Featured Image Credit: Council Bluffs Police Department X / zackdfilms1
Topics: US News
Britt Jones
Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada, was a man who had gone missing in 2009, but his body wouldn’t be found for a decade and in one of the strangest ways possible.
Larry, a 25-year-old supermarket worker from Iowa, had failed to return home one night 10 years before his was found.
According to his parents, he had been ‘barefoot’ and ‘hallucinating’ at the time he left their home and took off into the storm.
As any parent would, they became increasingly worried and called the authorities to report their son as missing.
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However, they wouldn’t find him or any evidence of him for years.
Victor Murillo, Larry’s dad, explained to news stations that it felt as though the world had ‘swallowed’ his son whole as there was no leads to where he could have gone after leaving the family home.
He told KETV: "We went out to find him, my wife and I.
"Another friend came to help me. We got up early and couldn’t find anything. It felt like the earth had swallowed him whole."
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Police, who also could not find him, eventually were left with a strange cold case which didn’t seem to be able to be solved.
However, that was until 2019 in a No Frills store.
Larry had worked at the local store for some time, and former workers who were questioned explained that it wasn't unusual for employees to climb on top of the units to stock them during their shift.
Sadly, this may have been what led to Larry’s disappearance.
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When workers were removing fridges from the closed property in 2019, they went on to discover human remains wedged between the wall and the fridge unit.
It is believed that Larry, who must have gone to his workplace following his departure from the family home, had fallen behind the fridges, and become stuck.
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A simulation of what could have happened shows a man perched on the fridge and leaning behind it to clean the area, before falling headfirst into the 18-inch gap.
Sadly, Larry’s body remained in that position for seven years while the store was still operational, and a further three years after it closed down.
Police later recalled that upon examination of Larry’s body, there were no signs of trauma and his death was ruled as an accident.
The authorities came to the conclusion that Larry may have been cleaning behind the fridge when he fell, and as the large fridge was round 12-feet tall, any of the 25-year-old's attempts to shout for help would have been drowned out by the noise of the cooling unit.
Police investigator, Sgt Danielson, who had worked on his disappearance in 2009 said: "We have missing persons all the time, but this is just unique."
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As for his grieving father, he said that: "Our heads are spinning, finding this out after so many years, and it is distressing. It makes us feel a lot of pain.”
The discovery of Larry’s remains meant that the family were able to finally receive answers as to what had happened to their son a decade prior.