ISDP: Rules Committee Edition

Under normal conditions, the 13th of the month finds us pounding out a new edition of I Small Dead People in the decrepit garret atop FirstNerve Manor. Things are different today. FirstNerve Manor has been sold and we have vacated the premises. This edition is being posted from a motel room in Barkeyville, Pennsylvania, which, we note, smells faintly of urine.

An item from the police log in the Fremont, Ohio, News-Messenger:

3:46 p.m., a caller reported a foul smell, 1100 block of Stillwell Avenue. The odor was coming from dead fish wrapped in a tarp.

One of those pesky false alarms.

Another close call: In the Ivory Coast, a stowaway hides on a cargo ship amid bags of cocoa beans. Nearly three weeks later the ship docks in Philadelphia.

Dockworker Kareem Dye said he noticed a foul odor, then heard a fellow worker call, “It’s a dead body!” Dye thought the man was joking until he walked over and looked.

According to the Rules Committee, this is a tie and therefore not a qualifying ISDP event.

A strange house call in Lakeside, California:

Brooke’s body was found on March 3 when two sheriff’s court services deputies went to a Woodside Avenue apartment to serve an eviction notice on her mother, Bonnie MacBeth. She had lived there four or five years.

Bonnie answered the door and stated, “Come in, I got something to show you.” Deputies noticed a foul odor inside. One deputy asked what she was going to show them.

She replied, “My daughter is dead in the bedroom.” One deputy checked the cluttered bedroom, but found no one, so he asked where the deceased person was. Bonnie said, “In a suitcase.”

The location of the corpse was being revealed at the same time the deputies noticed a stench. Another tie. Close but no cigar.

It has been an unstated assumption here at FirstNerve that the nose discovering the foul odor of decomposition must be human. But when a mountain biker in Ogden, Utah found a woman’s body in the brush, it was because his dog had followed the scent. Throughout human-canine coevolution, the dog’s nose has been a proxy for our own. The Rules Committee has judged this to be a bona fido ISDP incident.

From Flagler County, Florida:

The body of the 25-year-old man was found after a resident in a nearby house called 911 to report a foul odor and buzzards circling about the neighboring lot. An incident report indicated that the 59-year-old neighbor himself had actually located the body.

And in San Antonio, Texas, the body of a dead woman was discovered in a vacant lot “after the owner of property next door smelled a foul odor.”

See you next time, from wherever we may be.