ISDP: Foul Odors from Foul Deeds

It's the thirteenth of the month and therefore time to offer up our periodic collection of macabre episodes triggered by the detection of the uniquely disturbing smell of bodily decay. We're typing as fast as we can; the wind is picking up ahead of another Polar Vortex that shortly will force its way through the poorly insulated windows of FirstNerve Manor and cause our gnarled fingers to stiffen in place on the keyboard.

An employee at a storage facility in Winnipeg, Manitoba, noticed a foul smell coming from inside one of the lockers. Investigation showed the source to be the bodies of four small infants.

Police in Brownsville, Texas, were asked to investigate the source of a foul odor. They discovered the bodies of a woman and her 4-year-old son in a pile of rubbish in the backyard of a home. The woman's husband has been arrested and charged with murder.

In the trial of Charles Hicks Jr. who is charged in Pennsylvania with the 2008 murder and dismemberment of Deanna Null, Hicks' former landlady testified that

she was cleaning the house in preparation [for his departure] when she noticed a foul odor in a bedroom closet area. She dismissed it at the time as maybe a mouse that died in the walls.

According to further testimony, the smell was likely from "severed hands, later identified as Null's, which had been wrapped in old newspaper inside baggies, and large socks containing detergent."

As we like to remind readers here at ISDP--Always Trust Your Nose!

A woman in East Memphis, Tennessee, would have saved herself a lot of grief had she sniffed around a bit before renting a house (she only looked in through the windows). Turns out it had been the scene of murder a couple of months earlier, in which a man had killed his roommate and butchered his body. Despite the blood stains and foul odor, the landlord was under no obligation to reveal the home's history as a crime scene. 

Premonitions

Rurik Jutting, a 29-year-old British investment banker in Hong Kong, has been arrested in connection with the murder of two women whose bodies were found in his apartment after a neighbor complained of a foul odor coming from the unit. One of the bodies was found stuffed inside a suitcase on the apartment balcony. 

It appears that shortly before she was killed, the second woman

had texted a friend to raise concerns over her visit, saying: 'Something smells really bad – I want to get out of here'.

The smell was evidently from the body in the suitcase; that victim had been murdered five days earlier.