Episode 34: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I'm your host Julie Mattson. Over the years, I've always said that the perfect way to hide a body would be to bury it under a house that was under construction. I guess I always said that because years ago when I first started as a death investigator, we had a case like that in the Houston area. Listen in today as I share about that case and a few more that involved victims being buried under homes and in basements. Ready? Let's go...
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:30 Y'all are gonna laugh.
0:31 But I've always said over the years that the perfect way to hide a body would be to bury it under a house that was under construction.
0:41 And I guess I always said that because years ago when I first started as a death investigator, we had a case like that in the Houston area.
0:50 So a wife had disappeared and they had been looking for her for quite some time.
0:58 It was discovered as the police were trying to figure out what happened that the husband had actually added on to the home that they once lived in together.
1:10 They decided, hey, you know what, it would be perfect for him to have buried her body under the new construction and they actually dug up the foundation and found her body under there.
1:26 So he'd also been like cashing her disability checks.
1:31 And so he was still getting money that had been sent to her.
1:35 So of course, that always looks suspicious.
1:37 But I just remember thinking, you know, even in new construction that it would just be an easy way to hide a body.
1:46 And so I started looking into it and there's actually such a thing called foundation sacrifice.
1:52 And that's when somebody buries a human in the foundation of a new building, the sacrifice person was actually offered to deter spirits and then become a protective spirit to guard the building Kind of looking into different cases like this.
2:13 And I was trying to find the one in Houston that I worked, but I couldn't find it.
2:17 And I can't remember what year it happened.
2:19 It was probably around 06.
2:20 But I know that this happens a lot.
2:24 Back in 1990, there was a doctor in north central Ohio.
2:29 He was actually convicted for aggravated murder, murdered his 44 year old wife.
2:35 So supposedly he suffocated her, buried her in concrete under a house that he planned to share with his new girlfriend and his Children.
2:45 He got life sentence with no chance for parole.
2:49 He was an osteopath.
2:51 So he was 47 years old.
2:54 In addition to his imprisonment, he was fined $25,000 on aggravated murder and $2500 on abuse of a corpse.
3:05 Now, prosecutors said that he killed his wife to end a costly divorce and he wanted to move into a new house with his girlfriend.
3:15 So supposedly on December 31, he buried her in the basement floor and then covered her up with concrete.
3:25 The body was actually discovered January 25 almost a month later.
3:30 But he planned to have his son who was 12 at the time and his daughter who was three, she was adopted, she was going to live with him and the son and the girlfriend in this new house that had Mom buried in the basement.
3:47 He was having an affair, which is why she had filed for divorce.
3:52 And she knew about the affair and also knew that the woman he was having an affair with was pregnant.
4:01 So that of course, always causes problems.
4:05 But after hearing 83 witnesses, the jury deliberated for six hours.
4:12 Now looking further into what happened, John actually struck Noreen in the head and was unable to find what he struck her with.
4:21 But he claimed that he pushed her and she fell, but he struck her in the head and then suffocated her By putting a plastic bag over her head.
4:32 And then he loaded her up in the trunk and told the kids while mom left you and then he took her to this new house that he had just purchased and buried her in the basement.
4:45 Her body was discovered again on January 25 of 1990 under the basement floor of his new home in Erie, Pennsylvania.
4:56 Now she had filed for divorce in November of 89 and the two had been married for around 22 years.
5:04 Now, at the time, their 12 year old son Colyer was a key witness for the prosecution because he said that he heard loud thuds in the basement on the evening that this supposedly occurred.
5:18 Boyle had actually carried on many affairs over the years that he was married to Noreen.
5:25 But this woman that he had planned to live within this new home, Sherry Lee Campbell, who was 28 at the time, actually gave birth to their daughter in January of 1990, less than two weeks after Noreen had disappeared.
5:42 Now, this is what gets me about this whole story, of course, 1990, even though it was a long time ago, it wasn't that long ago, but an autopsy was done.
5:53 And apparently the doctor and everyone else claimed that the body that was supposed to be Noreen's was not her because it was heavier than she normally weighed at autopsy.
6:08 And so Boyle continued to claim that it was not her and that Noreen was still alive.
6:15 So Kind of odd now, so I guess back then, did they not fingerprint her?
6:21 Because that's what we do.
6:22 Now, people do sometimes way more as they decompose and different things can affect the weight, but they exhumed her body in 1995 and apparently matched a blood sample to that of her sister which supposedly is what they used to prove that it was actually Noreen, which I find crazy.
6:48 I didn't think that fingerprinting was that new, but apparently back then they didn't fingerprint her.
6:55 They said that it was her, but Boyle continued to claim that she just left him and the Children And that she was still alive and the body found in his basement was not hers.
7:07 So also though he had leased a Jackhammer on the 29th, the day before this supposedly occurred.
7:16 And that's what he used to tear up the floor to bury her under.
7:21 He claimed that he bought it or rented it to break up ice on the sidewalk because he was afraid that Noreen or his Children would slip and fall and get hurt because the weather had been bad.
7:33 But he also apparently had made a phone call to the home builder asking what the soil under the home consisted of.
7:42 Now, her body was in soft white clay about two ft below the basement floor and it was partially covered with that really thin green indoor outdoor carpet.
7:55 She was nude and she was wrapped in a tarp and then had a plastic bag over her head.
8:02 So he, in December of 2010 was turned down for parole.
8:09 He wasn't eligible for parole for 20 years.
8:12 So 2010 turned down, he's now at the Marion correctional institution.
8:18 He had another parole hearing in October of 2020 at the age of 77 and his parole was denied again.
8:29 They said that his release would create undue risk to public safety.
8:35 And there is another hearing scheduled for his parole on October one of 2025.
8:43 I seriously doubt that he is going to ever be paroled.
8:49 He was 77 in 2020.
8:53 So at his next parole hearing, he would be 82.
8:58 But anyway, his kids, particularly his son played a big part in his conviction because of some things that he had told the jury during the trial.
9:09 You know, I can remember reading a story about a Houston woman pretty recently who got 40 years in prison in exchange for pleading guilty.
9:20 She actually killed her kids in 2018, and and buried him under a neighbor's house.
9:26 If you can even imagine I couldn't imagine hurting a child, much less trying to hide them and going about life like nothing had happened.
9:34 But Sheborah Latrice Thomas pled guilty for the deaths of five year old and seven year old who were her own Children.
9:42 She drowned them in the bath, Kayiana
9:45 and then Ray Ray. Kayiana was her five year old daughter and then Ray Ray was the seven year old.
9:50 She left the bodies or she put them in a trash can behind her house and then she left for work to go get her paycheck.
9:59 Now, could you imagine doing that as a mom?
10:02 I can't even imagine anybody thinking that that's okay.
10:06 She started digging a hole in her backyard and was unable to dig it large enough.
10:14 So she ended up rolling them over to a neighbor's house and putting them under the neighbor's home just in conversation.
10:24 She admitted that she had done this to a friend.
10:28 Her friend actually thought she was joking, but then the friends started asking her a few more questions, like trying to just feel her out to see what the heck.
10:39 And she actually showed him where the bodies were, which is when he called the police department there in Houston.
10:46 Now her husband had been killed in 2018 by sheriff's deputies in Harris County.
10:53 She's unable to appeal her conviction because she did plead guilty.
10:58 She is in for 40 years and hopefully it does not get out.
11:05 So it seems a lot of people are in the habit of hiding bodies.
11:09 This is another story and this is actually a scene that I had worked as well.
11:14 It's not so much a basement.
11:16 I turned our house.
11:17 But I can remember, you know, we get calls on people who die on hospice all the time There many times at their home because they prefer to die at their own house instead of in a hospital or in a facility.
11:33 And you know, surrounded by family.
11:35 So this lady had a couple of Children who were older at this point.
11:40 I believe she was in her 80s, she was widowed, you know, her husband was already gone and she was on hospice for cancer.
11:48 And so she had been on hospice for, I think about a year and eventually passed away at her home.
11:57 As we do.
11:59 When we lose our parents, we start going through belongings to kind of sort them out, give them to who wants them clean out homes for moving and selling and, and all that kind of stuff.
12:13 So her kids who were in their fifties at this time started cleaning out mom's attic.
12:20 Apparently all her siblings were deceased.
12:22 Like there were no other family members really in her family.
12:26 Of course, like I said, dad was gone too, but they went up into the attic, started cleaning stuff out, started looking through some plastic bins and found a child's bones.
12:37 Now, of course, at this point, it's obviously real.
12:41 And so they call the police and the police come and determine, yes, it is the bones of a child.
12:47 And then they call us the medical examiner's office because it is a deceased person.
12:53 And of course, at this point, we don't know who it is.
12:56 But the Children tell us that when they were younger, they had a sibling who mom told them had gone to live with their aunt.
13:08 Apparently they never saw this sibling again.
13:11 They didn't ask a lot of questions as they got older.
13:14 Mom and dad never talked about the sibling and so pretty much the poor child had been completely forgotten about.
13:22 In reality, apparently this child had passed away.
13:26 Mom had put the bones in the ad in this Rubbermaid container.
13:32 Now, at this point, you know, none of the bones looked like they had been injured, they weren't cracked or chipped or anything like that.
13:40 And so the cause of death when the medical examiner looked at the bones was undetermined because we couldn't tell at that point since it was just bones, if the child had drowned or it didn't appear that the child had been struck with anything.
13:57 We didn't really know what happened.
13:59 So the cause of death ended up being undetermined.
14:03 And I just remember like that stuck with me a long time because could you imagine like being my age and I just turned 55 and then just going through your parents' belongings and finding the bones of a sibling that you thought was living with an aunt.
14:19 And I guess at this point they had assumed that that child had passed away, but they never saw it again.
14:25 I just found that really interesting because what a surprise right to find that in the attic.
14:31 And then I didn't know this y'all, but this was kind of crazy.
14:34 I found Benjamin Franklin of course, lived in London.
14:38Okay.
14:38 And now this seems totally unrelated, but he left his home to return to American 1776.
14:45 Now, 200 years later they found 15 bodies in the basement of his house.
14:52 I found this so weird again because we're talking about bodies being hidden and being discovered in basements and addicts and all that kind of thing.
15:00 Now, this was in 1998.
15:03 So again, it's really not that long ago, they found 1200 pieces of bone remnants from more than a dozen bodies.
15:13 Six of them Children in the home where Benjamin Franklin used to live in his basement, come to find out his friend, William Hewson ran an anatomy school from Franklin's basement.
15:28 So apparently Hewson turned to grave robbery to establish this anatomy lab when he was done using the bodies in his lab where he taught, he buried them so that he wouldn't risk getting caught and prosecuted.
15:49 Benjamin Franklin was likely aware of what was going on but was not involved.
15:55 So I found that kind of strange because the bodies were found many, many years later.
16:02 I mean, we're talking been there since 1776 and found 200 years later in the basement of this house.
16:11 And again, there were 1200 pieces of bone and they said that they belonged to more than a dozen bodies.
16:17 And again, half of them were Children.
16:19 I mean, it's good to know that they weren't like killed and used and buried there.
16:25 But it's sad that he robbed them from the grave and used them in his anatomy lab and then buried them in the basement because you know, the family never knew about that again.
16:35 Y'all, I just have to say people are weird.
16:38 What the heck is wrong with people these days?
16:41I'd be interested to see if you've heard of any stories of bodies being hidden or found years later in basements or addicts.
16:51 It would be strange to find the bones of somebody that had been missing in your attic or basement.
17:00 I don't know.
17:00 It's just an odd thing to think about, but I'm sure it happens more than we know people hiding bodies and trying to get away with murder and thinking that they can get away with murder is what blows my mind especially boil after his wife had filed for divorce.
17:17 He obviously had a mistress whom he'd gotten pregnant.
17:20 Her body is in his basement and he tries to make it look like not only did he not do it, but it's not her crazy.
17:28 People are crazy y'all.
17:30 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
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