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Grady Stiles Jr. was not only a killer, but a murder victim. He became famous as Lobster Boy in a bizarre travelling sideshow. While most of the world was confined to their homes at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, UK police were called to investigate a car being driven erratically near Coleford in the Forest of Dean, leading to the uncovering of the murder of Phoenix Netts.

Elmer McCurdy was a drunk and a train robber. It was decades after his death that his body was discovered at an amusement park in California. If you had committed a murder, would you consider yourself to be violent? Would you be chummy with the police when they arrived on your doorstep? Some killers behave differently, as evidenced by the odd behaviour of wife killer Stephen Searle.

Today, Brighton is one of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs, but in 1853 it was the scene of two bizarre murders, with a bag of sugar left on the victim’s head. And we unpack some frank feedback from listener Joey.

Nurse Roger Dean was working in a Sydney nursing when he murdered 11 elderly residents by setting a fire to the facility as they slept on November 18, 2011. Allen Lee Davis was sent to the electric chair for brutally killing a mother and her two young daughters. His botched execution is known as Florida’s messiest ever.

In this special Christmas episode we cover the 1992 “Christmas killings” in Dayton, Ohio. Marvallos Keene was the head of a gang that murdered six people. Hospital worker David Fuller pleaded guilty to murdering Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce in Tunbridge Wells back in 1987. And when police raided his home they found a stash of pornography described as “unimaginable sexual depravity” that led to investigators uncovering his years of necrophilia.

Harold Frederick Shipman (14 January 1946 – 13 January 2004), known to acquaintances as Fred Shipman, was an English general practitioner who is believed to be one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history. On 31 January 2000, he was found guilty of the murder of 15 patients under his care; his total number of victims was approximately 250. Shipman was sentenced to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he never be released.[4] He died by suicide, hanging himself in his cell at HM Prison Wakefield, West Yorkshire on 13 January 2004, a day before his 58th birthday. Sylvia Marie Likens (January 3, 1949 – October 26, 1965) was an American teenager who was tortured and murdered by her caregiver, Gertrude Baniszewski, many of Baniszewski's children, and several of their neighborhood friends. This abuse incrementally lasted for three months before Likens died from her extensive injuries and malnourishment on October 26 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Likens was increasingly neglected, belittled, sexually humiliated, beaten, starved, lacerated, and dehydrated by her tormentors. Her autopsy showed 150 wounds across her body, including several burns and receded skin. Through intimidation, her younger sister, Jenny, was occasionally forced to participate in her mistreatment. The official cause of her death was determined to be a homicide caused by a combination of subdural hematoma and shock, complicated by severe malnutrition.

The body of pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett was found in her home in Missouri in 2004. Her unborn foetus had been cut from her womb. The killer, Lisa Marie Montgomery, was put to death by lethal injection in January 2021. Martin van Butchell was an eccentric British dentist who put his dead wife on display. Was it for love, to attract customers, or because of a clause in a marriage contract?

Ten-year-old Candace Newmaker was killed during a bizarre therapy session designed to help her bond with her adoptive mother. She was suffocated by so-called therapists who were trying to force her to be “reborn”. We find Sharnelle in hotel quarantine after her stint reporting from Japan. She shares what makes her embarrassed daily as her meals are delivered.

How would you behave if your partner had just been stabbed multiple times, and the police came knocking on your door? We share the police bodycam footage that captured the odd behaviour of killer Owen Pellow. In a recent episode we looked at deaths on elevators and escalators. Now we’re making sure you never leave the ground floor, looking at deaths on stairs and in stairwells!

12-year-old Tia Sharp went shopping in August 2012 in New Addington, London, England, and it was weeks before her body was found in the roof of her grandmother’s home. Suspicion fell upon the partner of Tia’s grandmother, Stuart Hazell. We share a story from listener Brooke who found her Uncle John’s dead body.

“BTK” stands for “bind, torture, kill”: Dennis Lyn Rader gave himself the title. Between 1974 and 1991, Rader killed ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, and sent taunting letters to police and newspapers describing the details of his crimes. It was 2005 before he was arrested and jailed for life. In this episode we hear excerpts from his police interviews.

Sef Gonzales was found guilty of murdering his father Teodoro "Teddy" Gonzales, his mother Mary Loiva Gonzales, and his sister Clodine Gonzales, in Sydney, Australia, in 2001. He’s serving three concurrent life sentences, but continues to profess his innocence.

In 1971, Cheryl Miller and Pamella Jackson went missing on their way to an end of school year party in South Dakota in the US. It was 42 years before the mystery of their disappearance was finally solved.

More than 50 passengers drowned when the Loch Ard ran aground in Victoria in 1978. But those weren’t the only deaths along the same rugged Port Campbell coastline. In 1970, four dead bodies were found in a car that had gone over the cliff. The tragic death of basketballer Kobe Bryant led to the introduction of a new law, banning photos of the dead by first responders.

Herbert Baumeister seemed to his wife and children to be a regular businessman and they lived together on an 18-acre horse farm called Fox Hollow. But Herb had a secret, and had strangled several men and buried their dead bodies in the woods. You may have heard the expression “hanged, drawn and quartered”. But what is actually done to a person sentenced to this gruesome punishment?

Richard Speck raped, tortured and murdered eight student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital in 1966. And he would have gotten away with it, were it not for the extraordinary bravery of Corazon Amurao who survived his brutality. Andre Daigle fell victim to two men who beat him to death with a hammer just to see if they could kill someone.

Everyone is talking about the footage of Elisa Lam in the elevator in the Netflix documentary Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. We look into a number of deaths on escalators and elevators A listener shares a first-hand account of finding her dead uncle, weeks after his death, and the mammoth clean-up task after his body was removed.

We’re putting the dead bodies aside for this episode, as Sharnelle shares a deeply personal story from a recent event in her life.

The 18-metre sailing ketch The Bluebelle was the scene of several brutal murders in November, 1961, off the Bahamas. The killer survived the sinking of the vessel, and he didn’t count on an 11-year-old witness coming forward to undo his vile scheme. Drag queen Dorian Corey died from AIDS-related complications in 1993, and a mummified body was discovered in the closet of her apartment. It was a man named Robert Worley. But why was he there, how long had his body been there, and how did he die?

A wicked scheme where tissue and bone were stripped from corpses at funeral homes and then sold them for transplants - without the permission of the families - led to the arrest of former dental surgeon Michael Mastromarino. Elizabeth Bathory has been labelled the world’s most prolific female murderer, accused of torturing and killing hundreds of young girls and women between 1590 and 1610.