Dead Bodies Podcast

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.

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".

In 2007, police in Bhagavanpur in India received multiple phone calls alerting them to a most unexpected killing spree. They would eventually arrest a most surprising murderer: eight year old Amadeep Sada. In 1954, Olaf Perkman was one of Australia’s leading scientists working at the CSIRO irrigation research station at Griffith, in New South Wales. His promising career was cut short when he was found shot dead on the carriage of a Sydney-bound train.

Vicki Barton was 8 when she vanished in broad daylight from the main street of Lawson, in the New South Wales Blue Mountains. After years of searching, false leads, a big reward and a clairvoyant, police followed up a tip from a caller who rang a TV newsroom. Arnfinn Nesset was a Norwegian nurse who became one of the most notorious serial killers in Scandinavian history, eventually being found guilty in the murder of 22 people.

*Warning: this episode contains mention of cruelty to animals. Richard Chase killed six people in the span of a month in Sacramento, California. He drank his victims' blood and cannibalized their remains. We hear from “Doug” who is convinced the spirit of a dead person is attached to him.

In November, 2019, we brought you the story of the bodies of four men that were found at separate times in a similar area of the Rocky Mountains in the US. Although they didn’t know each other, the men’s deaths were related, because they were all searching for the same thing: a treasure buried by a man named Forrest Fenn. In this special bonus episode, we bring you and update about the treasure being found, and talk to radio star Andy Lee, who went hunting the treasure with his partner Hamish Blake. He has his own theory on who might have found it..

Klaus Andres killed his wife and used acid to dissolve her body and then washed her down a drain outside his home in Cairns. All that was left of her body was 10 porcelain teeth. In 2002, 29-year-old Janelle Patton was the first person to be murdered on Norfolk Island in more than 100 years. The hunt for her killer was drawn out as he had fled the island for New Zealand.

Darren Clover murdered three people by setting fire to a disused factory in Melbourne's west in 2017. David Griffiths, his girlfriend Tanya Burmeister and her daughter Zoe were sleeping in the factory when it was set alight Sada Abe was a Japanese geisha and prostitute, who strangled her lover and then cut off his penis and testicles and carried them around with her in her kimono.

Sharnelle looks at the disposal of the world’s mounting toll of bodies as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic Two years into construction of Melbourne’s Westgate bridge, a 112-metre span collapsed and fell to the ground and water below. Thirty-five people were killed and 18 injured, and it remains Australia's worst industrial accident to this day

British murderer and rapist Colin Pitchfork was the first person convicted of murder based on DNA fingerprinting evidence. He attacked and killed two girls in Narborough in 1983, and in Enderby in 1986. Vatthana Chounlamountry entered the home of his drug dealer, Thanh "Phong" Nguyen, and fatally stabbed him to death. He then barricaded himself in a Sunshine motel with a woman and two children.

Tasmania’s notorious murder house at 99 Hill Street in West Hobart was sold recently. Three decades ago it was the scene of a gruesome murder. Rory Jack Thompson strangled and dismembered his wife Maureen with a hacksaw and a meat cleaver. Angelo Pat Russo was jailed for five years for the 2017 shooting manslaughter of David Calandro on a market garden property at Tatura East on February 18 last year. An eggplant was a key part of his defence.

Altemio Sanchez murdered and raped at least three women in and around Buffalo, New York, between from 1981 and 2006, and became known as the Bike Path Rapist. When Patricia Stallings’ baby Ryan died in September, 1989, she was suspected of having poisoned him with anti-freeze. Public sentiment around her case was probably influenced by another case around the same time: Paula Sims had three babies, but claimed that two of them were kidnapped.

A black mourning card and a bunch of radishes led to the brutal murder of a stallholder at Melbourne’s Eastern Markets in 1899 by phrenologist Emery Medor. Tracie Andrews’ fiancee Lee Raymond Dean Harvey was stabbed over 42 times after they had stopped in his car following an argument on the way to their flat in The Becks, Alvechurch, Worcestershire, in 1996.

Tuesday, November 30 1937, a farmer found the body of a woman in his peach orchard near the entrance to Lake Parramatta reserve. There was a chaff bag over her head and shoulders Jane Andrews, a former aide to the Duchess of York, was jailed for life for murdering her millionaire boyfriend Tom Cressman. She was initially released from jail in 2015, but was locked up again in July 2018, allegedly after being accused of harassing a former lover.

North Carolina cold case detectives have arrested the mother of a newborn who died after being tossed from a moving car 21 years ago. Deborah Riddle O'Connor was linked via DNA to “Baby Michael”by a lab that specializes in genetic genealogy testing. Rosemaria Lauria left her home in Brunswick in 2006 to go to the local shops. But she somehow ended up in Frankston, some 60 kiloemtres away, where she was found burned to death on the Frankston foreshore. A million dollar reward still stands for information that leads to the arrest of her killer.

On August 28, 2003, pizza delivery man Brian Wells robbed a bank. Fifteen minutes later he was arrested in a nearby parking lot, with a collar bomb locked around his neck. Brian’s death in the bomb blast led to a tangled and twisted crime that involved several people, a body in a freezer, and an evil manipulator named Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. And we look at the often gruesome deaths by shark attacks.

Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 men between 1978 and 1991. He met them at gay bars, malls and bus stops, and lured them to his home with promises of money or sex, before strangling and dismembering them. Dahmer was captured in 1991 and sentenced to 16 life terms. A young man walking his dog in Sydney in September 1866, found the severed head of a woman. Police found the charred and decomposing remains of an armless torso nearby. The rest of her remains were later found, and her “husband” - a local butcher - was soon arrested. But was he really her husband?

On 31 December 1921, the body of 12-year-old Alma Tirtschke was found in a laneway in Melbourne, Australia. She had been raped, strangled and left naked behind a popular wine saloon. The owner of the wine saloon, Colin Ross, was arrested and tried for Alma's rape and murder. It was 86 years before the final chapter was written in this tragic story. Lonnie Franklin Jr. is better known as the Grim Sleeper. He was linked to as many as 25 murders in the Los Angeles area in the 1980s. He was brough undone by his habit of keeping photos of his victims as trophies in his home.

A fire in the Ghost Train ride at Sydney’s Luna Park in 1979 killed six children and one man. Listener Ashley shares her bizarre account of a tragic message from beyond the grave while she was on holiday with her family in Bali.

A young woman known to her friends as Jessica Pearce died being thrown from a car in an accident on the Hume Highway in New South Wales in 1987. It was 31 years before she would be correctly identified, and answers given to her family who had pined for her for decades. Body Farms are research facilities set up for the study of how our bodies decompose. But cats have different ideas at one such site in Whitewater, Colorado, which feral cats were using as a human buffet.

Having recently been in New Zealand reporting on the White Island volcano, Sharnelle looks at the harvesting of skin from human dead bodies to heal the wounds of the injured. The coal mining village of Aberfan was destroyed in 1966 by the collapse of a waste tip. Children at a school were among the victims of this horrendous accident.

With the world in the grip of the coronavirus outbreak, we look back at some of the deadly plagues, epidemics and pandemics that have caused millions of deaths over the centuries. Chrissie Venn was a 13-year-old girl whose brutalised body was found in a giant, hollow tree stump near her home in North Motton near Ulverstone, Tasmania, Australia in 1921.

In the 1960s, Ian Brady and his girlfriend, Myra Hindley, sexually abused and murdered young children and teens, then buried their bodies along the Saddleworth Moor, in what became known as the Moors Murders. Farmer Victor McCaskell returned from a day on his land to find his wife and baby daughter axed to death and his young farm hand hanged on the verandah, in what looked like a murder-suicide. But McCaskell himself came under suspicion, before putting a stick of dynamite in his mouth and blowing himself up.

Lindsay Robert Rose was a paramedic in 1977, where he was among the rescuers who worked to save lives after the Granville train disaster. But his life took a dramatic turn after that, and he is now serving five consecutive life sentences in jail for the murder of 5 people in New South Wales between 1984 and 1994. John Wayne Gacy raped, tortured and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978 in Cook County, Illinois, and he buried buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home. Three other victims were buried on his property, and the bodies of another four were dumped in the a river. The girls talk to psychologist Sandy Rea to find out why people who find a dead body are often so deeply affected by it.

January 18, 1977, a morning passenger train headed from the Blue Mountains to Sydney Central Station de-railed at Granville and smashed into the pillars of a bridge, which collapsed on several carriages. Dozens of people were crushed to death or horribly injured, in what remains to this day as Australia’s worst ever rail disaster. The Batavia set sail in 1628 with nearly 350 people on board, heading for Indonesia. When it ran of course and people had to take shelter on Beacon Island, a new horror was waiting.

In 1922, Melbourne doctor in the bayside suburb of Hampton injected his family and their housekeeper with - in some cases, lethal - doses of morphine. Dr George Elliot Cranstoun appeared to be a pillar of sociaety, but after his death his massive gambling debts and drug addiction became clear. We ask you all the time: “Have you ever seen a dead body?”. We weren’t expecting this feedback from Catherine who family featured in one of our earlier Dead Bodies episodes.

John Norman Collins is serving life behind bars for killing a young woman in Michigan in 1970. And police believe he is responsible for the rape and mutilation of a total of seven young women in a sickening spree in the late 1960’s that saw him dubbed The Co-Ed Killer. The bodies of four men were found at separate times in a similar area of the Rocky Mountains in the US. Although they didn’t know each other, the men’s deaths were related, because they were all searching for the same thing ...

Seven-year-old Olivia Gant was - according to her mother - suffering from a rare and fatal disease, suffered from seizures, autism, severe allergies, and intestinal failure - and she died in 2017. Soon after, Kelly Gant, 41, was arrested and charged with her murder. The Melbourne Botanic Gardens were the scene of the brutal murder of a young woman named Yuk Ling Lau in 2014. Ninety years earlier a shooting massacre in the gardens left several people dead.

22-year-old Sarah Cafferkey was bashed and stabbed by Steven James Hunter in Bacchus Marsh in 2012, after the pair had an argument. Her body was found in a wheelie bin at a home in Point Cook nine days later. In 1993, when Helen Gilham, 55, and her 58-year-old husband Stephen were stabbed to death in their southern Sydney home, and then set alight. Their eldest son Christopher Gilham was also stabbed to death on the same morning. The only surviving member of the family, Jeffrey, admitted to killing his brother, who he claimed had killed their parents.

The murder of David O’Hearn in Wollongong in 1998 was described by season police as the most gruesome they had ever come across, with body parts strewn around the house. Within days, former Mayor Frank Arkell was also killed, and then Mark Valera - known as the Butcher of Wollongong - confessed. Jessie Donker suffered at the hands of her violent partner for years, until she could take it no longer, and she aimed her car at Richard Powell and killed him. The sentencing judge - at times wiping away tears - described her case as one that required mercy.

Melbourne man Charles Mihayo smothered his daughters, Savannah, 4, and Indianna, 3, on April 20 2014, in a horrifying act of revenge after his divorce from the girls’ mother. Sharnelle shares her recollections of covering the case. Corrie Van der Valk stood to inherit her family’s multi-million dollar hotel chain in the Netherlands, until she went missing in 2001 and her husband of 40 years was suspected of killing her. Seventeen years later advances in DNA technology gave her family an answer to the mystery of her disappearance.

Cotard Delusion is an extremely rare condition where a person believes that they - or a part of their body - is dead. In extreme cases it can lead to actual death. Manuel Blanco Romasanta was charged with 13 murders, but only found guilty of nine, as four were found to have been committed by wolves. The complication? Romasanta believed that he himself was a wolf.

In 2002, 339 bodies that had been sent to the Tri-State Crematory in northwest Georgia, in the US, were found dumped on the crematorium's site. This led to civil litigation and criminal prosecutions. A series of attacks on young lovers parked at a “lovers’ lane” in Rowville, Victoria, in the 1980’s went unsolved for more than 30 years. But in 2018, cold case detectives caught up with murderer and rapist James Dobbie.

Carmen Thomas was 32 and the mother of a five year old son, when she went missing from the New Zealand suburb of Remuera in July 2010. Texts had been sent from her phone, but her car was found abandoned in Hamilton, and her bank accounts were untouched. It wasn’t long before police honed in on her estranged partner Brad Callaghan. Sharnelle looks at the significance of new research at Sydney’s Body Farm, which shows that dead bodies actually move as they decompose.

Clementine Barnabet was a serial mass murderer in Louisiana and Texas in the 1920’s. The killing spree was initially blamed on her father, but eventually police honed in on Clementine, who confessed to involvement in 35 murders. Jason Considine admitted to killing Ashley Phillips and dumping his body in a wheelie bin in Preston after a night of threesome sex and cannabis smoking with Considine's long-term partner, Natasha Hogan. Sharnelle recalls gruesome images filmed by news crews covering the case.

In a deadly love triangle, Yu Tung Lo manipulated her friend Daniel Duhovic into shooting dead a man he had never met - 48-year-old Paul Hogan - in May 2016. Rather than marry as they had planned, both are now serving time for murder. Henrietta Lacks had a malignant tumor on her cervix in 1951. During her treatment, doctors removed tissue from her that contained cells unlike any they had ever seen. Henrietta died within a few months, but part of her body lives on today.

August 2018, Colorado, Christopher Watts killed his pregnant wife Shan'ann and their daughters, Bella, 4, and Celeste. He then disposed of his daughters' bodies in oil tanks and buried his wife in a shallow grave at his worksite. March 1937, a natural gas leak caused an explosion at the The London School in Texas, killing more than 295 students and teachers. It’s the third deadliest disaster in the history of Texas, and it resulted in a change to household gas supplies that affects all of us today.

Benjamin Field was found guilty of murdering 69-year-old Peter Farquhar, by drugging him and encouraging him to drink alcohol over a two-year period. He also set his sights on Farquhar’s neighbour a lonely 82-year-old named Ann Moore-Martin. Questions raised by her family led police to investigate Field over Farquhar’s death. The remains of two young women were found in bushland east of the town of Truro in South Australia, in 1978 and 1979. After police searches, the remains of seven women were discovered in total: five at Truro, one at Wingfield, and one at Port Gawler. The women had been murdered over a two-month period in 1976–1977 by Christopher Worrell and James Miller. We take a call from “Tina” about who does make-up on a dead body. But something is not as it seems …

American serial killer Jerry Brudos murdered at least four women in Oregon between 1968 and 1969. Brudos kept the bodies - and body parts - of his victims hidden in his home. He was a necrophile with a fetish for women's shoes and underwear, and had sexual fantasies centred around his intense hate for his mother. We hear from Kassi who died but was brought back to life. Her experience was quite different to the usual accounts from people who say they came back from the dead. And a message from Sharnelle, who explains why she isn’t in the Dead Bodies studio this week.

Have you ever seen a dead body? We share some of your stories, including the kids who found a “green, wrinkly crocodile” in a swampy lake, that was linked to the disappearance of a local woman.

A dead body found in a rubbish bin in Maryland in 1985 has finally been identified through genetic genealogy. The victim, Roger Kelso, had been murdered back in 1963, but his body was unidentified for years As First Lady of Argentina, Eva Peron was loved by the working class. She died in 1952 and millions of people filed past her coffin. But there was a military coup two years later, and her body was moved multiple times over the next two decades.

Conditions at the Cantrell Funeral Home deteriorated over the years, with horrific treatment of the bodies of the dead. In August 2018 investigators entered the building and discovered rotting corpses and the remains of hundreds of people. A naked, unconscious man found under a car in Chicago earlier this year, turned into a bizarre case of mistaken identity. Alfonso Bennett found himself declared dead, when he was very much alive. We talk to Tamara - the daughter of a fatal work accident inspector - who herself worked as a trauma and organ donation nurse.

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 others, Adam Landerman and Bethany McKee, were also accused in the murder.

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 abortionist Hannah Mitchell.

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, and resulted in changes to safety procedures aboard cruise ships. Two very special guests join us to celebrate our 50th episode: it’s Bassmah and Sabrina!!!!

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 Melton to Lorne on Victoria’s west coast.

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 Australia over the death of a young mother at the end of World War Two. Laura reveals how a member of her family became embroiled in the scandal.

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 million dead are buried on Hart Island. We look at where all these dead bodies come from.

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 between Broome and Karratha in outback Western Australia.

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.