Secret of why Jean, 91, feels quite at home with death

THE 91-year-old widow lived by herself in a tumbledown house on a desolate country road in northern Pennsylvania in the United States. But she wasn't alone, not really, not as long as she could visit her husband and twin sister. No matter they were already dead.

Jean Stevens simply had their embalmed corpses dug up and stored them at her house - in the case of her late husband, for more than a decade - tending to the remains as best she could until police were finally tipped off last month.

Speaking this week, Stevens, seeming more grandmother than ghoul, held little back as she described what happened outside a small town in the Endless Mountains.

She knows what people must think of her. But she had her reasons, and they are complicated.

Dressed smartly in a light blue shirt and khaki skirt, silver hoops in her ears, her white hair swept back and her brown eyes clear and sharp, she offers a visitor a slice of pie, then casts a knowing look when it's declined. "You're afraid I'll poison you," she says. On a shelf in the corner of her dining room rests a handsome black-and-white portrait of Jean, then a stunner in her early twenties, and James, clad in his army uniform.

The photograph was taken after their 1942 marriage, but before his service in the Second World War.

He succumbed to Parkinson's disease on 21 May, 1999.

Next to that photo there is a smaller colour snapshot of Jean and June, taken when they were in their late eighties.

Though June lived more than 200 miles away in Connecticut, they talked by phone several times a week, and June wrote often.

Then last year June was diagnosed with cancer. She was in a lot of pain when Jean came to visit. The sisters shared a bed, and Jean rubbed her back. "I'm real glad you're here," June said.

On 3 October, June died. She was buried in her sister's backyard - but not for long.

"I think when you put them in the (ground], that's goodbye, goodbye," Jean Stevens said. "In this way I could touch her and look at her and talk to her."

She kept her sister, who was dressed in her "best housecoat", on an old couch in a spare room. Jean sprayed her with expensive perfume that was June's favourite.

"I'd go in, and I'd talk, and I'd forget," she said. "I put glasses on her. When I put the glasses on, it made all the difference in the world. I would fix her up. I'd fix her face up all the time."

She offered a similar rationale for keeping her husband on a couch in the detached garage. James, who had been laid to rest in a nearby cemetery, wore a dark suit, white shirt and blue knitted tie.

"I could see him, I could look at him, I could touch him," Jean said.

"Now, some people have a terrible feeling, they say, 'Why do you want to look at a dead person?

Oh my gracious,"' she said. "Well, I felt differently about death."

Yesterday, the county district attorney told Jean that she could keep the corpses of her husband and sister, provided she builds a crypt for them.z