Dead Bodies Podcast

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...

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 stab...

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...

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 su...

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...

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 Bod...

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 l...

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...

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 th...

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 o...

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 di...

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...

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...

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...

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 an...

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 mur...

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 influentia...

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 j...

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 righ...

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 in...

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 To...