A Portage Park woman with a history of fraud convictions who kept her dead mother’s body in a freezer for nearly two years so she could continue collecting the woman’s Social Security checks is now facing federal fraud charges.
Eva Bratcher, 73, already received an 18-month state sentence for concealing a death and possessing a fraudulent ID card. Now, federal prosecutors have charged her with embezzlement of public funds and failure to disclose life events, alleging she collected $16,752 in Social Security payments by concealing her mother’s death. The charges are part of a nationwide federal crackdown on fraud.
Chicago police conducting a well-being check at the home Bratcher shared with her 96-year-old mother in the 5500 block of West Melrose found Regina Michalski’s body inside a large freezer in the garage in January 2023. Prosecutors said police also found a receipt for the freezer inside the home dated about a week after Michalski was believed to have died nearly two years earlier.
Once Michalski’s body thawed, a process officials said took about a week, the Cook County medical examiner’s office determined that she died after accidentally choking on a foreign object.
Bratcher entered a relatively quick guilty plea in October 2023 to concealing a death and possessing a fraudulent ID card. The latter charge stems from allegations that she was carrying a state identification card bearing her photograph but her mother’s information.
Bratcher’s daughter, Sabrina Watson, made the phone call that sent Chicago police to the Northwest Side home in 2023. In an interview with the Sun-Times after Michalski’s body was found, Watson recalled being 14 years old when Bratcher was sent to prison for another matter. Bratcher left her with instructions: “If your grandmother dies, have her buried under a different name.”
“And I said why? And she said, ‘Well if you bury her, idiot, under the name Regina Michalski, I won’t get her checks anymore, and I need those checks,’” Watson recalled, according to the paper.
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