Had it not been bin night when a pungent smell met Margaret Johnson's nose, she might have been alerted much earlier to the fact her neighbour lay dead in his Queanbeyan home.
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On Sunday, police believe it was the body of Mrs Johnson's neighbour they found in an "advanced state" of decomposition in the lounge room of his Banksia Crescent home, estimating he had been dead for four weeks.
Mrs Johnson said she last saw her neighbour, believed to be aged in his 50s, a number of weeks earlier, struggling to mow his overgrown lawn.
It is understood the man has two adult children, including one in Canberra.
"It would only be every now and again you'd get one whiff of [the smell] and then it would go," Mrs Johnson said.
On Sunday morning, after two weeks of deliberating, Mrs Johnson visited other neighbours, asking if they had seen the man who lived directly across the street.
"I hadn't seen him, I hadn't heard his car going. He kept to himself pretty much, but you'd still see him now and again," Mrs Johnson said.
She put his absence down to him going away, but thought it odd he hadn't told anyone.
Mrs Johnson, who has lived in her home for 38 years, said the man had lived in the house directly opposite her for about 20 years.
While she and the man were friendly, they were not close.
"I knew him to say hello. I had a very sick husband and he'd offered to help with my husband, getting him in and out of the car, but that is as far as I went with him," Mrs Johnson said.
In the almost 40 years since Mrs Johnson had moved in, the street dynamics had changed.
She said when her children were little, they would play with the neighbours children.
However, over the years new families had moved in with young children, and hers had grown into adults, one of whom still lived with her.
She urged people to keep an eye on what was happening around them, noting it was important to be wary that things like this could happen in anyone's neighbourhood.
"I'd been saying for the last two weeks that I hadn't seen him, that I should go and see if he is all right. But time just gets away on you.
"It is sad to think that I didn't do something sooner, when I first started talking about. That is what gets at me, that I didn't go when I first noticed he wasn't around."
A post-mortem is yet to formally identify the man.
