Sorry this is long. I'm trying to provide all pertinent details. I'm posting here because I have no intention of pursuing this is anyway, it just recently came to light what happened and I think it's really messed up.

In 2015, my father was diagnosed with cancer. He passed away in July. I was 29 and the sole heir named in his will. His side of the family was very small and my only sibling was in prison so it was on me to handle his estate including cleaning out his house and selling it but I was in no shape to handle that.

My best friend at the time had recently lost her job and was facing homelessness so I hired her to clean out the house and prepare it to go on the market and allowed her to stay there while she did. At the same time, I had a cousin who needed a place to stay temporarily so I allowed him to stay there, too. This will become relevant later.

Dad's house was cluttered. Not like an episode of hoarders but he definitely had a lot of junk he did not need. I figured it would take about a month to clear out and agreed to pay my friend $500 a week to do that.

It ended up taking several months to get the house ready to put on the market with me having to sternly remind my friend that the house needed to be on the market as the mortgage needed to be paid off.

She finally got the house show ready and we listed it at $250,000. It was a large lot and a decent (but outdated) 3 br house. A lot of people came to see it but no one was making an offer. I figured it was because the house was certainly in need of some updates and was next door to a water tower which could be a deal breaker for some. We lowered the price a few times but still nothing and then the realtor called me to ask if my father had died in the house. I said no, he died in a nursing home. The realtor explained a large number of people were reporting a horrible stench when they viewed the house. I paid for someone to crawl under the house and see if something had died. There was nothing. I asked my friend to deep clean which she said she did. Eventually we dropped the asking price to $200,000 and got an offer. It was enough to cover the remaining mortgage balance and cover what I had paid my friend to clean the house out. I was perfectly happy with it and moved on. In 2020, that best friend and I had a falling out. We no longer speak at all. It was after this that my cousin came forward to provide me some information. Since he had been living there at the time, he was witness to how much work was getting done and the truth was, almost none. He said he did a lot of the cleaning, which he was happy to do because I was letting him live there rent free. He said she rarely did much in the first couple of months, certainly not enough to justify the $500 I was paying her. He hadn't said anything at the time because he didn't want to upset me with everything I was going through. To be honest, that part didn't surprise me. But the next part did. More recently, that cousin and I have become closer as he lives really close to my house and far from his parents and sisters. He told me that he had found rotting chicken in one of the cupboards. My friend had cooked it and then, inexplicably, put the pan with the chicken in it, into the cabinet and left it there. This was around the same time we were getting complaints about a smell.

I can't imagine putting cooked chicken in the cabinets to rot was an accident so the only conclusion I could come to was that she was trying to keep the house from selling. It was a free place to live and she was being paid to look after the house.

I don't have any intention of ever contacting or calling her out about this. It's in the past and I have moved on. I'm really just morbidly curious about what one's recourse in such a situation would be.