IN AN echo of Alfred Hitchcock’s spine-chilling thriller Psycho, an Italian man kept the dead body of his widowed 71-year-old mother in her bedroom wardrobe for three years, pretending to neighbours that she had become a recluse.

Mirko Sartori’s grisly secret emerged when his landlord called round to find out why the rent had not been paid.

The landlord first found Signor Sartori’s body, crushed beneath his red Fiat Panda in the garage, and then a note nearby saying “Mother forgive me.” It was not clear whether Signor Sartori had intended to kill himself or whether the car jack had simply collapsed. He had been dead for a fortnight.

The landlord, Antonio Barbasso, called police, who found Signor Sartori’s mother in a wardrobe sealed with silicon. Her son had continued to collect her pension and her medicines from the local chemist. Forensic scientists said that Anna Pelloni’s body was effectively “mummified” inside the airtight cupboard.

Signor Sartori lived alone with his mother at the house in the northern village of Orsara Bormida, near Alessandria. He was unemployed apart from odd jobs, although he always “dressed smartly and carried a briefcase”. Inside the house, however, the rooms were strewn with rubbish and the walls were covered in writing and drawings.

Some of the writing was rambling and incoherent, but included the phrase “For those who find us, my mother is in the bedroom wardrobe. She died on 20 Nov 2002 at 23.30. I found her in front of the television with her eyes wide open. Nothing had prepared me for such an unhappy and unexpected event. When I saw my mother was dead it was as if I had died too.”

He said he had dressed her “very carefully in a nice white blouse, the smartest I could find, and a blue suit and shoes of the same colour”.

As if addressing his mother, he wrote: “I wanted to leave you in your bed but if I did I would not have been able to come into your room any more. I could not permit the odour of death to corrupt the sweet features of your face. I combed your hair, powdered your face and tried to make you as comfortable as possible.”

He fixed a photograph of his mother holding him as a child on the door of the bedroom. One of the walls carries a drawing of Christ with a crown of thorns and the words “help me”.

In Hitchcock’s Psycho, the motel owner Norman Bates keeps his dead mother’s mummified body in the basement and impersonates her by wearing her clothes and a wig.