Who Is Ray Tomlinson? And Why Did He Go On A Road Trip With A Corpse?

Ray Tomlinson is the man who drove his deceased girlfriend from Arizona to Michigan.

According to Tomlinson, he believed he had 48 hours before he was legally required to report her death, so he drove her corpse, along with his 93-year-old mother, the rest of the way home. He didn’t take her body to the hospital, he told the Detroit Free Press, because he “cared too much for her.”

Tomlinson, 62, told police that he believes that the woman, whose name has yet to be released because her family has still not been informed of her death, died somewhere in Oklahoma or Texas.

Police, who did not release Tomlinson’s name, said the driver told them he was in a rural, area early Monday morning when the woman slumped forward and was cold to the touch.

“He then does an Internet search via his phone,” Warren Police Detective Sgt. Stephen Mills said. “He says he finds on the Internet that he has 48 hours to take her to a medical examiner or to a morgue.” source

 
Tomlinson said he broke no law. He said he worried that if he stopped, authorities “would have impounded my vehicle, they would have probably incarcerated me to do an investigation and I had a 93-year-old woman in my car that I needed to get home.”