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.