The body itself was badly decomposed, with the head, chest and abdominal cavity described by Simpson as being a "seething mass of maggots", which had eaten much of the soft body tissue, including the head and neck, save for a small section of scalp and hair. A headscarf was found knotted around the victim's neck, but the knot itself was extremely slack, instantly enabling both men to dismiss strangulation as the cause of death; instead, both men strongly speculated the cause of death had been the extensive blunt trauma to the skull, which had "all but collapsed" in the attack. The extent of decomposition indicated that the victim had likely died between five and seven weeks prior to her discovery. Furthermore, the murderer had dragged his victim uphill to the location where he had buried her; this conclusion was further supported by the presence of three parallel scrapes upon the skin of the right ankle, which corresponded with tears in the right sock.