Dead Bodies Podcast

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.

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 community.

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".

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 found shot dead on the carriage of a Sydney-bound train.

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 guilty in the murder of 22 people.

*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 being found, and talk to radio star Andy Lee, who went hunting the treasure with his partner Hamish Blake. He has his own theory on who might have found it..

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 year. An eggplant was a key part of his defence.

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, but claimed that two of them were kidnapped.