Dead Bodies Podcast

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 after being accused of harassing a former lover.

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 she was found burned to death on the Frankston foreshore. A million dollar reward still stands for information that leads to the arrest of her killer.

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 attacks.

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 an armless torso nearby. The rest of her remains were later found, and her “husband” - a local butcher - was soon arrested. But was he really her husband?

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 Sleeper. He was linked to as many as 25 murders in the Los Angeles area in the 1980s. He was brough undone by his habit of keeping photos of his victims as trophies in his home.

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 site in Whitewater, Colorado, which feral cats were using as a human buffet.

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. But McCaskell himself came under suspicion, before putting a stick of dynamite in his mouth and blowing himself up.

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 between 1972 and 1978 in Cook County, Illinois, and he buried buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home. Three other victims were buried on his property, and the bodies of another four were dumped in the a river. The girls talk to psychologist Sandy Rea to find out why people who find a dead body are often so deeply affected by it.

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, heading for Indonesia. When it ran of course and people had to take shelter on Beacon Island, a new horror was waiting.

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 Catherine who family featured in one of our earlier Dead Bodies episodes.

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 each other, the men’s deaths were related, because they were all searching for the same thing ...

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 shooting massacre in the gardens left several people dead.

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 stabbed to death on the same morning. The only surviving member of the family, Jeffrey, admitted to killing his brother, who he claimed had killed their parents.

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, and she aimed her car at Richard Powell and killed him. The sentencing judge - at times wiping away tears - described her case as one that required mercy.

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 suspected of killing her. Seventeen years later advances in DNA technology gave her family an answer to the mystery of her disappearance.

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.