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.