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Sunday, April 13, 2003

By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

JOHNSTOWN -- Their streetside mailbox was stuffed full of five weeks' worth of letters.

But that didn't raise alarms with their mail carrier, a U.S. Postal Service spokesman said, because Mary Collins and her ailing mother, Mary Grozanich, often didn't bother with their mail.

Collins frequently took their Schnauzer for early-morning walks up the streets of her tiny Johnstown suburb. But when she failed to make an appearance for more than a month, nobody seemed to notice.

"When she was out, she'd just look straight ahead, wouldn't talk to you, wouldn't acknowledge anybody," neighbor Michael Saloney said.

"Neighbors knew her as a bitter woman ... and nobody had much to do with her," said Capt. Tammi Collier of the local Conemaugh Township police. "There was very, very little contact with the neighbors. They had pretty much lost contact."

For 5 1/2 weeks, as life went on around them in the tiny community of Bon Air, Mary Grozanich, 90, her daughter, 58, and their dog lay dead, locked away in the narrow, two-story home they shared.

Ten days ago -- only after an episode of happenstance piqued neighbors' concern -- emergency workers got into the house to find Grozanich, who had been ailing and housebound with Alzheimer's disease, dead in her bed. Collins was lying on the floor of her own bedroom. The Schnauzer was dead nearby.

If neighbors indeed were kept at arm's length from Collins, her mother and the life they led, that might start to solve the mystery of how the deaths went unnoticed.

The bigger mystery -- one that Cambria County Coroner Dennis Kwiatkowski said could take six weeks of tests to crack and might go unsolved even then -- is how they died.

"There are no signs of foul play," Kwiatkowski said. "It doesn't appear to be a murder-suicide. It wasn't carbon monoxide. ... It doesn't appear they had frozen to death. The pipes weren't frozen."

Toxicology tests were done on mother and daughter. Tests even are being done on remains of the dog.

But after autopsies on Grozanich and Collins, Kwiatkowski left the causes of death undetermined, waiting to see if toxicology tests give him any case-breaking clues.

Neighbors offer their own theories, from plausible to wild-eyed. Some suggest that Collins died of natural causes, leaving her mother unable to fend for herself. Some ignore Kwiatkowski's findings, insist that the pair froze or suggest that Collins, a retired nurse, knew enough pharmacology to mix up a mystery potion that killed them both.

"Everybody has a theory," neighbor Albert Tursic said.

"It's everything and anything," Saloney said.

It was a little more than a year ago that Mary Collins, divorced and retired, came from Michigan to live with her mother, who was growing more dependent as Alzheimer's disease took control of her life.

Until then, Grozanich had been "a tough cookie," according to Tursic, often taking to her fair-size backyard garden, hand-tilling it and planting. But illness set in and Grozanich faded from view in Bon Air, a blue-collar enclave of maybe 100 homes, born as a settlement of Eastern European immigrants who flowed into Johnstown.

She was no longer out gardening. She stopped working up at the local SNPJ club, the Slovenian National Benefit Society.

But inside their house, Collier said, mother and daughter left signs of lives still in progress.

There was no sign of neglect, the police officer said.

"The place was extremely well stocked with food. The deep freezer was stocked. There were milk and juices, and the dishes were done," Collier said.

Two weeks of newspapers came and then stopped, apparently because the bill went unpaid, Collier said.

Their mailbox held all it could, a warning sign in many cases, but an indicator the mail carrier making his rounds through Bon Air deemed meaningless.

"Normally, carriers are very attuned to this," Postal Service spokesman George Flanigan said. "Their carrier is a respected carrier, and under normal circumstances, this would have alerted him. ... But this wasn't unusual for the people who lived there. They'd done this in the past."

Saloney said his warning came when his neighbors' real estate tax notice popped out of their overburdened mailbox and wound up in his yard.

"I went to put it in their mailbox, and it was stuffed," he said.

"I looked in the mailbox, and I saw checks, I knew darn well they wouldn't leave checks," Tursic said. "I pounded on the door and no one answered."

Police were called. Emergency officials arrived. And they went out on the job of working their way into a house that Collier said was locked "tighter than a drum."

Thursday, a week after they were found, Grozanich and Collins were entombed together in the family mausoleum at a local cemetery.

As with their lives, it went largely unnoticed.

Collins' two grown children, with whom she had sparing contact, were there. So were a handful of neighbors.

There was no church farewell --just a graveside service.

Correction/Clarification (Published April 15, 2003): In the April 13, 2003 version of this story about the deaths of a mother and daughter in their home near Johnstown, the last name of Mary Collins, one of those who died, was given incorrectly as Collier in two references.