ISDP: Bleak December Edition

It’s cold, wet and dreary outside, and also the thirteenth of the month so what better time for the latest installment of the dismal series we call ISDP?

In Houston, a couple was visiting their daughter and her three kids when “a foul smell led them to her bathroom.” Under the sink they found a blanket containing something smelly which they tossed in the dumpster. Their daughter then told them they had discarded the remains of her stillborn baby delivered two months previously. 

Residents of the Cambridge Hill gated community in Diamond Bar, California reported “a foul smell” coming from a house. Police found two bodies, in separate rooms, but no signs of forced entry or foul play. Authorities aren’t confirming that these are the deceased, but according to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune the house was occupied by a 47-year-old man and his 88-year-old mother.

A maintenance worker at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas notified police of “a foul odor” on Level 5, Section F-6 of the Terminal D parking lot. They found a woman’s body in the back seat of a Ford Focus.

A local detective approached a house in Frazier Park near Bakersfield, California to interview the resident about a case. He “smelled a foul odor” and convinced the occupant’s relatives to open their door with their key. He discovered the body of a dead man. [According to our notoriously strict criteria, this barely qualifies as an ISDP incident because the detective had prior, non-olfactory, suspicions about the welfare of the deceased.] 

Marcia Pledger of The Plain Dealer follows up on Ray’s Sausage, the long-time, family-owned, business in Cleveland that found itself next door to the malodorous house of horrors where Anthony Sowell is alleged to have killed eleven women. Ray’s was wrongly accused by locals as well as government health inspectors of being the source of the foul odor and spent nearly $20,000 to replace plumbing in a fruitless attempt to correct it. The good news is that Renee Cash and her brother Raymond Cash, Jr. are determined to keep the business going and customers remain enthusiastically loyal to their product. Harder to overcome will be the economic decline and social decay that have overtaken the neighborhood. The family are good people and we wish them the best of luck.