The remains include the home’s former co-owner and her son
Edward Marchion took a chance when he bought a four-bedroom house in Burlington, Connecticut, an affluent suburb about 20 miles west of Hartford, without ever stepping foot inside, he told The Wall Street Journal. When he entered for the first time, he could hardly believe what he found: three dead bodies.
Connecticut State Police described the bodies found at the home as “skeletal remains” and identified one of them as the previous co-owner, Sally Anne Cash, who would be 54 years old today. Another body belonged to her son, Brian Cash, who would have turned 23 this month, according to state police.
The third body is still undergoing DNA testing to determine identity, the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. Sally Anne Cash had purchased the house in 2019 with her husband, the Journal reported.
It is still not clear when or how the former owner and her son died, but police said they believe the deaths were an isolated incident, according to the Journal.
Marchion won the home in June at a “sight unseen” foreclosure auction, meaning bidders were not allowed to tour inside beforehand. Marchion’s winning bid was $525,000, a discount off the property’s estimated value of $650,000.
The lawyer appointed by the court to oversee the foreclosure auction, Christopher Thogmartin, said he assumed most bidders planned to flip the home for resale. Marchion declined to comment to the Journal.
MSI previously reported the discovery in a June 17 article, at which point state police had said they found no indication of anything suspicious or criminal.
The mystery has highlighted the risks buyers can encounter when purchasing houses at foreclosure auctions. Most house hunters would not dare buy a home sight unseen, but at auctions bidders are rarely given a look inside beforehand, the Journal reported.
That is because homeowners and tenants generally are legally permitted to remain in their homes through foreclosure proceedings and are not required to allow interior inspections prior to public auctions, according to the Journal.
The foreclosure case in Burlington was unusual from the beginning. The 2,800-square-foot, Cape Cod-style home sat on more than two acres and was worth at least twice the amount remaining on its mortgage, Thogmartin told the Journal.
“Why would anyone walk away from that?” he said.
The owners stopped making their roughly $3,000 monthly mortgage payments in late 2024, according to court records cited by the Journal. Their bank filed a foreclosure complaint the following August. The Cashes never responded to the foreclosure complaint filed against them, court records show.
Thogmartin told the Journal he figured the owners had abandoned the house, which was completely overgrown when he first visited it in May. When a property is clearly abandoned, Thogmartin has the authority to hire a locksmith to allow for a full inspection by potential bidders, he said.
But when he returned to the home a few weeks before the auction, he noticed two new signs that said “keep out” and “owner occupied,” he told the Journal.
“Because of that, there’s no way I can order a locksmith,” he said. “I have reason to believe someone might be inside.”
On June 8, roughly two dozen people showed up for the auction and wandered around the outside of the house as best they could, the Journal reported. After six bids, Marchion was declared the winner.
Marchion has asked the court to delay the closing until state police complete their investigation. The court is scheduled to consider his motion on Monday, July 21.
The discovery of human remains in foreclosed homes is not unheard of. Kenny Olson, a longtime real-estate broker in Foxborough, Massachusetts, who attends about three to five foreclosure auctions a week, told the Journal that two of the homes he has purchased over the last 37 years contained the bodies of former homeowners.
“Trash everywhere. Disrepair. I try to fix them up and sell them,” Olson told the Journal of the typical condition of auctioned properties.