Dead Bodies Podcast

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 f...

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 gui...

*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 be...

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 y...

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...

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 a...

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 sh...

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 atta...

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...

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 S...

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 sit...

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....

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 b...

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, headi...

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 Cathe...

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...