Dead Bodies Podcast

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.

In 2002, 339 bodies that had been sent to the Tri-State Crematory in northwest Georgia, in the US, were found dumped on the crematorium's site. This led to civil litigation and criminal prosecutions. A series of attacks on young lovers parked at a “lovers’ lane” in Rowville, Victoria, in the 1980’s went unsolved for more than 30 years. But in 2018, cold case detectives caught up with murderer and rapist James Dobbie.

Carmen Thomas was 32 and the mother of a five year old son, when she went missing from the New Zealand suburb of Remuera in July 2010. Texts had been sent from her phone, but her car was found abandoned in Hamilton, and her bank accounts were untouched. It wasn’t long before police honed in on her estranged partner Brad Callaghan. Sharnelle looks at the significance of new research at Sydney’s Body Farm, which shows that dead bodies actually move as they decompose.

Clementine Barnabet was a serial mass murderer in Louisiana and Texas in the 1920’s. The killing spree was initially blamed on her father, but eventually police honed in on Clementine, who confessed to involvement in 35 murders. Jason Considine admitted to killing Ashley Phillips and dumping his body in a wheelie bin in Preston after a night of threesome sex and cannabis smoking with Considine's long-term partner, Natasha Hogan. Sharnelle recalls gruesome images filmed by news crews covering the case.

In a deadly love triangle, Yu Tung Lo manipulated her friend Daniel Duhovic into shooting dead a man he had never met - 48-year-old Paul Hogan - in May 2016. Rather than marry as they had planned, both are now serving time for murder. Henrietta Lacks had a malignant tumor on her cervix in 1951. During her treatment, doctors removed tissue from her that contained cells unlike any they had ever seen. Henrietta died within a few months, but part of her body lives on today.

August 2018, Colorado, Christopher Watts killed his pregnant wife Shan'ann and their daughters, Bella, 4, and Celeste. He then disposed of his daughters' bodies in oil tanks and buried his wife in a shallow grave at his worksite. March 1937, a natural gas leak caused an explosion at the The London School in Texas, killing more than 295 students and teachers. It’s the third deadliest disaster in the history of Texas, and it resulted in a change to household gas supplies that affects all of us today.

Benjamin Field was found guilty of murdering 69-year-old Peter Farquhar, by drugging him and encouraging him to drink alcohol over a two-year period. He also set his sights on Farquhar’s neighbour a lonely 82-year-old named Ann Moore-Martin. Questions raised by her family led police to investigate Field over Farquhar’s death. The remains of two young women were found in bushland east of the town of Truro in South Australia, in 1978 and 1979. After police searches, the remains of seven women were discovered in total: five at Truro, one at Wingfield, and one at Port Gawler. The women had been murdered over a two-month period in 1976–1977 by Christopher Worrell and James Miller. We take a call from “Tina” about who does make-up on a dead body. But something is not as it seems …

American serial killer Jerry Brudos murdered at least four women in Oregon between 1968 and 1969. Brudos kept the bodies - and body parts - of his victims hidden in his home. He was a necrophile with a fetish for women's shoes and underwear, and had sexual fantasies centred around his intense hate for his mother. We hear from Kassi who died but was brought back to life. Her experience was quite different to the usual accounts from people who say they came back from the dead. And a message from Sharnelle, who explains why she isn’t in the Dead Bodies studio this week.

Have you ever seen a dead body? We share some of your stories, including the kids who found a “green, wrinkly crocodile” in a swampy lake, that was linked to the disappearance of a local woman.