Introducing... Strangely

This show is part of the always true crime network of podcasts, and there's loads of investigative

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Journalists loot Jones who you'll know from the Pit Controls and true crime podcast legend,

Poppy Damon, join forces to explore the overlooked oddities that deserve a deep dive.

From mysterious grave tampering in Pennsylvania in the USA to a bionic surgeon in Cornwall in the UK. These cases need to be heard to be believed.

“Listen to this story from strangely that just gets weird or weird.”

You're big into symmetries. You've pitched a few symmetries. It's true. It's true. There was a London Vampire story that was in a symmetry.

A lot of my podcast star offered a symmetry for various reasons because often if the person dead, it's a good place to go and begin. So we're going to start at a symmetry on a winter's night. It's called Mount Moriah cemetery, like Moriah Kerry, but not spell that way. Moriah.

Okay. Before you ask, I know who you're getting at that loop. Oh, I was going to ask. And it's in Philadelphia and also spans into a place called Yaden in Pennsylvania. And it's got, there's a big symmetry.

And it's got, you know, family plots, revolutionary war soldiers, it's a kind of really

amazing symmetry with, like, big, muscleiums and kind of old tombstones. And this story takes place as recently as November last year. When volunteers and police started to notice that what appeared to be breakings to some of the vaults, it wasn't just wear and tear. These were fully desecrated graves.

And, you know, the volunteers like to maintain the sites, they thought this was very mysterious. And, of course, rumours start to circulate because grave robbers have a kind of mythical folklore kind of tail, but they almost couldn't believe it. Was it animals? Was it kids just messing around?

But they thought that, and this isn't somebody with a shovel trying to dig up a bit of earth and exhibit grave. These are sort of those big stones. Exactly. Exactly.

And what sort of big stone does open rocks move so that people can be able to enter. And, of course, you wouldn't know what was in this. You don't know exactly what had been taken as well. But obviously, very painful for families, you know, they want to go and visit their loved ones and it, you know, these kind of breakings happening.

And then there's a tip as they often is that comes into the police. And it was from someone who believed that a man named John Gerlach maybe behind these breakings. And the tipster had said that he had seen a partially decomposed corpse hanging in the basement of this gentleman's home. This is, what a great tip.

Oh, there's this mystery about all of these, you know, half open mausoleums and this thing. Oh, I know who it is. Oh, and also I've seen it as maybe all, okay. It's true. It's tipgo.

It's pretty good.

“And then even more on the nose, really, as tips go, they said you should also check out”

this man's social media. This is someone who's not being secret about it. The police have a look on his Instagram account, this is man Gerlach. And they say that they see posts about taxidermy, skeleton collecting, oddities and illusions to a bone museum.

Now, you should know upfront that none of these things in the state of Pennsylvania are illegal. So, for example, have human remains, but it is illegal to break into gross. That's important. Hang on.

So, if I here in London had, I don't even know why to get have human remains. But if I had a relative's leg, as I keep say, after they died, and I couldn't really keep that could. I don't know the law anymore. It's just preventing the law for bearer.

If you're preventing the law for burial of, yes, it must be licensed.

So, I think if you're right, if it was like a family plot and then you ended up, you

know, in Greece, for example, there's not enough gravestites, so they do actually clear them up and people do kind of keep the remnants. So, there's different rules in different places. But here they know that they want to connect it to the break-ins. Is this this man who's just got some weird taxidermy, or is this someone who's breaking

an entry? And the taxidermy was of animals. It doesn't say. It was a sort of, it was his social media was in order for people to purchase things.

“So, I think there was some, it wasn't particularly clear what he was maybe alluding to.”

And though, they will come back to the socials in due course. So, they also here, they also noticed that there's a suspect leaving a hardware store in East El Township, Pennsylvania.

And he's, this is really funny, because true crime followers will know that there's always

this moment in the documentary where they find them shopping at a hardware store. And what he was purchased was headlamp. What do you do? Well, that wrote it. The LED rechargeable glow stick gloves and tools common to use in burglaries.

Now, actually, I said he was leaving the shop. They had been stolen and they, they thought that was rather mysterious as well. And they thought that he was behind that robbery. But you think if you're going to, you know, use those tools, you think you just purchased them.

And more directly linked to him, so maybe it was smart to steal them, because you wouldn't

“have the credit card bill that says big shovel.”

Yeah. And then they look down full of many, literally. Then they look a little bit deeper. And they see that he is a member of a human bones and skull selling group on Facebook. And they see that another member of that group said, "Thanks, Jonathan, really enjoyed

that item you sold me." So it's starting to look really suspicious. Social media is horrible, isn't it? As millennials have seeded Facebook to older boomer generations, is this what they're getting up to on there?

And you know what?

The funny thing is, when I made my first series, Madra Biliar, it was about people who

collected true crime objects. And there's a big market for serial killers here, paintings drawn by serial killers in prison. It's ethically really ambiguous, right, because if you're putting money in their commissary, you are essentially purchasing it, though many places have laws that say criminals can't benefit from their crimes.

They're called son of Sam laws, because the son of Sam at one point was going to have a bio-picking get quite a lot of money, and these laws came in to say, you can't be using your fame to profit, because it would really incentivize people to be major serial killers. So, these groups who should say have, you know, 5,000 members, some of them, you know, these are really popular underground worlds that John garlic was a, I said garlic, I mean

garlic, obviously, which you might need, if you're creating an asymmetry at night, let a garlic. It's literally. Wouldn't stake, obviously. So he also had a cash app account, which showed a photo of a person holding what appeared

to be a human skull, and then they further looked at his vehicle, and they could see that he had driven in some of the locations where burglaries, you know, had taken place in the cemetery. So, it's all not looking very good, and the pleaser doing all this work quietly at the end of last year, and in early January, they may can arrest.

This year. So, just only a few weeks ago, I don't know why I don't know why it's worse for being sort of more recent, but it's true, it is more disturbing. And so they confront this suspect, John garlic, they had all these evidence against him. He's 34 years old, he's from Pennsylvania, and in fact, they've been following him.

And this is really, big as belief, but they catch him, leaving a cemetery, the cemetery with a crowbar and a burlap sack. The burlap sack really gets me. Did he have the sack over his shoulder, and was he sort of comedy creepy?

“That's how I pictured it, doing the little like grateful.”

And then this is really awful. So then they look inside the burlap sack, and there's mummified children's remains, skulls, and bones. Now, I feel bad about that now, but let's hope these were sort of, I think they've long dead graves that he's sort of just for them to be mummified in all of that, they often

who kind of historical bones and bones. But he pretty quickly, allegedly, says to the police, "Look, I do mostly sell these online, but the vast majority of them are in my basement, and in my storage unit." And so officers get a search warrant, and they go to his basement. And one of the officers said, "Described the scene as a horror movie come to life."

There were shelves covered in skeletal remains, corpses hanging from the ceiling as that

In fact, this detail really haunted me.

“There were even like pacemakers and other medical devices that you could see within the”

bodies. Oh. So it's like the worst episode ever of storage hunters, you know, they sort of all bid on an unclamed storage unit. Imagine opening that and thinking sort of gold, and then it's true for those who've

not been blessed enough to watch storage hunters, it's people who buy blindly from storage units. And usually there's like, you know, so nice paintings or some pottery collection, you're right, if it was, it would be really the horror movie version if you were landed with a bunch of decomposing bodies.

So, but actually sorry, but the line's share of it you were saying was in his basement,

not in a store. Yes, exactly. So, it's a mixture of the two he needed space clearly for so many items, but what he was actually charged with because, you know, as I say, possessing them isn't necessarily legal, but he was charged with burglary corpse abuse, theft of venerated objects, desecration, and

a few others. And of course, all the local media has been kind of talking to the family members, essentially, you know, they've been giving statements saying that they're absolutely horrified that, you know, you want your loved ones to be laid to rest, extra volunteer groups have sort of cropped up to protect the area from now on.

And the hurt caused by, to, to family members obviously cannot be underestimated when these are very like sacred places where people say goodbye. So, they, we've also seen that they've, like, really enhanced securities that they put cameras in. There's like, you know, real effort now to make sure this doesn't happen because, as it turns

out, John Garlack is part of this much wider community. And they worry that he is just one of many. And I was really interested in who this man actually was. And some of the local press has spoken to some of his friends. And you may or may not be surprised, you know, that he's slightly in the heavy metal community.

And a former sort of friend and bandmate of his said, you know, he certainly had an

interested in oddities, but that they'd never heard him talking about doing something

like this. And there's big questions over whether the people purchasing them are going to face legal consequences, because in a way, they're sort of inviting the crime to take place.

“Because also, what is, it's hard to decide what is worse is it?”

I guess it is the person who's going around, desecrating these grays and stealing remains. But then also the widow who buys it online to do what with, have it on a shell, have it as some sort of creepy ornament? I think that. And I think again, like humans love strange macabre objects like that, there's a long history

of that. I mean, when they used to be public hangings, people would go with Hankachiefs and dip them in the blood and keep them, or, as I say, people keeping lots of hair of criminals, skulls of criminals, even famous crimes that take place, people want to preserve a bit of that history.

So I think it does have a real legacy with that. And I think that there is the kind of satanic heavy metal, sometimes overlapping this well, in this space. And would you like to take, you guess, how much a full skeleton can go for on one of these Facebook websites?

Great question, full skeleton with display box. Is it what, like, a couple thousand dollars, go for up to $7,000. So these, which actually seems really low, does very human corpse, yeah, but on the other hand you think, like, who's got seven grand just for this, you know, when you could get a really good staged one, they want the real thing, the idea of living with the dead as

a kind of new-lish thing. So yeah, that is a little bit about the community. And also, we should say that grave robbing does have this kind of long legacy. There's a famous tale where grave robbing happened because cadavers used for medical experiments, suddenly had a great value in London, there was all the kind of public anatomy exams and

things, and there were some famous grave robbers involved in that. But, you know, in this instance, it's really just for the kind of online trade, whether more laws that we brought in to kind of stop people grave robbing or to prevent this online sale is yet to be seen. As you mentioned, you've done quite a bit looking at murder or belier.

What was the sort of strangest bit that you found?

“Was it was the strangest item that someone had bought or sold or kept?”

I have to say, I get the commission of paintings, you know, there's Charles Manson music,

and they're kind of amazing pieces of art.

“Those I can understand, I think for me hair and toenail clippings and things like that,”

I find harder to connect with, because that sort of rose for any one. But again, it's almost like putting animal head on the wall isn't it? It's like a physical piece of them that you're holding, like pure evil, if you believe that you're kind of keeping a piece of that in a box. Yeah, but then I can sort of see, but then I have their own other end of this picture,

and you have, of course, you know, in some churches, there will be the sacred remains of some sand, it might be their whole body, it might be a part of their body, but actually sort of someone grim or unknown to you, but bought off the internet, got on a limb and say that's strange. Have you ever been, I know, as you were posted on this kind of thing, but have you ever

“seen or been near any of this stuff, or been any kind of gruesome?”

Yes, we went to meet lots of collectors, and they, one, the thing that was really creepy, actually, was there was a car owned by a serial killer in which he'd picked up sex workers and murdered them in that vehicle, and this gentleman called Paul that we spoke to had it in his garage, and he said he'd just like to sit in it and get a creepy feeling while he sat at where many people had lost their lives. And that was quite disturbing, because there's quite a large piece,

you know, a large item, and you know, I mean, I suppose you can go to the, what do they call the catacombs in Paris and other places where you're kind of lined with skulls? So I guess part of the series, and maybe part of my interest that was drawn to this story is like, what is it that, you know, what's the, we kind of asked the question a bit provocatively, which is like, what's the difference between watching a true crime documentary and wanting to

buy the car with someone's murder, and you're ultimately still consuming the true crime genre,

you know, I'm putting money towards that industry or the industrial complex of true crime. True crime, industrial complex, which we would like to describe, I'm farting, yeah, like I can subscribe, I'm farting, screaming from like I said, I've been to one autopsy. Really? But it was of a poor, it was of a poor poice. I thought you could have saved a poor person, and I was like, oh my god, we kind of have heard something about that.

And a poor poice, it was, I was at London Zoo doing something, and they do, how do we get here? They do autopsy on every single animal that dies at London Zoo. No, I understand how it dies, it could be a fly, it could be a giraffe, they will cut that thing open and have a look, and it's almost a poor poice. Wow. And yeah, it was like on this table open, and the guy was there like stringing all its insides out being, look at this here, you can tell from

this that that and I was like, in the car. Oh my goodness, wouldn't recommend. Oh my goodness. Not a good day, the office for me, I'd say. So before we finish just back to your man, girl, like, what is, what is happening with him now? It's a quite recent, so it's not being caught. Yeah, he's still just facing exactly. So he's being held in George W. Hill,

correctional facility on a million dollar bail. I thought you said George W. Bush,

correctional facility. He faces, you know, obviously listed some of the main charges, but it's actually 574 criminal counts, and that's, you know, as I mentioned, 100 counts of abuse of a corpse, theft by unlawful taking, 100 counts, receiving cell and property, 100 counts, desecration of generated objects, 26 counts. There is one other little tidbit detail, as part of the police investigation, more is eating out, you know, there's this

getting caught stealing from the hardware store allegedly. There's the tips to who said, you know, there's our scenes and corpses in this guy's basement, there's his socials. There was also the desecration referred to volunteers had seen things like, he'd left energy drinks and cigarette butts, and so presumably they'll use DNA to link him to that, but it's sloppy criminal work, I should say. And one important factor is like, this, this burial ground is, is quite

“historic and is really run by volunteers, so I think, presumably a criminal might have thought they”

could try their luck because it's really no longer a kind of active functioning burial site, but it wasn't to be in good police work and some good tips meant that they caught him, and we have to see what happens at trial. Just search strangely wherever you get your podcast and line up your next lesson.

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