Metro

Decomposed body found in Queens attic after suicide note hints at atrocity

His cryptic suicide note left relatives concerned and confused:

“I’m going to go to hell for what I did,” he wrote.

Yesterday, the ominous last words of Devendra Autar, which he scrawled a month ago on a sheet of paper before he hanged himself, finally made sense.

As his cop brother was packing Autar’s belongings to clean out the Queens apartment, he was overwhelmed by a stench from the attic — where he found a badly decomposed body of a woman stuffed into a canvas duffel bag.

Autar, who was in his 20s, was not married, and his brother — assigned to the 111th Precinct in Bayside, Queens — didn’t know if he’d had a girlfriend, sources said.

The woman appeared to have been dead for weeks.

She apparently died around the time relatives of Autar found his body on July 21 in the room he rented in a ramshackle three-family home on the Van Wyck Expressway service road.

For weeks after discovering Auter’s body, his relatives stayed away from the second-story apartment, putting off the inevitable ritual of packing up his things.

When his brother finally returned to carry out the chore, he made the gruesome discovery.

Authorities last night removed the corpse and an NYPD Crime Scene Unit team began scouring the upstairs apartment for clues.

Investigators brought out at least five plastic bags filled with items from inside the apartment.

Neighbors said Autar had changed in the weeks before his death — keeping to himself and no longer greeting neighbors.

One said that he had driven an Access-a-Ride van for a living, but he lost that job months ago.

A neighbor, David Singh, 46, said Autar hadn’t always acted like a recluse.

He used to have friends over, and his apartment windows would sometimes give off the scent of marijuana.

“He seemed like a pretty normal guy,” Singh said.

“We would wave at each other, but lately he just stopped waving. No acknowledgment, no nothing.”

Additional reporting by Rebecca Harshbarger