ISDP Redux

 

A little over five years ago we called a wrap on our wildly popular I Smell Dead People™ feature, along with the annual Norman Bates Award™ competition. It wasn’t for lack of compelling material. From a simple premise (a person follows a repulsive smell only to discover cadaverous remains) came stories that illuminated the human condition in all its highs and lows. However there were simply too many incidents to catalog and each one took some unraveling. Also, I needed to free up some time to write what would become the fictional adventures of Nick Zollicker.

This week the lurking thrall of ISDP finally broke through my studied indifference. The first item to grab me was a headline in the august Times of London: “Russian admiral’s wife and son found stabbed to death.” The bodies of Rear Admiral Leonid Lobanov’s elderly wife and middle-aged son were discovered in a St. Petersburg apartment after neighbors complained of a bad smell.

No big deal, right? Standard unnoticed deaths. Wrong: “The pair had been stabbed and slashed several times in the torso, neck and face. They were in a sitting position on a sofa.” And here’s the kicker: the bodies were discovered eight days after the Rear Admiral “died under the wheels of a suburban train near Ruchi station in the northeast of the city, two miles from the apartment where they all lived.”

That’s potentially the basis for a typically dark Russian tale of depravity and intrigue. The only question is whether it should be written in the style of Dostoyevsky or John le Carré.

The second item to leap out at me came from the execrable Star Tribune of Minneapolis. [Why so harsh?—Ed.] [It’s Minnesota’s answer to the Los Angeles Times.] [Oh.—Ed.] The headline wasn’t anything special: “Murder charge: St. Paul woman shot ex-husband, buried him in their back yard.” It was the subhead that raised the relevant possibility: “A neighbor told police about a bad smell coming from near Karina Her’s garden sometime shortly after July 5 and persisting for a week.”

So—do we credit the neighbor with an ISDP find?

Karina Her

Enthusiasts know that to qualify as an ISDP incident, the body in question must be discovered by someone smelling it. Suppose an out-of-state relative requests a welfare check on an elderly family member and the responding police officer detects the telltale scent wafting through an open window. Sorry—no dice. The ISDP Rules Committee sets and maintains very high standards.

From the Star Tribune story (along with this one from WCCOChannel 4) it is unclear whether the neighbor’s complaint led directly to the discovery of the husband’s body. After all, the victim’s stepdaughter apparently implicated her mother in a 911 call. The sequence of events is critical to determining whether this is a true IDSP event. (See how much work this takes?)

Finally, this item from the Overpromising and Underdelivering file: “L.A. Woman Says She Slept 3 Feet From Her Neighbor’s Corpse for Weeks.” At first glance it looks like Reagan Baylee deserves a Norman Bates Award nomination. But it turns out her neighbor’s corpse was in a different apartment.  

Ms. Baylee’s emotional and highly personal account, as befits the Age of Social Media, overshares to the point of TMI. (Check out her TikTok video for the full effect.) Still, she supplies some telling details and her story has an excellent plot twist. (Which neighboring apartment was the gruesome odor really coming from?)

Trending on Twitter

 

Everyone loves ISDP™ humor.

Smells from Beyond

 

In a series of pre-Halloween posts a decade ago, I examined ghostly smell stories and poems including examples from the Victorian English novelist Wilkie Collins, the 19^th century American writer Bret Harte, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, and an English novel (“The Uninvited”) that was made into a movie starring Ray Milland.

I was reminded of them this week when I came across a new study: “Perceptual phenomena associated with spontaneous experiences of after-death communication: Analysis of visual, tactile, auditory and olfactory sensations.”

Have I started dabbling in occultism? Not exactly. The paper appears in Explore: The Journal of Science & Healing, published by Elsevier, which claims to address “the scientific principles behind, and applications of, evidence-based healing practices from a wide variety of sources, including conventional, alternative, and cross-cultural medicine.” Further, “It is an interdisciplinary journal that explores the healing arts, consciousness, spirituality, eco-environmental issues, and basic science as all these fields relate to health.”

OK, then!

So who conducted the study? Here’s the batting order:

Marjorie Woollacott, an emeritus professor of physiology whose focus is motor control.

Chris A. Roe, a professor of psychology at the University of Northampton in the UK who is President of the Society for Psychical Research and whose most recent publication is a chapter titled “Clinical parapsychology: The interface between anomalous experiences and psychological wellbeing.”

Callum E. Cooper, a senior lecturer in psychology at Northampton, who holds two doctorates and whose most recent publication is the entry on “Anal Intercourse” for the Encyclopedia of Sex and Sexuality.

David Lorimer, Programme Director of something called the Scientific and Medical Network, and an editor and author of many books including Survival? Death as a Transition; he is interviewed in a recent youtube video.

Evelyn Elsaesser, an independent researcher in Switzerland and author of, among other books, On the other side of life: Exploring the phenomenon of the near-death experience.

So what have they delivered?

The study itself consists of a lengthy 194-item online questionnaire that was filled out by 991 people, mostly women (85%) with a median age of 51 years. The olfactory data appear in Table 6. In response to the question “Did you smell a fragrance characteristic of the deceased which made you think he/she was present?” 28% of respondents said yes. Of these, 60% also said yes to the next question: “Did you feel that the deceased was conveying a message to you by way of this fragrance?”

The authors give us an idea of what smells were reported:

“The fragrances typically included aftershave lotion, a typical body scent, perfume or soap, but many odors were noted in the descriptions, including tobacco, food and flowers.”

Smells were the least common sensory impression (28%) reported by people who experienced ADC. The most frequent were tactile (48%), visual (46%), and auditory (44%). While noting that there is considerable variability in the representation of the individual senses in previous studies of ADC, the authors don’t have much to say about the proportions they found.

For what it’s worth, I would point out that the substantially lower incidence of smells compared to sights and sounds is consistent with what’s been reported for sensory impressions in dreams and hallucinations.

The paper is mildly interesting for the cross-sensory tabulations insofar as they relate to smells in phantosmia, dreams, and hallucinations. Whether there is anything else worth pursuing on the topic of after-death communication is, in my opinion, dubious. Interestingly, the funders of the study are publicity-shy:

Funding: This work was supported by a foundation that wishes to remain anonymous. The funding organization had no influence on the final research design, data collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of the report or the decision to submit the article for publication.

UPDATE May 7, 2021

And right on cue—spooky new Netflix movie Things Heard & Seen features among other things a smelly ghost.

The study discussed here is “Perceptual phenomena associatedwith spontaneous experiences of after-death communication: Analysis of visual,tactile, auditory and olfactory sensations,” by Marjorie Woollacott, Chris A. Roe, Callum E. Cooper, David Lorimer, and Evelyn Elsaesser, published online in EXPLORE, February 23, 2021.

Noted in Passing

FirstNerve’s wildly popular but now dormant “I Smell Dead People” feature began with an observation in my book. I noted that stories about the “Body in the Bed”—motel guests complaining of a foul odor in their room which the manager later discovers is due to a corpse hidden beneath the bed—were not urban legends but in fact quite common occurrences. 

Way back in 2009, ISDP covered the case of Anthony Sowell, a Cleveland man accused of killing as many as 11 women and stashing their bodies in the house where he lived. One reason he was able to get away with these crimes was that people who smelled the putrefaction often assumed the smell was coming from a sausage factory next door. You can find all the gory details here.

So why bring up Anthony Sowell now? Because the bastard has just died peacefully (unlike his victims) in an Ohio prison hospital. 

He will not be missed.

Another “New York Death”?

Hey, I’m as big a fan of Febreze® as the next guy, but I think it’s a tall order for that product to handle the smell of human decomposition. This case reported by the New York Post will ring a bell with fans of FirstNerve’s long-standing “I Smell Dead People” feature which, if memory serves, recorded instances of people attempting to hide the smell of rotting corpses with scented candles and air fresheners.

Cops believe the actor who was found dead with his mom’s body in Chelsea lived with her decomposing corpse for several days before he also passed away — and that he used Febreze to mask the odor, law-enforcement sources said Sunday.

ISDP fans will note that this is not a bona fide case of “I Smell Dead People” because the remains of the unfortunate Mr. Wedell and his mother were not discovered by smell, but via a police wellness check requested by concerned relatives. 

Enjoy the screenshot of the Post story in case a copy editor wakes up and notices the product name was misspelled in the headline.

The Norman Bates Profile: A Halloween Meta-Analysis

In the deepening gloom of the post-equinoctial season, we are cheered to find the spirit of I Smell Dead People taking hold of a new generation of decay-obsessed social media types. There is, for example, the elegantly produced Death/Scent blog (“Exploring the weird & wonderful world of fragrance & funerals”) and its associated twitter account @DeathandScent.

Here at FirstNerve Manor, we admit to being sadly negligent in the I Smell Dead People department. It takes quite an effort to track down and validate (according to our strict rules) every incident of a deceased person being discovered through the scent of corporeal decay. FirstNerve simply doesn’t have the resources to pay all the little Festers who serve as our ISDP scribes and scorekeepers. We tried to code a proprietary algorithm to handle the task, but it kept choking on news items about blooming Corpse Flowers.

Nevertheless, we still monitor the police blotters and were inspired to tweet a couple of potential 2017 Norman Bates Award™ nominees this month. [This prize is given to the person or persons who has shown exemplary, if bizarre, olfactory fortitude in living in close quarters with a dead body.—Ed.] One nominee was a guy in Georgia who lived with the body of his deceased aunt; the other was a Minnesotan who cohabited with the bodies of his mother and twin brother.

Both cases were somewhat anomalous. We don’t recall a nominee’s aunt figuring in any previous incident, but we’ve seen twins before. Brothers Edwin Larry Berndt and Edward Christian Berndt, of Houston, Texas, won the 2011 Norman Bates Award for living three months with the corpse of their 89-year-old mother.

This got us thinking about family relationships. The “actual” Norman Bates lived with the remains of his mother, and our impression has been that mothers are over-represented as co-habitees. But is this true? We decided to gather some data and analyze it.

Our source was the Norman Bates Award™ archives. The prize was given for six years running (2010 to 2015); our total database consists of 45 nominees and 47 bodies. Here’s how it breaks down:

Number of nominees who lived with body of

mother 14
father 4
husband 4
wife 1
brother 3
sister 1
son 2
daughter 2
uncle 1
girlfriend 3
boyfriend 2
roommate/housemate 5
landlord 1
unknown 4

So there you have it: the Norman Bates profile is real. An NBA nominee is far more likely to live with the remains of his mother than any other category of deceased person. (It’s not all guys btw—the list includes a few Norma Bates’s.)

More generally, parents (18) outnumber spouses (5), siblings (4), children (4) and BF/GFs (5).

In 9 cases (20% of the total) the deceased was murdered by the NBA nominee. This was true for 2 of 14 mothers, 1 of 4 fathers, 1 of 2 daughters, 1 of 2 BFs, 2 of 3 GFs, 1 of 5 roommates/housemates, and the landlord.

What drives people to cohabit with the deceased? Our guess is mental incompetence and/or panic, with anosmia as a possible contributing factor. But there is often a venal motivation for concealing the death—in 6 cases the NBA nominee cashed the dead person’s Social Security or pension checks, or otherwise made use of their bank account.

That’s it for now. We have to go to Big Bob’s Work Wear and buy bib overalls for our Chucky costume. See ya next time!

ISDP: It’s a Wrap and On to New Projects

Today’s earlier ISDP post was dedicated entirely to the 6th Annual Norman Bates Award™. That doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten our “normal” ISDP report. Our enthusiastic fans know that December/January is a slow time for bacterial decomposition in general, and for the olfactory-based discovery of human remains in particular. Nevertheless, we did dredge up one item and it turns out to have great symbolic significance for us. Here it is:

Police were called after reports of a foul odor coming from an apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Inside they found the body of a 36-year-old woman who had been stabbed to death.

This item resonates because it takes us back to the starting point of our insanely popular I Smell Dead People feature. In a section of that name in What the Nose Knows, we quoted Billy Crystal’s line in When Harry Met Sally:

Suppose nothing happens to you. Suppose you live there your whole life and nothing happens. You never meet anybody, you never become anything, and finally you die one of those New York deaths where nobody notices for two weeks until the smell drifts into the hallway.

We did some research and found that the “New York death” is, in fact, remarkably common. So December’s incident at 69 West 225th Street in New York is a closing-of-the-circle moment for us. We’ve been doing ISDP on a monthly basis since February, 2009. We’ve documented scores (if not hundreds) of incidents, and established entirely new genres of the phenomenon: the body in the chimney, the body in the car (with special subcategory: Walmart parking lot). And of course, we’ve given unprecedented attention to people who, out of anosmia, psychopathology, or criminality (or a combo) have lived in close quarters with the stench of decaying human remains. The annual Norman Bates Awards will continue, but this is the last of the monthly ISDP installments.

Having established a body of work [Phrasing!—Ed.] we feel it is now time to move along. The monthly compilations are time-consuming and we’d rather devote those hours to a new project that we’ve been incubating for a while now. It is a fictional olfacto-literary endeavor unlike any the world has seen. Is it the long-rumored AChemS novel? The steamy page-turner that pulls back the curtain on the annual orgy of smell and taste science in Florida? It might be. But as G.R.R. Martin says, “Sod off, you’ll just have to wait for it.”

Thanks, ISDP fans, and see you soon.

The 6th Annual Norman Bates Award: The Biggest & Best Field Ever

Hooray! It’s awards season. And right on the heels of Sunday’s Golden Globes comes the widely anticipated 2015 Norman Bates Award™. This year we have sixteen highly qualified nominees, all culled from the past 12 months of I Smell Dead People posts here at FirstNerve. And what a group of nominees they are. Among them are two couples, five people living with the corpse of someone they are thought to have murdered, and six people who lived with the body of a family member (four mothers, a grandfather, and a father + sister).



In the spirit of award ceremonies everywhere, we begin with a lesser category. The Norman Bates Award—Mobile Division has only a single nominee:


Tonya Slaton

Tonya Slaton, 44, of Richmond, Virginia, who kept the body of her young son in a plastic bag in the trunk of her car while driving around in it since 2004.

By acclamation, therefore, the Roaming Norman goes to Tonya Slayton. Congratulations!

And now for the main prize. Here are the nominees:


Tammy Conner

Tammy Conner of Jacksonville, Florida, who allegedly shot and killed her married boyfriend, then left his body in the enclosed porch of her home which she sealed with plastic sheets and supplied with air fresheners.

Leon Edward Collier, 45, of Little River, South Carolina, who is alleged to have killed his girlfriend and stuffed her body into a closet in the house.


Charles Cole

Charles Cole, 48, and his wife Ronalda, from upstate New York, who lived in a motel room with his mother’s body for seven weeks before driving to South Carolina and dumping it near I-95.

Alfred Guerrero of Ontario, California, who lived briefly with a body in his long-term rental motel room.


Brandon Griswold


Whitney Gray

Brandon Griswold, 20, and his girlfriend Whitney Gray, 21, of Nashville, Tennessee, who bludgeoned their roommates to death and stashed their bodies in the apartment’s utility closet while continuing to live there.


Mary Kersting

Mary Kersting, 60, of Gloversville, New York, who kept her dead mother’s body in the apartment below hers for about a year while collecting the old lady’s benefit checks.


Cheyanne Jessie

Cheyanne Jessie, 25, of Lakeland, Florida, who allegedly killed her father and 6-year-old daughter so that she could be with her boyfriend, then lived with the bodies in her house a few days before moving them to a storage shed because of the smell.


Michael Eugene Sticken

Michael Eugene Sticken, 60, of Pace, Florida, who hid the body of his 81-year-old mother under blankets on a couch in their house for four months while withdrawing her Social Security payments from their joint bank account.

Partha De of Kolkata, India, who lived for about six months in his apartment along with the bodies of his father, sister, and the sister’s two dogs, while burning candles, playing eerie background music, and pretending to feed them.

The adult grandson of ninety-two-year-old Robert L. Sufana of Portage, Indiana, who for over a week failed to look in on the old man who was confined to a bedroom in the house even as the smell of decay became noticeable from the street outside.


Barbara Ann Helton

Barbara Ann Helton, 58, a parolee from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who apparently lived for weeks with the body of her dead landlord stuffed in an upstairs closet.

“Carolyn” from San Francisco, California, who lived in a Richmond District “hoarder” house with the mummified remains of her mother for at least a year if not more.

The unnamed woman from Lakeside, California, who was discovered by deputies serving an eviction notice to have been living for six months to a year with a body placed in a container sealed with duct tape.

At FirstNerve we are big believers in procedural transparency. So we freely admit to giving greater weight to nominees who lived up close and personal with the decaying remains. Also, we think that long-term Batesian co-habitation counts for more than a couple of days spent around the smell of initial decomp. Based on these criteria, we can whittle the field down to finalists Charles and Ronalda Cole, Michael Eugene Sticken, Parthe De, and “Carolyn” from San Francisco.

It’s still a tough call, but we think that Mr. and Mrs. Cole take the cake. Imagine spending seven weeks in a motel room with your spouse. Then imagine the same conditions but with a decomposing body on the scene. Then imagine the conversation:

“Honey, I think it’s time we drove Mom to South Carolina and dumped her.”

“If you say so, sweetheart.”

“Give me hand carrying her to the car, will you?”

So congratulations to Charles and Ronalda Cole, co-winners of the 2015 Norman Bates Award, and thanks for bringing the prize back to the U.S.A. after two years abroad.

List of previous winners:

2014 Anonymous 55-year-old lady from Munich, Germany
2013 Madame H. of Brussels, Belgium
2012 Kit Darrant
2011 Twin brothers Edwin Larry Berndt & Edward Christian Berndt
2010 Alan Derrick

Enclosed Spaces: ISDP December 2015

Given our tendency to revel in the lugubrious, we got quite excited a couple of days ago when we spotted this headline in Newsweek: “Using the Human Microbiome to Predict Time of Death.” Could it be that science had finally made the link between increasingly toxic farts and imminent demise? Is it possible to gas oneself to death?

Alas, it turns out that author Sena Christian doesn’t have a firm grasp on the English language. The title should have been “Using the Human Microbiome to Retrodict Time of Death,” as the story is about researchers attempting to refine time of death estimates by analyzing the microbes present on and in a corpse. Despite our disappointment, the new study reported by Newsweek (“Microbial community assembly and metabolic function during mammalian corpse decomposition”) has lots to recommend it to ISDP fans.

This month’s curated assemblage of the olfactory macabre includes two new nominees for the 2015 Norman Bates Award™ but, as we shall reveal, there were nearly three!


Tammy Conner

Tammy Conner of Jacksonville, Florida, earned her NBA nomination by allegedly killing her married boyfriend back in June. Conner is reported to have shot the man and left his body in the enclosed porch of her house. She sealed the house windows with plastic sheets and placed some air fresheners and cleaning products near the body. According to a video report aired by CBS Channel 47 ActionNewJax, cell phone records place Conner was at the house for some days after the crime was committed. That’s good enough for the Nominations Committee to put her on this year’s list!

Next up is 45-year-old Leon Edward Collier of Little River, South Carolina.

Horry County police officers responded to a third-person call of a suicidal man at 4250 Pinehurst Circle around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday. The caller reported that the man at the residence was threatening to harm himself and making comments that he “may have hurt his girlfriend,” according to a police report.

After forcibly gaining entry to the house, police officers smelled a foul odor. This led them to a closet where they found the decomposing body of Mr. Collier’s girlfriend hidden under various items. We give the Horry County police officers credit for following their noses, and we give Mr. Collier a nomination for the 2015 Norman Bates Award.

We thought we were in Norman Bates Award territory for a third time when we found this headline: “Suburban Man Hid Roommate’s Body in Suitcase.” But when his girlfriend/roommate died of a drug overdose, the suburbanite in question, 23-year-old Alexander Acevedo of Midlothian, Illinois, hid the suitcase containing her body in the storage area of his apartment building. ISDP fans will already have predicted the consequences [Valid use of “predict”!—Ed.]:

Assistant States Attorney Jordan Matthis said a resident of the building in the 14500 block of Keystone Avenue flagged down a police officer Thursday after she smelled a foul odor coming from the building’s storage area.

By moving the suitcase out of the apartment, Mr. Acevedo got himself charged with “concealment of a death” and also took himself out of the running for the Norman Bates Award. (Why? Because competition rules require the nominee to have lived in close proximity with a dead body.) Photos and crime scene details are available from the indispensable Daily Mail.



Always Trust Your Nose™

There’s a romance to being on the road, and nothing testifies to the great American tradition of vehicular self-sufficiency better than the RV. And nothing speaks better to trusting and caring for the needs of the motoring public than Walmart’s policy of allowing RVs to overnight in its parking lots. An inevitable result is that Walmart, through no fault of its own, features in the occasional ISDP incident. A new example from Florida:

An elderly man was found dead Monday inside a camper in a parking lot near the Hallandale Beach Walmart after someone on a lunch break reported a foul odor to police, according to Hallandale Beach police spokeswoman Sonia Quinones.

Quinones said the man had gotten lunch and went back to his car to eat when he smelled something from two parking spots away.

Always Trust Your Nose™, Part Deux

Warehouse staff at a heating company in England discover that two crates supposed to contain boilers are crawling with maggots and emitting a foul smell. They find a decomposing body inside each crate. What prompted the discovery?

“People had been complaining about a foul smell for about a week but it got worse so some staff went to investigate.

About a week? How bad does it usually smell at Ferroli Ltd.?

None are so blind as those who fail to smell . . .

Paramedics were called about 2 p.m. after a gardener noticed an unresponsive man in the back seat of a black Cadillac SRX, which was parked along the curb of Ferris Road, said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Steve Jauch.

The unresponsive man in question, who had been reported missing, was dead, evidently as the result of a gunshot wound. Accounts do not mention that the gardener noticed a smell, therefore this cannot qualify as an ISDP incident. However, the body had been there for at least two days. The previous day it had been ticketed by a parking officer for the El Monte Police Department, who evidently didn’t notice an odor (or the body for that matter). And then there is this:

A neighbor was quoted in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune as saying she walks a route that passes that intersection daily and noticed the Cadillac on Dec. 2 [two days previous] about noon. The resident said she recalled a foul odor when she passed by the car but wasn’t sure if it came from the vehicle or the storm drain next to it.

Storm drain, dead body, whatever.

As It Was in the Beginning: ISDP November 2015

When we launched ISDP on a Friday the thirteenth back in the misty dawn of Internet time, little did we suspect that it would become the most insanely popular feature of FirstNerve. We continue to disgorge a new collection of these lugubrious stories on the thirteenth of each month, and every so often it lands on another Friday. It just feels so right, does it not?

Cold weather sort of puts the kibosh on ISDP incidents. It snowed here yesterday, so we expected to pull a relatively small batch of reeking items from the depths of the rusty drum where we keep incoming data. And yet we dredged up a full serving of material. Enjoy!



Charles Cole

We have another nominee for the 2015 Norman Bates Award™, the second one this year from upstate New York. Forty-eight-year-old Charles Cole allegedly strangled his mother to death, lived with her body in a motel in Pleasant Valley, New York, for seven weeks, and then drove it to South Carolina where he dumped it in a secluded area off of I-95.

“I find it hard to imagine,” state police Capt. John Ryan said, “the circumstances that would lead a son to strangle his mother, but also to live with the body in a motel room and then travel several states away and dump her like trash.”

Preaching to the choir, Capt. Ryan.

Curiously, the motel staff, who were in the room frequently, claim not to have noticed any malodor. Cole’s wife Ronalda, age 40, has been charged with tampering with physical evidence for her alleged role in helping transport her mother-in-law’s body. She will of course receive her own invitation to the Norman Bates Awards gala and ceremony early next year.

The bodies of a woman and her granddaughter are found in a home in Casa de Oro near San Diego, but is this a bona fide ISDP incident? Reports are conflicting. This report is ambiguous; it sounds like a stench from the house caused neighbors to flag down a police car. However, another report suggests that the concerned friends who discovered the pair smelled a “foul odor” only after opening the door. You know the drill—odor must lead to the discovery, so this one sounds like a near miss. Hmmm . . . In any case, it now appears to have been a murder-suicide.

In Long Beach, Mississippi, police follow up on a missing persons report.

When officers arrived to follow-up on the man they said they caught a whiff of a strong odor coming from the man’s backyard.

That’s where they found the 87-year-old resident’s body in a garbage container. Why are we bothering you with what appears to be another case of “close but no cigar”? Because 63-year-old Christy Lee Zarrella, who had been befriended the deceased and was living with him in the house, has been charged with desecration of a corpse: she allegedly removed the pacemaker from his body.

Stay tuned—this could get weird: it might even result in another Norman Bates Award nomination.

“Mobile home park manager” turns out to be one of those high risk of ISDP occupations. In Joliet, Illinois, the park manager tried to contact a resident after smelling a foul odor coming from a mobile home. Getting no response, he went inside and found the body of the 60-year-old resident, who had been stabbed multiple times.

In St. Louis, Missouri:

Two men working for an asbestos abatement crew were clearing out drywall from the back of a home when they noticed a foul odor. They discovered the body underneath three pieces of drywall.

The body was that of a 22-year-old Army veteran. His was the 159th homicide of the year in St. Louis.

Two men fishing the Brazos River in Waller County, Texas, smelled a foul odor coming from a black trash bag near the river. Sheriff’s deputies found a dismembered body inside the bag.

Meanwhile, in southwest Houston, a “group of juveniles” walking along the 7100 block of Jetty Lane followed their noses to the source of a foul odor. They discovered the skeletal remains of a woman.

Residents in Newark, New Jersey, call the police about a foul odor. In a neighbor’s garage down the block officers find the body of a 50-year-old woman who had been reported missing 10 days earlier. The body wrapped in a blanket and the head was separated from the body.

In the Atlanta suburb of Lawrenceville, residents call the police about a foul odor near a wooded area. On investigating, officers found the body of a 28-year-old woman in a nearby dumpster behind an oil change service shop. They have arrested the woman’s 42-year-old husband, who works at the shop.

From the October 12 police log in Sausalito, California:

600 block of Sausalito Boulevard. A woman was concerned the bad odor coming from her front yard was a dead body and wanted police to check it out. Officers checked her yard and found no dead bodies but suspected the foul odor was coming from a neighbor’s chicken manure or possibly a dead animal under someone’s home.

Call us paranoid, but we wouldn't consider this case closed just yet.

Late Harvest: Pre-Halloween ISDP Edition

It’s been busy here in the drafty shack that serves as FirstNerve Manor on the high plains of Colorado. Mostly we’ve been sampling local IPAs and watching the sales figures surge for our I Smell Dead People T-shirt, which seems to have hit a nerve with Bride of Chucky fans. [And no, Brad Dourif, we’re not going to send you one gratis. Pony up, you cheap f**k! Jennifer Tilly we’ll comp, but that’s a different story.]

With the thirteenth of the month at hand, it’s time to uncork the latest batch of lugubrious ISDP incidents. You know what we’re talking about: those stories that begin with a foul odor and end at the same grim state of corporeal decay. [It never gets old!—Ed.] This pre-Halloween edition is chock-full as the lingering summer heat keeps the relevant bacteria working overtime.

Our first incident combines two great themes of I Smell Dead People. One is the legendary “Body Under the Bed” scenario that inspired our morbid fascination with the entire genre in the first place: in its purest form, a motel guest complains of a bad-smelling room, and the manager discovers a corpse stashed beneath the bed. The second theme is the focus of our insanely popular Norman Bates Award™, given to a person who lives in close quarters with a deceased person, even as said person exhibits the florid and putrescent signs of bodily decay.

So meet Alfred Guerrero, the latest Norman Bates Award™ Nominee and the man who personalized the body-in-the-motel-room routine. A “funky smell” emanating from a room at the Mission Motel in Ontario, California led someone to call the police to investigate. Officers detained long-term motel resident Alfred Guerrero after finding a decomposing body in his room. The remains appear to be those of an acquaintance of his. Guerrero was released without charges after being questioned.


Mixed Doubles


Whitney Gray
 
Brandon Griswold

A Nashville, Tennessee, couple bludgeons their roommates (another couple) to death, stuffs the bodies into a utility closet, and continues to live in the apartment. The mother of the male victim, who had reported him missing, went to the apartment in search of him. When she “smelled the odor of decomposition” leaking past the door, she called police who discovered the crime scene. Brandon Griswold (20) and his girlfriend Whitney Gray (21) confessed to the murders and were arrested. They are this year’s first dual nominees for the Norman Bates Award™.

Since we’re talking theme and variations, we venture abroad to include an unusual hybrid item from the town of Heerhugowaard in the Netherlands. A local woman let a homeless lady store some personal belongings in her shed. A year later, while rummaging in the shed, the owner notices a foul odor. Searching for the source, she discovered the body of a child, wrapped in plastic. While this qualifies as an ISDP incident, we also wonder whether it might not be something new, a case of Norman Bates by Proxy Syndrome.


Mary Kersting

Finally, 60-year-old Mary Kersting of Gloversville, New York, has pleaded guilty to grand larceny and improper disposal of a body. When her 93-year-old mother died in October, 2013, Kersting kept her body in the apartment below hers while she cashed the old lady’s benefits checks. A police welfare check in December, 2014, discovered the year-old body. Kersting faces six months in jail, but she is also in the running for the 2015 Norman Bates Award™. Congratulations!


Out West

In West Jordan, Utah, a couple of young skateboarders smelled “an extremely foul odor” and successfully followed their noses to the source. They found the badly decomposed body of a 28-year-old man in a utility area near the public library. Evidence suggests his death was the result of a drug overdose.

Someone walking past a camper parked between two abandoned houses in Texarkana, Texas, smelled a “foul odor” coming from it and called police, who found a decomposed male body inside. The body was later identified as that of a 47-year-old homeless man.


Rugged Individualism

A 64-year-old man in Humboldt County, California, is the victim of an attempted home invasion. He fights back with a Gurka knife and the wounded assailant flees with the help of another perp. Two weeks later someone calls the county sheriffs to report a foul odor and deputies discover the decomposed remains of a 32-year-old Sacramento man who may have been the wounded attacker.

It’s not quite “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” but “Texas Woman’s Body Found in Oklahoma Trunk” isn’t bad. A Oklahoma DPS trooper stopped to check out an abandoned car on I-44 near Randlett, in Cotton County. Smelling a foul odor, he opened the trunk where he discovered the body of a 61-year-old woman from Amarillo, Texas. Without impugning the trooper’s olfactory acuity in the least, we are not able to award this incident true ISDP status, as the search was initiated before the officer noticed the smell.


Southern California

Just off the 405 in the North Hills area of Los Angeles neighbors smell a foul odor coming from an apartment and call the police. LAPD finds the decomposing remains of a 23-year-old man who appears to have died from a gunshot to the head.

Neighbors called police about a foul smell coming from parked car in a residential area of San Bernardino, California. Police found a decomposing body in the trunk. The body was later identified as that of the 28-year-old owner of the car, who had been reported missing a few days earlier.

A body discovered in the Angeles National Forest, just north of Glendora, may be that of a man who was digging for gold when torrential rains caused mud slides and fallen trees. He had been missing for about a week, and acquaintances who were searching for him were tracking a “foul odor” when they discovered the remains.


Always Trust Your Nose™

Tenants at a business complex in Santa Fe, New Mexico had been complaining for weeks about a “rancid odor.” One of the properties owners (in what we presume was a search for the source of the stink) lifted the lid on a cistern and discovered a body that police say had been in the water for about two weeks. A lock on the cistern lid appears to have been broken but it is not yet known how the person died.

Last month we referred an incident to the Rules Committee for clarification. In Queens, New York, the body of a 28-year-old woman with stab wounds was found in the trunk of her father’s Nissan. Her boyfriend is still being sought by police in connection with her murder. From accounts at press time, it wasn’t clear whether the car was reported because of a smell, or because police were searching for it. Now we have an answer:

The driver of an NYPD tow truck discovered the Nissan during a rotation tow operation on September 10, police sources said. The victim’s family listed the car as missing when they filed a Missing Persons Report on September 9. A license plate reader in the tow truck spotted the car and the driver alerted the NYPD Missing Persons Unit. Investigators who arrived at the scene were overcome by a foul odor coming from the trunk of the car, police said.

Well, that settles it. Discovery preceded odor, therefore no ISDP.


Breaking News from the World of Science

We’re not sure whether to file this under “No shit, Sherlock” or under “Good to know, Ken.”

The smell of death: evidence that putrescine elicits threat management mechanisms.

Judging from our years of reporting on the topic, we think that the “implicit cognition” mechanisms triggered by the smell of putrescine can be easily overridden by contextual cues (“A dead body? Really? I thought someone was cooking cabbage.”)

Case in point: a woman in Naples, Florida, thought the foul odor in her ceiling might be a dead mouse. She spent $800 on cleaning supplies in an unsuccessful effort to get rid of the smell. Then her apartment manager informed her that her upstairs neighbor had died “quite some time ago.”


Department of Updates

One year ago we reported on an instance of ISDP in Brownsville, Texas, in which a woman and child were found dead. Last month Donald Edward Pierce pleaded guilty to murdering his wife and son and was sentenced to life without parole.

Also last month we posted an ISDP incident in Calaveras County, California, in which a motorist driving through a sparsely populated area noticed a foul odor and called the sheriffs who found a man’s body lying off the road. Soon after, a 71-year-old local woman was arrested in connection with the case and charged with suspicion of murder. [You mean 17-year-old local woman?—Ed.] [No: seventy-one.] Another body was found in the area earlier this year. Stay tuned.

We close with resolution to an ISDP Cold Case File. An 18-year-old man from Woodland Park, Colorado went missing seven years ago. His remains were found two months ago when a local cabin was demolished: he evidently had attempted to enter the cabin via the chimney, gotten stuck, and died. The cabin’s owner told a newspaper that he seldom used the cabin because of its “foul odor.”

A sad story, but a surprisingly common one, as long-time ISDP readers know. For hours of entertainment just type “chimney” into the search box at the top of the page.

Summer's Bounty: An ISDP Cornucopia

We were stuffing pages from an old copy of the Guardian into our wet boots the other evening when we noticed a piece by our pal, the winsome Katie Puckrik: “Bottling the smell of dead people won’t capture their essence.” Our first reaction was, “the hell it won’t.” But then we realized she was talking about Olfactory Links, a French enterprise based on the idea of “olfactory comfort” or capturing the scent of a departed loved one. Katie riffs on the idea in her characteristic style. For example, the company’s method is “a high-tech variation of boiling dad down to a reduction sauce.”

A million people write about fragrance. What sets Katie apart is the thoughtfulness and vividness she brings to it:

family smell associations are both more nuanced and more abstract than anything produced by an enfleurage of my parents’ senior-style velour tracksuits. I don’t know that I’d find their literal smell more comforting than that of cut grass (Dad mowing the lawn), or of leather ballet slippers (Mom driving me to dance class), or even of the lung-shrivelling damp that crept up from the cellar as their house aged along with them.

Katie is firing up her Katie Puckrik Smells blog again and it’s worth stopping by. We will as soon as we hack into our neighbor’s WiFi.

Meanwhile, it appears that we may need to open an ISDP news bureau in Japan to cover the rising epidemic of what are called “solitary deaths”
(孤立死 or koritsu-shi).

According to data made public by the Tokyo coroner’s office, in 2013, the latest year for which figures are available, some 2,733 people over the age of 65 were found dead while living alone in Tokyo’s 23 wards. The figures showed a continuous increase over the previous decade. The office also had data on the average number of days that had passed from the dead person’s last human contact. Compared with six days for women, the average for men was double.

Underlying the phenomenon is Japan’s population structure—fewer young people to look after an increasing proportion of elderly—and perhaps changing cultural norms, in which a preoccupation with social media takes precedence over family obligations. On the bright side, Japan Today notes that the increase in koritsu-shi has created a commercial niche for specialized clean-up crews.
 
Finally, blogger Maki notes how use of the related terms koritsu-shi and kodoku-shi reflect recent changes in language and in the Japanese attitude towards deaths that take place in social isolation.

This month’s ISDP summary is swollen to grotesque proportions by the heat of August. We begin with an item from Brooklyn that should have been included in last month’s edition.

Police found a man’s decomposing body inside a Brownsville apartment, authorities said. The grim discovery was made Saturday night after neighbors reported a foul odor coming from inside an apartment at the Chester Street home near Dumont Street, cops said.

Upstate in Batavia, New York, a body found in Kibbe Park turned out to be that of a missing 49-year-old man. His body was discovered “after workers at the park noticed a foul odor, and then discovered him in Tonawanda Creek.”

More news from Philadelphia, the city that let ghoulish butcher M.D. Kermit Gosnell thrive for years: A “terrible stench” leads neighbors to discover corpses from a funeral home stored in a garage. The funeral home director, Janet Powell Daley, had an expired business license and an expired license as a funeral director. She had not responded to citations regarding either one.

A decomposed body was found in the back set of a car parked next to a supermarket in West Covina, California “after someone noticed a foul odor coming from the car and peered inside.” The body was that of an Uber driver, a 36-year-old woman from Irvine.

In Youngstown, Ohio, police found the decomposed body of a man in a wooded area behind a home, after a citizen reported “a foul odor coming from a vacant home.”

In Blairsville, Georgia, neighbors of Randy Ray Siggers on Highway 325 “reported a foul odor coming from his residence.” His body was found inside.

The headline from Forest Lake, Minnesota: “Foul odor in Forest Lake apartment leads police to body; man held.” The body was that of a woman; the man was her boyfriend. Officers were called by the landlord who “reported a foul smell coming from the south end of the building.”

In San Antonio, Texas, police found a body inside a vacant home after a neighbor called about a foul odor. It appears the victim had been kidnapped several days earlier.

Lingering After Effects

In Topeka, Kansas, a woman complains that “she can’t escape a foul odor coming from a neighbor’s home.”

Kim Boyd says the odor’s been around ever since a decomposing body was removed from the house next door to her in the 1200 block of SW 25th. (. . .) Boyd says the smell is so bad, her son won’t go outside and play.

Sounds like a job for Taiichi Yoshida's cleanup crew.

There are none so anosmic as those who will not smell . . .

In San Antonio, Texas, police received a late-night call about a foul odor coming from a vacant house. They found a decomposed body in a bathtub on the second floor.

Roger Aguilar, who works as at church across the street, heard about the disturbing discovery and drove by the area. He said he has noticed a lot of activity around the house in the past, but didn’t notice anything unusual lately. “I never smelled anything. I never noticed anything,” Aguilar said. “We always see traffic in and out of there, people coming out, so we don’t know who’s the actual person that lives there.”

Doth he protest too much? Police say the body had been there for a week. They are treating it as a homicide.

At the Penn Plaza Apartment in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA, a man’s decomposed body was found in his unit.

“The man lay inside his apartment for seven or eight days, by the door, and where was security at? Why didn’t security officials walk the halls and report any foul odor to management?” said resident Gayle Williams.

In Brockton, Massachusetts, the body of a 24-year-old homicide victim was found in the backyard of an abandoned home on Boylston Street.

Susan Russo, who lives on nearby Winona Street, told the Enterprise she started smelling a foul odor on Wednesday.

“I started smelling it Wednesday but it was also trash night so I thought it was just trash,” Russo, 54, said. “My neighbor, it smelled really bad in her yard and as you walked into her yard and the next yard it smelled disgusting.”

Later, Ms. Russo complained to The Patriot Ledger that she was troubled by the discovery.

Susan Russo didn’t get much sleep after finding out that the foul odor she had been smelling in her neighborhood this week was coming from the body of a man in a nearby backyard.

“I just couldn’t sleep knowing that. It’s really bothersome. This is a decent neighborhood and it’s really bothersome that they found a body here,” Russo, 54, said Friday.

Talk about bothersome. Who is this “they” that found a body? You smelled it first, lady.

In contrast to these dispiriting reports, here’s a reminder that concerned citizens can and do rise to the occasion. In California, Calaveras County Sheriff’s deputies responded to reports of a foul odor and “located the remains of an adult male off the roadway.” The remains were found “off Winton Road near Lily Gap Road in a sparsely populated area several miles east of West Point, between Highways 4 and 88. A person driving through the area reported the foul smell to the Sheriff’s Office.”

Annals of Marketing

The FOX Connecticut TV channel manages to needlessly piss off at least two potential advertisers:

WEST HARTFORD – Police are investigating the discovery of a dead body in a car outside the Red Robin restaurant near Best Buy at the Corbin’s Corner shopping center. A call came in to police at about 4 p.m. Sunday from a shopper who reported a foul odor and possible body.

Down in Putnam County, Florida, the body of a young woman was found in a cemetery. According to an initial story, it was discovered by a local pastor.

“I noticed a foul odor,” said the Rev. Christopher Coleman. Coleman said he was preparing a grave for an upcoming service Thursday morning at the remote Gethsemane Cemetery.

In a subsequent story, Rev. Coleman is identified as the owner of Coleman Mortuary. Would it be to cynical to suggest that he gave reporters his commercial bona fides after he realized the PR opportunity provided by the new coverage? Yeah, probably.

Minutes of the Rules Committee

Long-time readers know that to qualify as an ISDP incident, the stench of decay must lead to the discovery of human remains; odor noticed in the course of investigating a welfare check or a missing person complaint does not qualify, and we don’t bother posting such cases. So this case from Lake Worth, Florida presents a difficult case for the Rules Committee.

While Palm Beach County Sheriff’s detectives were handing out missing person fliers today on South L Street, they smelled a “foul odor” that led them to human remains, PBSO reported. After noticing the stench in Lake Worth south of Lake Avenue, the deputies investigated and found what the medical examiner’s office later confirmed were human remains.

We don’t yet know that the discovered remains were those of the person in the flyer. If they were not, it’s clearly an ISDP incident. If they were, we’re still inclined to credit the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s detectives for olfactory alertness and follow-through.

Postscript: It turns out the remains did, in fact, belong to the missing person.

On the other hand, this case from Butler County, Missouri is an easy call. A sheriff’s deputy on patrol spotted an abandoned car in a ditch. As he approached the vehicle “he immediately detected a foul odor.” On inspecting the car, he found the decomposed body of a 48-year-old murder victim in the trunk. That’s good police work but it doesn’t qualify as ISDP.

Here’s a final one for the Rules Committee: “Boyfriend suspected in death of woman found in trunk of her father’s car” The details, provided by the New York Post, are ambiguous:

The vehicle was found at the corner of Murray Street and 22nd Street around 8:30 p.m., emanating a foul odor, cops said.

Did a citizen report a foul smell coming from the car (ISDP)? Or did police find the car because they were looking for a make, model and license plate (not ISDP)? Committee decision: withhold judgment pending clarification.

ISDP: In the Heat of the Summer

It’s peak summer—the zucchini are plump and the corn is ripening. So too are the remains of certain unfortunate souls who expired this past month; only the grim olfactory residuum of decomposition allowed them to be found. Here in the ISDP nerve center at FirstNerve Manor we have been collecting reports from all across the nation—we were so busy we missed our traditional 13th of the month deadline last night, something that happens only once in a blue moon. So without further ado, here is our latest compendium of the most grotesque smell in the world.

An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

Two severed legs were found near the State Street train station in New Haven, Connecticut. Then things got weird:

After the discovery of the severed legs, someone noticed a foul smell and upon searching two severed arms without hands in a garbage bag were found under the bridge.

“It’s a little creepy,” local resident Marge Vallee told WTNH-TV.

We’re inclined to agree.

Olfactory Irony Alert

In DeBary, Florida, a man notices a foul odor coming from a residence on Jasmine Drive, and alerts the town rescue unit which discovers the bodies of an elderly couple who had been having trouble with their air conditioner. But you know the rules, people! Since the man had been checking the house at the request of the couple’s daughter, this fails the basic requirement of ISDP: discovery of the decedents via the smell of decomposition.

The helpful neighbor did provide these words of wisdom to News13:

“I don't know if you've ever smelled death before, but once you smell it, you never forget,” Bartlett said.

Other People’s Money

Speaking of rules, this incident from Pahrump, Nevada, also fails to qualify as bona fide ISDP: the family of an elderly woman asked the Nye County Sheriff’s Department to look in on her, as they hadn’t heard from her for some days and they noticed unusual activity in her bank account. Longtime ISDP readers will not be shocked to learn that deputies noticed “an extremely foul odor” at the house, and entered it only to find the lady’s decomposed remains. The stepson of the deceased, one Robert Marygold, “arrived home” while officers where still on the scene and admitted to shooting his stepmother dead a few days earlier, then using her debit card at a casino. It is unclear from reports whether Mr. Marygold was, in fact, living with his stepmother at the time of the murder. If so, he may be eligible for a Norman Bates Award™ nomination.

Maryland, My Maryland

Based on the lede, you’d think you know where this story is headed:

On July 21, 2015, Deputy Lawrence responded to the 21000 block of Great Mills Lane in Lexington Park, after witnesses reported a foul odor coming from the vacant residence.

But SURPRISE! Deputies found a man and a woman (of “no fixed address”) asleep in the basement. The couple was charged with burglary. The source of the telltale foul odor remains unexplained.

Dude!

In Williamsport, Pennsylvania, a guy stabs his girlfriend to death and stashes her body in a closet in the apartment. After a few weeks the stench triggers odor complaints. The guy blames it on a toilet problem and is told he’ll have to vacate while the place is fumigated. He attempts to dispose of the remains that night but bungles the job and is arrested. Congratulations to Hasan Gooden-Reid on his nomination for the 2015 Norman Bates Award™.

Car 54 Where Are You?

Couple of deputies make a routine traffic stop in Polk County, Florida. They pull the violator into a Walgreen’s parking lot, and while there notice a foul odor leaking from another car in the lot. In the driver’s seat they discover the body of a 52-year-old suicide victim.

In Butler, Pennsylvania, a pizza shop employee noticed a foul odor behind the business and discovered the body of a 29-year-old local man lying in the grass.

In Norcross, Georgia, a landscaper mowing the lawn at a rental property noticed a foul odor coming from the house. He flagged down a police officer who entered the house and found two bodies: an apparent brother-sister murder-suicide.

In Pueblo, Colorado, someone strolling near the Pueblo Mall “smelled a foul odor” and discovered a dead body near Fountain Creek. Authorities believe it is that of a homeless man and they do not suspect foul play.

Technically speaking, this incident in Pacific Palisades involves neither smell or the discovery of a dead body. But since it bears a superficial similarity to many previous cases of DBs found in cars, it caught our interest. Plus there are some headlines that were impossible to ignore:

Mystery Man Found Decomposing In Car Had More Than 1,200 Guns, Cash, Underwater Car

Dead LA gun stash owner described as alien hybrid, govt. spy

And then there are the names, right out of a Carl Hiaasen novel: the deceased was Jeffrey Alan Lash. His longtime fiancée was Catherine Nebron, and her employee Dawn VadBunker. Nebron and VadBunker believed Lash to be a CIA and/or FBI spy and possible human-alien hybrid. When he collapsed and died they left his body in his car—he had told them people from the government would retrieve his remains—and went on a ten-day-long trip. They say they were surprised to find his body there upon their return. So they had an attorney contact police. Bottom line: no smell, no discovery of remains, and, perhaps even more disappointingly, no Norman Bates Award™ nomination. But Mr. Lash was clearly a glorious, major league weirdo. RIP.

Turning to other vehicular events, we find this item from Escondido, California. Police were called to an apartment complex to check on reports of a foul odor. Inside a van they found the body of a 46-year-old man. His death does not appear to be suspicious.

The Nostrils of Texas are Upon You

In Houston, Texas, male remains were discovered at 53 East Parker Road. The circumstances were classic:

“A neighbor to the east of the residence smelled a foul odor coming from the above address and went to investigate. Upon walking up the driveway, the neighbor found the victim in a heavy stage of decomposition.”

Up in San Antonio, police found a decomposed body in a grassy area on the West Side of town. It had evidently been gnawed on by animals. According to KSAT ABC-12, “neighbors in the area reported smelling a foul odor for weeks.” Apparently they couldn’t be bothered to call police or take a look themselves.

Dead People Make People

The headline from People.com: “Florida Woman Killed Her Father and Her Daughter So She Could Be with Her Boyfriend: Cops.”

The investigation started when 25-year-old Cheyanne Jessie called police on Saturday morning to report that her father and 6-year-old daughter had vanished. When police arrived at Jessie’s home, they say, they smelled a foul odor. Jessie allegedly attributed the smell to a dead raccoon.

[Dead raccoon? Not bad!—Ed.]

According to People, police think Ms. Jessie left the bodies in the house for days until the smell forced her to move them to a storage shed 200 feet away. That period of co-residency means Cheyanne Jessie is nominated for the 2015 Norman Bates Award™. Congratulations!