Psychiatrist may have been dead for several months

Weird news from the Belleville News Democrat:

Authorities are attempting to learn the circumstances surrounding the death of a psychiatrist whose body was found this week in the town house she shared with her 58-year-old daughter in one of Chicago's most exclusive neighborhoods.

The Cook County Medical Examiner's office said Dr. Ruth Koenig, 86, may have been dead for several months before her badly decomposed body was found in a second-floor bedroom Thursday by police officers who had been called to make a well-being check by the Chicago Department on Aging.

Officers said Koenig's daughter at first refused to let them in, but they smelled the odor of decomposition and eventually persuaded her to open the door.

Dr. Scott Denton of the medical examiner's office, who performed an autopsy Friday, told the Chicago Sun-Times he believed the daughter "had some mental health issues."

"She didn't want to face or realize that her mom was dead," Denton said. "She was kind of living in a world where her mom was still alive."

Denton said his examination found no evidence of injury on Koenig's body, and noted that she suffered from severe coronary artery disease.

Neighbors on Elm Street in the city's Gold Coast neighborhood said they last saw Koenig alive in early June, when she returned from a stay in a nearby nursing home. They said she had been hospitalized on and off over the past five years.

Koenig was the widow of the late Dr. Harold Koenig, a physician who died in 1992. The couple bought the town house about 40 years ago, and Ruth Koenig continued to run her psychiatric practice from the residence through the 1990s.

All of which ties into a certain stereotype about the mental health of children of psychiatrists.