‘We all loved her, but not enough’: A woman died in her flat and it somehow took three years for anyone to notice

One cold January day, in 2006, officials entered a flat in London which was being repossessed due to rent arrears. What they found was a long decomposed corpse belonging to a woman called Joyce Vincent. She had died a long time ago.

As a younger woman, Joyce was pretty popular, she had plenty of friends and for the most part loved a normal life growing up in West London. She worked as a secretary in the city center in the mid-eighties and worked her way up, building a career, forging friendships and relationships, as a matter of fact, she seemed set for success. 

The discovery of Joyce Vincent

In 2006, her body was found on the sofa in her living room, there were unopened Christmas presents on the floor, a pile of letters by the front door, and the television was still on. Food in the fridge showed expiry dates for 2003. It was obvious that she had died about three years ago and her body had been decaying ever since. She was 38 at the time of her passing.

So how does somebody go from the kind of life Joyce was living in the eighties to being a person nobody even notices is missing? For three years, none of her friends or family checked up on her, nobody called or tried to find out where she might be. And yet, her life had been seemingly vibrant and full of potential just a decade or two earlier.

What happened to those who knew her?

She had plenty of people around her but one-by-one, she faded out of their lives and into a world of reclusiveness. In 2011, film-maker Carol Morley decided to find out all she could about Joyce. She placed adverts appealing to those who may have known her, she sought to figure out how such a tragic death could befall a person.

She met with past boyfriends and former housemates, all of whom painted a picture of a young, intelligent woman who was very likeable. Morley tracked down some old colleagues who knew her in 2001, according to them, Joyce quit her job that year, telling people conflicting stories of what she would do next. To some, she told them she was going travelling, to others, she claimed she’d been headhunted for another firm.

It seems neither of these things were true. All that is known for certain between her quitting her job and her death is that she spent some time in a shelter for victims of domestic violence.
Her death came as a shock to all who knew her yet Joyce had been able to quietly drop out of their lives without them even noticing. Her story inspired Carol Morley to make the film Dreams of a Life, which was released in 2011.