The 74-year-old women who lay dead in her Rotterdam home for 10 years without anyone noticing has a daughter whom she gave birth to when she was 16, the AD said on Saturday.

The 68-year-old woman, named by the paper as Evelyne, said she had last seen her mother 20 years ago. ‘I was an unwanted child and she showed me that continually,’ the woman told the paper.

‘I always expected a police officer would turn up on my doorstep one day to tell me my mother was dead,’ she said. ‘I would not have been surprised if she had been dead at home for several months, but 10 years?’

Independence

Evelyne, who lives in Brabant, recognised her mother’s first floor flat from television reports and travelled with her husband to Rotterdam. ‘I do not know why I am here,’ she told the paper.

‘My mother was a closed person but I thought she had contact with a few people. We had a difficult relationship. My mother was 16 when I was born, in the Dutch East Indies, at the time of the independence wars. I never knew my father.’

Evelyne’s husband told the paper his mother-in-law suffered from a serious trauma dating back to the war, but that she refused to talk about it.

Evelyne told the paper she had been to the police. ‘I am sad about it, but what could I do? She did not want to see me. … Of course I thought about her, but contact needs to be a two-way street.’

Rotterdam city council has launched an investigation to find out how the woman came to disappear from the radar. Her bills were paid automatically from her state pension.

Her body was discovered after she failed to respond to letters and phone calls about having her gas pipes renewed. Police were able to date her death by the piles of post unopened behind the door.