Concrete buried Mercedes in American garden

In mid-October, the new owner of a $15 million estate in the posh enclave of Atherton commissioned a landscape architect to build a playground for his three small children in the yard. When excavating the lawn, an employee found metal at a depth of more than 1.5 meters. It turned out to be a Mercedes convertible partly filled with concrete.

corpse smell?
The homeowner, a software engineer from Meta, alerted the police. Police spokesman Daniel Larsen informed the public that sniffer dogs may have jumped at the smell of dead bodies – after which the entire yard was cleared and combed by police forensic scientists.

Police were able to identify the owner of the car. His name was Johnny Bocktune Lew, who bought the land in Atherton in 1990 and built the house. Lew, who died in 2015 at the age of 78, had a long criminal record. From 1964, he had spent six years behind bars for murder before the verdict was quashed on appeal over a formal error.

“harmless explanation”
In 1977, Lew was sentenced to three years in prison for attempted murder. But his buried car had nothing to do with another murder, as no remains were discovered.

Homeowner Larsen was somewhat relieved to learn, “Lew had reported his Mercedes stolen in 1992 and collected $88,000 from insurance. The whole thing was an insurance scam!”

Lew’s daughter Jacq Searle is also more than relieved by this “innocent statement,” as she revealed to the “San Francisco Chronicle”: “My father was a very seedy man. I’ve been trying to get over the trauma of my childhood and adolescence for years. I always had to visit him in prison!”