Quite often when someone dies without interested relatives, a cursory sweep of the house is done for obvious valuables and then everything else is thrown away. Appears to be what's happened here. Kind of compounds the tragedy, but in a world of plentiful stuff and expensive real estate it's hard to avoid.
Estate auctions kinda fill this gap, if there's enough "stuff". It's not uncommon to see boxes or even pallets of loosely-related possessions sell as a lot, where even they buyer probably doesn't know what all they're getting.
I've acquired a fairly large stash of firearms parts this way. There are a few valuable individual items, but in aggregate it's probably worth at least $15-20k. I probably have $250 invested in all of it, and it all fits in a single (heavy) moving box.
I've also gotten quite a few valuable fountain pens and parts for them the same way. Once I bought a ratty old desk for $50 because the drawers were full of office supplies that I wanted, including a couple of vintage Waterman pens. I dumped them into a box and gave the desk to the other person that was bidding on it so I didn't have to haul it home. She was ecstatic to get the desk for free, and I was happy to get ~$1k worth of vintage pens for almost nothing.
Even with an interested relative, sometimes there's just too much stuff. My father-in-law left a basement full of computer stuff. There was some Heathkit hardware, TRS-80s, a couple of AT&T 3B2's, tons of PCs, a Bell Labs MAC Tutor, old calculators, thousands of CDs and floppies, piles and piles of printouts of old code, plus books. Some of it was probably valuable to someone, somewhere, but it was a full room, chest deep with stuff, and just hauling it all out took several days. Nearly all of the hardware went to an electronics recycler.
