The Michigan resident had lived in the quiet, middle-class suburban town since 2003, although she traveled frequently for business, so it wasn’t strange for people to go long periods of time without seeing her. “We worked in the international division, so everybody in that department traveled a lot. It wasn’t unusual for people to be gone for a month and then come back for a week or two and then be gone for another month or two,” Joan Gill Strack, a former coworker of Farrenkopf, recalled to the Detroit Free Press.
In the months before her death, Farrenkopf was working as a successful self-employed financial troubleshooter, whose last job had been as a contractor for Chrysler Financial, according to USA Today. However, in September 2008, Farrenkopf’s contract with Chrysler Financial ended and she stopped working.
Farrenkopf had never been terribly close to her neighbors, although she did pay one neighbor to help maintain her property, mowing her lawn and shoveling snow in the winter. Around 2007, the neighbor stopped hearing from Farrenkopf, but continued to maintain her lawn without payment, as did another neighbor, who took over the maintenance duties in 2013. But while they cared for the outside of the home, it seems that in five years, none of her neighbors knocked on the door to check in on Farrenkopf herself.
