apart a closed-down store which had been shut for the past three years.

In the narrow gap between the fridge units and the walls, they found human remains, and a DNA test confirmed that the body they found wedged in the confined space belonged to Larry.

Investigators found no signs of foul play and concluded that Larry had slipped into an 18-inch gap between the fridge units and the wall.

He was trapped there until he died.

Quite disturbingly, it means the shop operated for years with a dead body just the other side of the fridges and nobody noticed.

Larry had worked at the No Frills shop, which closed down in 2016, meaning he spent around seven years just the other side of the fridge without the shoppers realising it.

After it shut, it wasn't fully cleared out until 2019, which is when workers found Larry's body, with the remains wearing clothes that matched the last things the man's family remembered him wearing.

Employees at the No Frills said it wasn't unusual for staff to climb atop the fridges to stock them, since the fridges are around 12 feet tall.

If the man was conscious and trying to shout for help, then it's possible the noise would have been drowned out by the sound they made while switched on.

A grotesque simulation of what Larry might have suffered through shows the 25-year-old, whose death was ruled an accident, would not have been able to free himself after falling into the gap.

People walked right by where his body was, completely unaware, and while some wondered whether customers or staff would have noticed the smell of his decomposing remains, they appear not to have done so since his body stayed there for the next 10 years.

Retail workers responding to the man's tragic fate said there were all sorts of smells they ignored while on the job, so many people would dismiss a foul odour as just something else in the shop and not think any more of it.

It would have been a terrible ordeal for Larry and his family, spending 10 years not knowing what happened to him before the truth was finally discovered.

Investigator Sgt Brandon Danielson, who was originally assigned to the case at the time, said in 2019: "You don't hear about these types of cases, [like] people found in walls, especially in this area."