Detectives are awaiting the results of an autopsy after a decomposed body was found inside a wheelie bin in a Melbourne storage facility on Friday.

A Victoria Police spokesperson told The New Daily police are waiting for the results of a postmortem due to be given on Saturday.

In the meantime, investigators are searching lease records of storage containers at the premises in the Melbourne south-eastern suburb of Oakleigh South, admitting a number of them have been abandoned for years.

Police are also continuing to trawl through missing persons records and cold-case suspected murders in a bid to identify the remains which were found with dirt and straw in the bin tied with Occy straps about 11am on Friday.


A black boot was the first sign to workers they’d made a gruesome discovery, after they’d been asked by the new storage facility owners to clean out the unit which had not been accessed or paid for over many years.

Detective Senior Sergeant Pixie Fuhmeister told reporters at the scene the person had been dead for at least 15 years due to the level of decomposition.

“That container has not been accessed for a number of years,” she said.

“We are determining the matter as suspicious at the moment and it is very early days and what we are looking at is long-term decomposition of the body.”

Earlier, Anton Hillemacher, one of the workers at the warehouse, told the ABC the suspected remains in the bin were discovered inside a container covered in soil.

“I’ve looked in this container and there’s a wheelie bin in there and it had a strap around it, a couple of straps,” he said.

“I’ve cut the straps and the lid’s fallen open and it seemed like there was grass clippings in there, mouldy stuff.”

“So we’ve started scraping away and then someone’s sort of said, ‘Oh look, there’s a boot.”

“They’ve dug away a bit more and sure enough there seemed to be a boot there.

“[Another worker] was pulling back grass clippings … and a couple of the guys had come to the conclusion that there was a body in there. It [the suspected remains] was pretty boned out, it was pretty thin.”

“It wasn’t until I saw what looked like a foot in a sock in there and I thought, ‘Oh shit’.”

Police expect to remain at the Milgate Street property on Saturday. The area remains cordoned off and bags of evidence have been removed from the scene.