Dead Bodies Podcast

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...

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, o...

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 despic...

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 bab...

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 Minte...

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...

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 communit...

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".