It was July 2nd, 1951 in St. Petersburg, Florida, when Mary Reeser’s landlady
+
landlady:
casera
discovered that something was very wrong. The landlady, Pansy Carpenter, wanted to deliver
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to deliver:
entregar
a telegram to her sixty-seven-year-old tenant
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tenant:
inquilina
, but when she touched the doorknob
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doorknob:
pomo de la puerta
on the door to Mary’s apartment, it was hot. Alarmed, Pansy called the police, and when the police arrived they discovered the burnt
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burnt:
quemados
remains of Mary’s body inside her apartment.
What was mysterious in this case was that almost all of Mary’s body was carbonized, as was
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as was:
al igual que lo estaba
the chair that she had been sitting on, but nothing else in the apartment was burnt. There was no other evidence
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evidence:
evidencia
of a fire whatsoever
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whatsoever:
de ningún tipo
. So, what had happened to poor Mary? Authorities disagreed
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to disagree:
estar en desacuerdo
on this point.
On examining the evidence, the FBI hypothesized that Mary, who had been a smoker and been taking sleeping pills, had fallen asleep
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to fall asleep:
dormirse
while smoking and set fire
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to set fire:
prender fuego
to her clothes with a lit
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lit:
encendido
cigarette. However, professor Wilton M. Krogman, a physical anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine, contested this theory. He later hypothesized that Mary had been murdered
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to muder:
asesinar
at another location, then burnt in a crematorium, before being transferred to her apartment, where the murderer had used special equipment
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equipment:
equipamiento
to heat up
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to heat up:
calentar
the doorknob and fabricated
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to fabricate:
falsear
the scene.
Today, many believe that Mary was a victim of spontaneous human combustion, a phenomenon in which a person spontaneously bursts into flames
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to burst into flames:
estallar en llamas
, without any apparent external source of ignition. However, scientists contest that spontaneous human combustion is truly possible, so we still don’t know what really happened to Mary Reeser, whether
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wheter...or...:
si...o...
she was murdered or died from natural or supernatural causes. Perhaps we never will.