They spent eighteen days looking for Langley. He was ten feet away.

An anonymous tip reached the New York police on 21 March 1947: there was a dead man at number 2078 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 128th Street, in Harlem. It was Homer Collyer, a lawyer of 65, blind since 1933 and crippled by a rheumatic illness that had long since stopped him walking. His brother Langley was hunted for eighteen days across half a dozen states, and he was ten feet from Homer, in the same house, under a bale of newspapers.

The officers could not open the front door. Behind it stood a wall of tied newspaper bundles, boxes and furniture stacked to the ceiling. One officer ended up breaking a second-floor bedroom window, and behind that window it took five hours of digging, with the police emergency squad throwing bundles out into the street. They found Homer in a hollow between boxes, covered by a dressing gown. He had starved to death; the medical examiner also noted heart disease.

Langley Collyer, 61, had studied engineering at Columbia and was the one who looked after him. He fed him a hundred oranges a week because he was convinced they would bring his sight back. The pair had had their electricity, gas, water and telephone cut off over unpaid bills, and carried water from a fountain in the park. When the police got in, Langley was not there.

One tip-off said he had been seen boarding a bus in Atlantic City. Meanwhile, city crews were emptying the house at the rate of a truck a day, and neighbours crowded the pavement to see what came out.

On 8 April, a workman shifting bundles on the second floor found him. Langley was under a suitcase, three tin bread boxes and a stack of newspapers, ten feet from the hollow where his brother had died. He had crawled into one of the tunnels he himself opened through the junk to reach Homer. One of the booby traps he had rigged against burglars came down on him. He had rigged them because for years there had been a rumour that the Collyers kept a fortune in the house. He had been dead about a month. Homer died afterwards, waiting for his food.

More than a hundred tons came out of that house. The inventory drawn up by the city lists fourteen pianos, two organs, the chassis of a Model T Ford, an X-ray machine from the practice of their father, a Manhattan gynaecologist, thirteen mantel clocks, thousands of law books, the jawbone of a horse, jars of organs preserved in formalin and eight live cats. Of the fortune in the legend, nothing ever turned up. The building was pulled down in July of that same year, and today the lot is a small public garden that carries their name.

In New York firefighters' slang, a home you cannot get through because of what has piled up inside has been a "Collyer's Mansion" ever since.