ISDP Springtime Edition

The weather’s warming up and so is ISDP activity. Shoo away the kids and the prudes and indulge yourself in this month’s roundup of foul odors that lead to a dead end.

On the evening of May 22 in Bakersfield, California, a Pizza Hut employee noticed “a foul odor” emanating from the restaurant’s dumpster enclosure. He took a closer look and found . . . a dead body. 

Three days later, in Fairport Harbor, Ohio, residents on Plum Street finally called police to complain about “a foul smell” they’d been noticing for weeks. The police found a badly decomposed body. Why the delay in reporting the stink? Well, the folks live at the end of Plum Street, only a stone’s throw from Lake Erie:

“Never crossed our minds that it would be a body,” a neighbor said. “Some animal or fish wash up on the lake maybe . . . but never dreamed it would be a body.”

According to the University of Kentucky’s independent paper The Kentucky Kernel, residents of a Lexington apartment building complained on May 28 of “a foul odor” coming from one of the units. Inside, a maintenance man discovered the body of the resident, 22-year-old Richard Mudd, a student at Bluegrass Community and Technical College. He appears to have died of natural causes.

When 62-year old handyman John Fields was fixing a plumbing problem at a North Memphis, Tennessee, house on June 7, he went into the crawl space beneath the house. Nearby residents eventually noticed that Fields had disappeared, leaving his tools on the porch. The next day they tracked “a foul smell” to the space beneath the house, where they found his body.

The New York Daily News—a rich source of ISDP incidents—comes through with another. On June 8, according to reporters Kenny Porpora and Alison Gendar,

a building super on W. 204th St. called cops over a bad smell that was seeping out of a vacant sixth-floor apartment.

Police found a decomposing corpse wrapped in bags and stuffed in a closet. Two days later the remains were identified as those of 19-year-old Glendalis Pagan, who had vanished a week earlier after leaving her mother’s nearby apartment to get her nails done.

Finally, it's time for the ISDP Emily Littella Moment:

CBS-4 reporter Lisa Cilli tells how two South Florida Water Management District workers found a suspicious bundle lying near an entrance ramp to the Sawgrass Expressway in Coral Springs. The bundle was wrapped in a garbage bag and sealed with duct tape; even more alarmingly, it gave off “a foul odor.” Police were called in. Crime scene investigators cordoned off the area, erected a tent, and went to work. They discovered that the package contained a box of rotting fish.

Never mind!

UPDATE June 13, 2009

Another Emily Littella Moment, this one from the June 1 police report in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, posted on TheNorthwestern.com:

Officers received multiple complaints about a foul odor on Eveline Street. Police determined a man doing amateur taxidermy has a beetle crib in his house. Deer heads are placed in the crib and beetles eat the flesh from the bone to whiten the skull.

Never mind!