Joyce Carol Vincent (19 October 1965 – December 2003) was an English woman whose death went unnoticed for more than two years as her corpse lay undiscovered at her bedsit in north London.
Her remains were discovered on 25 January 2006, with the cause of death believed to be either an asthma attack or complications from a recent peptic ulcer.
Joyce Vincent was born in London's Hammersmith area on 19 October 1965 and raised near Fulham Palace Road.
[5] She had a wide circle of friends in the music industry and when she was 24, she attended and was video recorded in the backstage audience at the concert Nelson Mandela: An International Tribute for a Free South Africa in April 1990 at Wembley Stadium.
[1] Shortly afterwards, Vincent spent some time in a domestic abuse shelter in Haringey and worked as a cleaner in a budget hotel.
[10] In November 2003, after vomiting blood, she was hospitalised at North Middlesex Hospital for two days, due to a peptic ulcer.
[11] Vincent lived above the Shopping City in Wood Green in North London in a Housing Trust flat.
Her remains were described as "mostly skeletal" according to the pathologist, and she was lying on her back, next to a shopping bag, surrounded by Christmas presents she had wrapped but never delivered.
[6] Neighbours had assumed the flat was unoccupied, and the odour of decomposing body tissue was attributed to nearby waste bins.
[10] Half of her rent was being automatically paid to Metropolitan Housing Trust by benefits agencies, leading officials to believe that she was still alive.
[4] The detective found the previous address where Vincent had been living, and the family wrote letters to her there, receiving no response.
[1] During her life, she met figures such as Nelson Mandela, Ben E. King, Gil Scott-Heron, and Betty Wright, spoke on the telephone with Isaac Hayes and had also been to dinner with Stevie Wonder.
', is a highly fictionalised version of Vincent: she is born on 8 October 1978 to an Italian mother and dies or disappears on 22 December 2014.