Dead Bodies Podcast

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 corps...

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 t...

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, b...

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 th...

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 De...

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 l...

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 spectacl...

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 li...

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...

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. S...

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...

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 bec...

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’...

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.

Would you eat human flesh? A man who had his leg amputated after a motorcycle accident made it into fajita tacos and served it to his friends. Ruth Snyder was sent to the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in 1928, and the image of her dead body was plastered on the front page of the New York Daily News. The case changed forever the protocols for media at executions.

Neil Gordon Wilson pretended to be a fish. People in his home town of Horsham in Victoria accepted his quirky ways, but were shocked when his dead body was found in a paddock in 1995. Maria Korp was strangled by her husband Joe Korp’s lover Tania Herman, put into the boot of a car and abandoned in Melbourne in 2005, in what became known as The Body In The Boot case. Herman was jailed, and Joe Korp...

The Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home was run by Catholic nuns in Tuam, County Galway, in Ireland, from 1925 to 1961. Dee Dee looks at the ongoing investigation into a mass burial chamber found on the site of the home, and the fate of hundreds of babies and children who lived and died at Tuam. The rich and famous spend millions of dollars on a final goodbye to the world. Sharnelle looks at the worl...

James Gargasoulas murdered six pedestrians and injured another 27 when he sped his car along a footpath in Bourke Street, Melbourne, in 2017. After covering his trial, Sharnelle recounts the horror of his actions. George Melville was sentenced to hang for his part in one of Australia’s biggest robberies in 1853. His wife requested his body after his death and put it on public display in the middle...

Ned Kelly was a notorious Irish-Australian outlaw. He killed three police officers and was hanged in 1880, and buried close to another vile murderer, Frederick Deeming, who was once suspected of being Jack The Ripper. The hunt for the skulls of both men continues to this day. Movie star Charlie Chaplin died in 1978 at the age of 88, and was buried near his home in Switzerland. But not for long. Gr...