Dead Bodies Podcast

While Dead Bodies is on pause for the moment, we are pleased to share a project that Dee Dee has been working on for the last 18 months. It's a true crime investigation into the disappearance of 12-year-old Terry Floyd in Avoca, Victoria, Australia, in 1975. The trailer is available now, and the first three episodes launch on Monday, May 5. In this bonus episode, Sharnelle and Dee Dee discuss her work on this intriguing cold case with former Homicide Detective Charlie Bezzina, and Daryl Floyd, who is digging in a disused gold mine for the remains of his missing brother. More info on Instagram: @theboyinthegoldmine or on Facebook: The Boy In The Gold Mine Please Follow and share with a friend!

Ding Dong Ditch is a harmless prank that teenagers play. Ring the doorbell and run away. It was not so harmless, though, for a group of teens in Southern California in 2020, when the homeowner they pranked turned predator.

In June, 2024, a woman was found dead inside the belly of a snake in central Indonesia. We look at some of the more bizarre deadly snake cases, as well as a man who tried to be swallowed alive by an anaconda.

Alvin Ridley was an eccentric, often combative TV repairman in the town of Ringgold, Georgia in the US, who became reclusive and paranoid after his business closed. Suspicious eyes fell upon him when he reported a woman - who he said was his wife - dead in his home. Lawyer McCracken Poston took on the job of defending him in a murder case that everyone said could not be won.

Australia, has been abuzz with discussion about the deaths of three people in Victoria, apparently after eating poison mushrooms. In this episode we look at serial poisoner Velma Barfield, who in 1984 became the first woman to be executed by lethal injection in the United States.

29-year-old Katie Haley was bashed to death with a dumbbell by her vicious, jealous and controlling partner Shane Robertson, while their baby daughter slept in the room next door. Katie’s sad end serves as another reminder that we need to do more as a community to stamp out domestic violence.

A new-age health and wellness workshop went horribly wrong in Quebec, Canada, in 2011, when 38-year-old Chantal Lavigne was literally boiled to death in a bizarre therapy session.

Babies sent to the neonatal intensive care unit are usually the most vulnerable, and in need of the greatest care. But instead of nursing them back to health, British nurse Lucy Letby was doing the unthinkable: attacking and killing them.

In 2018 Lana Clayton found her husband Steve lying dead at the bottom of the stairs in their home in South Carolina. At first it was believed he’d had a heart attack, but when toxicology showed the presence of poison, police were led to something common in most household bathrooms.

Survivors of a plane crash in the Andes in 1972 had to use great ingenuity to stay alive in the blizzard conditions, with very little food, and as the days passed it seemed nobody was coming to rescue them.

Lawyer Garry Hoy fell to his death from a window on the 24th floor of a Toronto law firm in 1993. Was it suicide, was he pushed, or was there another reason behind his tragic death?

In the UK in 2016, Ian Stewart’s fiancee Helen Bailey goes missing. The investigation into her disappearance leads police to take another look at the death of his first wife Diane. They fear they have hit a dead end when they discover that Diane’s body was cremated.

The murder of pastry chef Renea Lau in Melbourne's Kings Domain has been described as one of the city's worst. Senior police were shocked by the brutality and duration of the attack and because of its random nature.

Worldwide, around 1.35 million people die in road accidents each year. Research to make road travel safer is constant, as new technology and design emerge. Crash Test Dummies are used for most of the testing. But that hasn’t always been the case. Kirsten is missing, and we welcome Simon Owens to the studio today in her place. Join our massive tantrum over her (hopefully temporary) disappearance.

Sharnelle continues recounting covering the 2013 trial of Adrian Bayley who was convicted of the rape and murder of Gillian Maher in Melbourne. Thawee Nanra was the leader of a Taiwanese cult. His devotees promised his followers they could cure their ills by consuming his bodily fluids. And that’s not the worst of it …..

Drought has seen Nevada’s Lake Mead drop to historic lows, exposing things which have remained underwater for years. In one case, a discovery on the lake bed brought closure to a family after years of heartache. Convicted rapist Adrian Bayley is responsible for the rape and murder of Gillian Meagher, in a case that brought the people of Melbourne to the streets in 2012. Sharnelle covered his court case.

Grady Stiles Jr. was not only a killer, but a murder victim. He became famous as Lobster Boy in a bizarre travelling sideshow. While most of the world was confined to their homes at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, UK police were called to investigate a car being driven erratically near Coleford in the Forest of Dean, leading to the uncovering of the murder of Phoenix Netts.

Elmer McCurdy was a drunk and a train robber. It was decades after his death that his body was discovered at an amusement park in California. If you had committed a murder, would you consider yourself to be violent? Would you be chummy with the police when they arrived on your doorstep? Some killers behave differently, as evidenced by the odd behaviour of wife killer Stephen Searle.

Today, Brighton is one of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs, but in 1853 it was the scene of two bizarre murders, with a bag of sugar left on the victim’s head. And we unpack some frank feedback from listener Joey.

Nurse Roger Dean was working in a Sydney nursing when he murdered 11 elderly residents by setting a fire to the facility as they slept on November 18, 2011. Allen Lee Davis was sent to the electric chair for brutally killing a mother and her two young daughters. His botched execution is known as Florida’s messiest ever.

In this special Christmas episode we cover the 1992 “Christmas killings” in Dayton, Ohio. Marvallos Keene was the head of a gang that murdered six people. Hospital worker David Fuller pleaded guilty to murdering Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce in Tunbridge Wells back in 1987. And when police raided his home they found a stash of pornography described as “unimaginable sexual depravity” that led to investigators uncovering his years of necrophilia.

Harold Frederick Shipman (14 January 1946 – 13 January 2004), known to acquaintances as Fred Shipman, was an English general practitioner who is believed to be one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history. On 31 January 2000, he was found guilty of the murder of 15 patients under his care; his total number of victims was approximately 250. Shipman was sentenced to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he never be released.[4] He died by suicide, hanging himself in his cell at HM Prison Wakefield, West Yorkshire on 13 January 2004, a day before his 58th birthday. Sylvia Marie Likens (January 3, 1949 – October 26, 1965) was an American teenager who was tortured and murdered by her caregiver, Gertrude Baniszewski, many of Baniszewski's children, and several of their neighborhood friends. This abuse incrementally lasted for three months before Likens died from her extensive injuries and malnourishment on October 26 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Likens was increasingly neglected, belittled, sexually humiliated, beaten, starved, lacerated, and dehydrated by her tormentors. Her autopsy showed 150 wounds across her body, including several burns and receded skin. Through intimidation, her younger sister, Jenny, was occasionally forced to participate in her mistreatment. The official cause of her death was determined to be a homicide caused by a combination of subdural hematoma and shock, complicated by severe malnutrition.

The body of pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett was found in her home in Missouri in 2004. Her unborn foetus had been cut from her womb. The killer, Lisa Marie Montgomery, was put to death by lethal injection in January 2021. Martin van Butchell was an eccentric British dentist who put his dead wife on display. Was it for love, to attract customers, or because of a clause in a marriage contract?

Ten-year-old Candace Newmaker was killed during a bizarre therapy session designed to help her bond with her adoptive mother. She was suffocated by so-called therapists who were trying to force her to be “reborn”. We find Sharnelle in hotel quarantine after her stint reporting from Japan. She shares what makes her embarrassed daily as her meals are delivered.

How would you behave if your partner had just been stabbed multiple times, and the police came knocking on your door? We share the police bodycam footage that captured the odd behaviour of killer Owen Pellow. In a recent episode we looked at deaths on elevators and escalators. Now we’re making sure you never leave the ground floor, looking at deaths on stairs and in stairwells!

12-year-old Tia Sharp went shopping in August 2012 in New Addington, London, England, and it was weeks before her body was found in the roof of her grandmother’s home. Suspicion fell upon the partner of Tia’s grandmother, Stuart Hazell. We share a story from listener Brooke who found her Uncle John’s dead body.

“BTK” stands for “bind, torture, kill”: Dennis Lyn Rader gave himself the title. Between 1974 and 1991, Rader killed ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, and sent taunting letters to police and newspapers describing the details of his crimes. It was 2005 before he was arrested and jailed for life. In this episode we hear excerpts from his police interviews.

Sef Gonzales was found guilty of murdering his father Teodoro "Teddy" Gonzales, his mother Mary Loiva Gonzales, and his sister Clodine Gonzales, in Sydney, Australia, in 2001. He’s serving three concurrent life sentences, but continues to profess his innocence.

In 1971, Cheryl Miller and Pamella Jackson went missing on their way to an end of school year party in South Dakota in the US. It was 42 years before the mystery of their disappearance was finally solved.

More than 50 passengers drowned when the Loch Ard ran aground in Victoria in 1978. But those weren’t the only deaths along the same rugged Port Campbell coastline. In 1970, four dead bodies were found in a car that had gone over the cliff. The tragic death of basketballer Kobe Bryant led to the introduction of a new law, banning photos of the dead by first responders.

Herbert Baumeister seemed to his wife and children to be a regular businessman and they lived together on an 18-acre horse farm called Fox Hollow. But Herb had a secret, and had strangled several men and buried their dead bodies in the woods. You may have heard the expression “hanged, drawn and quartered”. But what is actually done to a person sentenced to this gruesome punishment?

Richard Speck raped, tortured and murdered eight student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital in 1966. And he would have gotten away with it, were it not for the extraordinary bravery of Corazon Amurao who survived his brutality. Andre Daigle fell victim to two men who beat him to death with a hammer just to see if they could kill someone.

Everyone is talking about the footage of Elisa Lam in the elevator in the Netflix documentary Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. We look into a number of deaths on escalators and elevators A listener shares a first-hand account of finding her dead uncle, weeks after his death, and the mammoth clean-up task after his body was removed.

We’re putting the dead bodies aside for this episode, as Sharnelle shares a deeply personal story from a recent event in her life.

The 18-metre sailing ketch The Bluebelle was the scene of several brutal murders in November, 1961, off the Bahamas. The killer survived the sinking of the vessel, and he didn’t count on an 11-year-old witness coming forward to undo his vile scheme. Drag queen Dorian Corey died from AIDS-related complications in 1993, and a mummified body was discovered in the closet of her apartment. It was a man named Robert Worley. But why was he there, how long had his body been there, and how did he die?

A wicked scheme where tissue and bone were stripped from corpses at funeral homes and then sold them for transplants - without the permission of the families - led to the arrest of former dental surgeon Michael Mastromarino. Elizabeth Bathory has been labelled the world’s most prolific female murderer, accused of torturing and killing hundreds of young girls and women between 1590 and 1610.

A tiny witness led to Thomas Easby being found guilty of the murder of his family. He was hanged, and trophies that exist to this day were taken from his dead body. An unidentified body was found in 2006 in Texas. Years later, Joseph Wayne Burnette confessed to her murder, and it was 2019 before the DNA Doe Project established her real identity.

Notorious Bega schoolgirl killer Leslie Camilleri was jailed for 28 years for the murder of 13-year-old Prue Bird in 1992. He was already serving two life sentences without parole for raping and murdering Bega schoolgirls Lauren Barry and Nichole Collins in 1997. Medical researchers have uncovered multiple cases of women giving birth after death, in a process known as postmortem fetal extrusion, or “coffin birth”.

Two schoolgirls were abducted, raped and murdered in Bega, New South Wales, Australia on 6 October 1997. Lindsay Beckett claimed that he killed the girls under the orders of Leslie Camilleri. Traigo Andretti was given a life sentence for killing and dismembering his wife, and pleaded guilty today to the murder of another woman named Myrna Letandre. The judge described him as "evil, vile and despicable," and said he had very little chance for rehabilitation. It was a moot point. Andretti didn’t live long enough for any chance at redemption.

Eric Edgar Cooke was known as the "Night Caller". He terrorised Perth, Western Australia in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, committing at least twenty-two violent crimes, and eight murders. Kermit Gosnell was a doctor with a secretive, illegal and horrendous practise, where he and his untrained staff carried out abortions in the most unhygenic conditions, resulting in the deaths of countless babies and at least one woman.

In 1858, Cheesman Park in Denver, Colorado, was a graveyard called Prospect Hill Cemetery. When it closed, and the moving of the bodies was left to an undertaker named E.P. McGovern things started to go terribly wrong. Glenys Heyward disappeared from her home in Mt Gambier, Victoria, in July, 2007. Almost three years later her son, Matthew Reginald Wills Heyward, and and farmhand Jeremy Adam Minter were convicted of her murder.

July 6, 1944, as the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was beginning its 2pm matinee performance, a fire started under the big top, killing 167 people and injuring more than 700. It was years before arsonist Robert Segee came forward to confess. “Be careful. My uncle's a killer. He has a dead baby.” Those words from a young girl in New Hampshire sparked an investigation into the corpse of a baby that had been handed down through generations.

The Case of Juan Pedro Martinez Gomez, Europe’s strangest disappearance. Bassmah and Sabrina are back… with Bottlebaby! And we hear from Susanne in Sweden, where they have fabulous accents and a Dead Bodies style song

December 8, 1987, in Melbourne, Australia, a gunman opened fire in the Queen Street offices of Australia Post offices. He killed eight people before throwing himself out of an 11th-floor window. Anatoly Moskvyn is serving time in a Russian psychiatric facility, for stealing 29 girls' corpses and turning them into 'dolls’. Sharnelle has an update on his case.

Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California and murdered her elderly and mentally disabled boarders, leading to her being dubbed the "Death House Landlady". Kylie Maybury went missing from her neighborhood in Preston in 1984. More than 30 years after her death, police arrested and charged Gregory Keith Davies.

Melbourne millionaire Herman Rockefeller’s disappearance mystified police, until they untangled his complex life that involved a secret mistress and an underground ''swingers'' network. Wade Frankum went on a shooting rampage at a shopping mall in Strathfield, Sydney, on 17 August 1991. He killed himself, after leaving eight dead and six wounded.

John Conn was found guilty of the murder of Aveline Littler and sentenced to hang at Bathurst jail in 1872. The headlines read: “Frightful Scene” after an incident occurred in his final moments. Louis "Buddy" Musso was a 59 year old mentally handicapped man from New Jersey, USA who was horribly murdered by three men and three women in Houston, Texas.

When children found the torso of a missing man - John Dick - in Hamilton, Ontario, they quickly focussed on his estranged wife Evelyn Dick. What they didn’t expect was to find another dead body in the attic of the home she shared with her mother. The axe murder of a woman and her infant grandson in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray in 1944 was a little close to home for one of our podcast community.

Several incidents where emergency workers have taken photos of corpses and shared them online - causing distress to grieving families - we discuss whether there should be a wholesale ban anyone taking pictures of dead bodies. Adolph Luetgert was known as The Sausage King in Chicago, Illinois. When his second wife Louisa Bicknese disappeared in 1897 police knew where to start looking for her …

A group of teenagers using the app Randonautica in Seattle found a suitcase containing human remains and posted the video on TikTok. Peter Kürten was a German serial killer who committed a series of murders and sexual assaults between February and November 1929 in the city of Düsseldorf. He became known as "The Vampire of Düsseldorf".