Elderly Woman’s Body Unearthed in Yard

Coroners were trying to determine Wednesday whether a body dug up after midnight from the tiny backyard of a mobile home was that of the 86-year-old woman who had lived there.

Sheriff’s deputies found the badly decomposed body of an elderly woman after digging in the backyard of Katherine Poindexter, who had not been seen since May in her double-wide trailer in the 7800 block of Lampson Avenue in Stanton.

Her son, Robert Poindexter, who lived in the mobile home with his mother, was in custody on warrants, according to Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Hector Rivera, but not for homicide. The lieutenant would not say what the warrants were for. He said Poindexter was being questioned by homicide investigators but stressed that “no cause of death or identity has been determined.”

Earlier in the week, the manager of the Rancho 39 Mobile Home Park contacted authorities to say that Katherine Poindexter had not been seen for months, and that she was concerned about the woman’s welfare. Monday night, deputies filled the mobile home park. Rivera said that Monday night or Tuesday morning, deputies took Robert Poindexter into custody. Late Tuesday night, they arrived with shovels. Just under two hours later, they unearthed a body in a narrow, deep grave between two well-trimmed bushes.

Nearby neighbors Cheryl and Brian Ringel said that Robert Poindexter had told them for months that his elderly mother was “on vacation.”

“He’d tell me he’d just talked to her on the phone, and she was having a great time visiting Aunt So-and-So, and Cousin Whoever,” said Cheryl Ringel.

They were stunned to find out the woman might be dead.

“They woke me up at 1:30 and told me I had to move my truck,” said Brian Ringel, who had parked his Toyota for a year and a half in the Poindexters’ driveway after Robert told him to go ahead and use the spot.

The Ringels, who live directly across the street from the Poindexters’ unit tucked at one end of the mobile home park, saw Katherine Poindexter when she and her son moved in about a year and a half ago.

“I never saw her outside, but I’d see her sitting at the window behind the curtain, and I’d wave every time I went by,” said Cheryl Ringel. “At first she wouldn’t wave back, but then she started smiling and waving to me.”

Several other neighbors, including one who attended a dinner hosted by Robert Poindexter, said he son was sociable but that they had never seen his mother.