Manila: Relatives and friends of an actress who died during the prime of her career in 1984 were aghast after finding her remains still intact nearly three decades after her death in a car accident.
Reports reaching Manila said the corpse of Claudia Zobel, appeared undamaged and showed relatively little decomposition 29 years after her death.
Claudia’s relatives made the discovery last Tuesday as memorial park workers at the Queen City Memorial Gardens in Cebu, Central Philippines exhumed her remains to provide space for the burial of her 75-year-old father who died recently, reports said.
In a television interview aired by GMA News in Filipino, Zobel’s elder brother, Ernesto Maloloy-on, 57, said they were surprised to find his younger sister’s body still intact and not fully decomposed after all those years.
“We were expecting to find a skeleton,” he said.
The startling discovery also posed problems for Zobel’s family as they have to find another plot to bury her remains.
Dr Nestor Sator, a medico-legal officer at the Central Visayas police crime laboratory, said in a GMA News interview that Zobel’s remains was still intact because it had undergone a natural process of mummification.
Video footages showed Zobel’s apparently expensive stone coffin housed in a sealed wooden casket and the intact remains of the late actress.
Sator said that if the ground where Zobel’s body was buried as dry and sandy, the body would naturally mummify because it will become dehydrated and bacteria would have difficulty proliferating.
Zobel, whose real name is Thelma Maloloy-on, lost her life in a car accident on February 10, 1984 at the age of 19. She was at the peak of her popularity when she died.
Zobel was known for her roles in risqué films such as “Magdalena Buong Magdamag,” (Magdalena of the Evening) and “Uhaw sa Pag-ibig,” (Hungry for Love) among others.
Zobel was filming “Sinner or Saint” under the direction of multi-awarded Lino Brocka, at the time of her untimely death.
