WRITTEN BY TYLER SPINOSA
ILLUSTRATED BY KIRE TORRES
Ninety-seven decomposing corpses were discovered in the back room of the local Yankee Candle store this past Sunday, Jan. 6. The corpses were found during an audit when an employee was moving boxes and unearthed the small mountain of shrink-wrapped murder victims.
Coroners determined the bodies had been there for as long as 18 months. Police are still investigating potential suspects. When asked about how this could have gone unnoticed for so long, sales associate Millard Whimpnutt said, “I’m shocked, but I’m not surprised. I also don’t care, and maybe that’s how this happened.”
Longtime customer Katherine Gutsmith was shocked to hear the news. “I come here all the time,” she said. “I thought it was suspicious that there was always someone in a jumpsuit dragging bulky rugs in and out of the back room, but I never said anything.”
Candle shipments come in at least five times a week, and the boxes are stored several feet high in the stockroom. “Sometimes it takes a while for us to get through everything,” said Michael Shortmantle, a longtime backroom employee. “Most of us have completely checked out mentally and really can’t be bothered to care, so there are boxes from last year still floating around back there. I thought I smelled something weird, but I just assumed it was a new seasonal fragrance.”
The victims have been identified as missing people from the surrounding area. Hiring manager Duncan Meloncamp took partial responsibility as he said, “Yeah, this is partly on me. I definitely saw that guy in the jumpsuit, but my self-esteem is way too low to assert myself with strangers.”
It took emergency services more than an hour to complete the cleanup. Families and onlookers watched in horror, as a seemingly endless string of dead people were rolled out the door on stretchers and onto a police flatbed for mass transportation. Investigators are checking other Yankee Candle stores within the tri-state area to see if they are also housing human remains.
In the wake of this tragedy, Yankee Candle has begun to reconsider its hiring policies and infrastructure to try and remedy the fact that their businesses are such an optimal place for hiding the remains of murder victims.
Regional sales manager George Harglin said, “No one saw this coming, but in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. If I were going to hide that many bodies, our establishments would be a natural choice.”
