The dead body of 41-year-old intellectually disabled man Lindsay Jellett was found on the side of the road in Ararat in 1994. At first it appeared he was the victim of a hit-and-run, but accident investigators uncovered the sad truth of his death. In 1971 in Accountant John List shot his wife, mother, and his three children, then he disappeared. Eighteen years later a forensic artist helped police track him down.
Seventeen-year-old Melanie Road was stabbed to death as she made her way home from a nightclub in Bath in the UK in June 1984. With no DNA technology to work with, and despite massive efforts, police struggled to find her attacker. Thirty-two years later, science caught up with her killer. In Illinois, US, in 2014, Two people were lured to the apartment of Alissa Massaro, where they were robbed and strangled to death. Then Massaro and her friend Joshua Miner had sex on top of the bodies. Two oth...
James Byrd Jr. was a black man who was murdered by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, on June 7, 1998. Shawn Berry, Lawrence Brewer, and John King dragged along the road Byrd behind a pickup truck. The sickening incident led to a change in the Texas hate-crimes law. Melbourne’s Yarra River is the deadliest inland river per metre in Australia. One of the earliest bodies dragged from its murky depths was Bertha Coughlan in 1923, a young, unmarried mother who had died at the hands of aborti...
We rely on our refrigerators to keep our food fresh. But when it’s time to throw an old fridge out, there’s a warning: they can become deadly. “Tillie” Klimek was born in Poland in 1876, but lived most of her adult life in Chicago, where in 1923 she was found guilty of the murder of her third husband by poisoning. There is a list of 20 of her victims, most of who died at her hands.
In the early 1960’s, police were baffled by a series of gruesome crimes that they said was the work of The Sydney Mutilator. William MacDonald was eventually caught and jailed for life for the killing spress. He freely admitted that he hated the world and would gleefully murder and mutilate again if he was released. American music producer Phil Spector is acknowledged as one of the most influential figures in pop music history..In 2009, he was convicted of second-degree murder.
Actress Rebecca Schaeffer lived in a quiet and seemingly safe area of LA. But a crazed fan stalked her, found her home, and murdered her in cold blood. Workers cleaning out a massive storage tank at Velva Liquids in the UK in 1979, found the torso and head of a young woman named Eileen McDougall. How had the body gotten there, how long had it been there, and who killed her? And was the right man jailed for the crime?
In 2011, 24-year-old Daniel O'Keeffe went missing from his parent's home in Geelong. His family mounted and extraordinary social media campaign,but it was five years before they found out what had happened to him. The Black Dahlia is one of the most famous dead bodies of all time. Hollywood hopeful Elizabeth Short was found in Leimert Park, murdered and mutilated. Her killer has never been found.
A necrophile is a person who is sexually attracted to corpses. Nine out of ten necrophiles are men. It is extremely rare for a woman to indulge in necrophilia: Karen Greenlee was one of them. She was caught after stealing a body on its way to a funeral in 1979. What happens if one identical twin commits a horrible crime, but points the finger at the other? How do police know they have got the right or wrong man?
Serial killer Todd Kohlhepp was convicted of murdering seven people in South Carolina between 2003 and 2016. His violent life of crime started when he was just 15, and ended when one of his eight victims was found alive being held captive on his property. Brisbane mother Dianne Brimble died over a drug overdose in 2002 on a P&O Cruises cruise ship, and police named a group of men as “persons of interest”. The investigation, inquest, and eventual trial related to her death concluded in 2010, ...
When an actor “dies” on stage, the audience is usually confident that they’re only acting, but that is not always the case. On more than one occasion, theatre-goers have unwittingly watched an actual death take place. The Darwin Awards are given out each year for the most stupid death, rewarding the person’s willingness to “remove themselves from the human gene pool.” We look at the most recent Top Ten thrillseekers who met an untimely end.
In 1959, nine hikers died in the northern Ural Mountains in the former Soviet Union, in what became known as The Dyatlov Pass incident. They set up camp, but during the night, something caused them to tear their way out of their tents and flee in the sub-zero temperatures. In Melbourne, in 1999, Gabriel Omar Chang took to the dead body of Dianne Psaila with a meat tenderiser, and carried her corpse in the boot of her car for five days. His erratic behaviour that took him from the murder scene in...
In Tasmania, in 1822, Alexander Pearce is one of eight convicts who escape from the Macquarie Harbour penal settlement into the mountain wilderness on the mainland. When they run out of food their only option is to kill and eat each other. Did Pearce cannibalise his mates out of necessity, or pleasure? Have you ever played Chubby Bunny? DON’T!!! It’s the childhood game that has turned deadly. We talk to Laura who has been investigating the story of Alice Pengel, a woman who was jailed in Western...
Imagine dying, and nobody came to your funeral. Homeless men and women are spared that bleak prospect thanks to Roxbury Latin School’s Ave Atque Vale program — through which Class I boys act as pallbearers at the funerals of homeless men and women. In Antwerp, Victoria, in 1993, 49 year old Joan Vollmer was killed by her husband and a group of devout Christians, who performed an exorcism on her, believing that she was possessed by demons.
L'Inconnue de la Seine translates from French as The Unknown Woman of the Seine. The unidentified young woman whose dead body was pulled from the River Seine in the 1800’s later became known as The Drowned Mona Lisa. We explain why her face is familiar to hundreds of millions of people the world over as part of a lifesaving training. Hart Island, in the northeast Bronx, New York City, serves as the city's potter's field and is run by the New York City Department of Correction. More than one mill...
Kodokushi or lonely death refers to a Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time. We look at why a growing number of dead bodies are being found abandoned in Japanese apartments, as well as Japan’s suicide forest, Aokigahara. The people of New Orleans have embraced a trend for keeping life-size cardboard cut-outs of their loved ones who have died.
America has a glut of unclaimed bodies, and the dead are piling up quicker than morgues can deal with them. We look at where the corpses end up. Leonard Lawson was an Australian artist who wrote The Lone Avenger comic books in the 1950’s. He was also a notorious rapist and murderer, and one of the last people sentenced to death in New South Wales.
James Bulger was two years old in 1993 when he was abducted, tortured and killed by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables in Merseyside in the UK. 26 years later the case is still having legal repercussions. Clement Vallandigham was a politician in Ohio in 1871. His attempt to clear a man named Thomas McGehean of a murder charge went horribly wrong, with fatal consequences. Dee Dee and Sharnelle talk to Kara who came across a horrifying fatal car accident on the isolated road be...
An emerging DNA technique has been used to solve the murders of two young women in El Dorado County, California, more than 40 years ago. Joseph Holt was identified as the killer of Brynn Rainey in 1977 and Carol Andersen 1979 using genealogy databases. Caroline Byrne was a model found at the bottom of a cliff at The Gap in Sydney in 1995. Her boyfriend Gordon Wood was convicted of her murder but later acquitted. Sharnelle and Dee Dee talk to Wendy who worked as a funeral and mortuary assistant....
Frances Knorr was known as the Baby Farming Murderess. She was found guilty of strangling an infant and hanged at Pentridge Prison in Melbourne on Monday 15 January 1894. Other bodies of babies that had been in her care were found buried in the garden of houses where she had lived. A couple who made a trip to honor the memory of their late son, and staff at the hotel constructed a bizarre spectacle on the bed, as their way of paying tribute to his memory. And to celebrate our Fortyversary we fin...
In 2001, Armin Meiwes killed and ate Bernd Brandes, who had placed an ad in the paper offering “the chance to eat me alive”. We establish whether it is okay to eat someone if they have given you their permission. New South Wales, 1994, fisherman pulled the body of a man strapped to a steel crucifix from the mouth of the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Dubbed “Rack Man”, his dead body still lies in the Sydney morgue.
58-year-old Warren Meyer went for a walk in the bush at Dom Dom Saddle in the Yarra Ranges National Park on March 21, 2008. He was never seen again. We track the search for him, through evidence heard in the Coroners Court of Victoria. Spontaneous Human Combustion occurs when a living human body is burned without an apparent external source of ignition. Often the legs and feet are the only remains. We look at a number of cases of people bursting into flames, and examine what causes this bizarre ...
The death of Edward Baldock in Brisbane in 1989 was described as one of the most brutal and bizarre crimes Australia had ever seen at the time. The discovery of his body, found drained of 75 percent of its blood, led to the arrest of Tracey Wigginton, who was dubbed the “Lesbian Vampire Killer”, a woman with six separate personalities. The suburbs of Australia seem to be littered with skeletons. Sharnelle’s search through the files of the Coroner’s Court of Victoria has uncovered multiple cases ...
In 2003 the bodies of a woman, her three children, and her mother were found dead in a house in Bakersfield California. Police used extraordinary forensics, including insects embedded in a rental car, to convict the woman’s husband Vincent Brothers of the murders. In August, 1974, a massive flood hit Queanbeyan in New South Wales, and locals claimed that bodies from the local cemetery were washed down the river and into Lake Burley Griffin in the heart of Canberra.
Bona Lual murdered his wife Suzi Oghia and then mutilated her eyes in their Noble Park, Victoria, home in 2013. As he desecrated her dead body their four children lay sleeping nearby. Laura Van Ryn and Whitney Cerak were students at Taylor University in Indiana in 2006. They barely knew each other, but after a terrible accident, a huge mistake, and the death of one of the girls, their families became forever entwined.
For those who don’t like the thought of burial or cremation, new ways of disposing of human bodies are being found, including composting and hydrolysis. Gunther Von Hagens is the German scientist known as Dr Death. He invented the process of plastination which preserves human bodies so they can be put on display. We look at how it is done, and where do the bodies come from?
Update on the Babies of Tuam, and details on Joseph Michael Housden and his murder of Lillian Mole in Frankston in 1984.
Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people from 1984 until the mid 1990’s. Many of them she buried herself when their families abandoned them because they were gay, and had AIDS. Bassmah and Sabrina are back, with a surprise revelation. And Hanna tells us her horrific dead body story (in her own American accent).
You never know what you’ll find in the hard rubbish. In 1984 three Columbia University students picked up what they thought was a nice piece of carpet, but it contained a nasty surprise. In the 1800’s, scientists thought that electricity could bring dead bodies back to life. Professor Andrew Ure’s grotesque experiment on a dead body left many feeling ill.
Two-year-old Nikki Coslovich went missing in Mildura in 2015. Sharnelle recalls covering the search for her, the finding of her body, and the ensuing court case. In 2003 the bodies of Amarjit Chohan, his wife and mother, were found floating in the sea off Bournemouth in England. His two young boys are still missing. Three men have been jailed over the Chohan murders and a plot to steal the family’s freight business.
In our final episode for 2018, we share Dead Bodies stories from our listeners. Dice has seen three dead bodies and had two near-death experiences; Miranda has a comment on the Sofina Nikat case; Catherine got thrown in the deep end at a Maori funeral; and Candice shares Death By Tortoise.
