Dead Bodies Podcast

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.