There, the most old timey newspaper headline you might ever see on The Mary Sue. But it’s a decidedly recent and sad story. The Miller Sisters were very briefly a famous musical act in the 1950s, performing for Bing Crosby, the USO and others before fading out of the public view. They’d spent their twilight years living together in a four bedroom home in California. Area police discovered Patricia and Joan’s bodies last week, a room apart, with no signs of foul play or disease, and are still investigating possible cause of death.
So far, detectives have only gone as far as saying that it looks like these two women, who’d spent so much of their lives together, had naturally left them the same way.
Since the twins listed each other as next of kin, and police have no other leads on their family members, they have revealed the details of the case in the hopes that more family members will come forward.
“My perception is one died and the other couldn’t handle it,” said [Detective Matt] Harwood, who has been unable to identify any close friends or family members to inform of the sisters’ deaths. “It appears purely natural, but we are still trying to piece it all together.”
Police don’t usually release the names of the dead without first informing their relatives, but the sisters’ shrouded lives made that impossible, Harwood said.
“The circumstance surrounding their death is somewhat of an enigma,” he said. “These two only ever had each other, and we would like, at least for their sake, to notify their family.”
Neighbors noticed an ambulance being called to the house last year, and since then requested that police make regular check ups on the elderly duo, which is how their deaths were discovered. The house was in good state, and though their health seemed to be ailing as one might expect for people of their age living without much social support, no cause of death has yet been determined. There were also no signs of a break-in or struggle, just one sister in a first-floor bedroom and the other collapsed in the adjacent hallway.
Their connections to the community, as described by CBS News describes a deeply reclusive pair, who politely, openly, if sometimes awkwardly, shut down any attempts to penetrate or add to the tiny social life they had between the two of them. While there are lots of myths surrounding twins, especially identical twins, the urge to assign one of them to their deaths is strong, and, if nothing else, makes their deaths seem less lonely.
(via Jezebel.)
