He was billed as "Lobster Boy." He was convicted of murder. He never spent a single day in prison.

Grady Stiles Jr. was born in Pittsburgh in 1937 with ectrodactyly — a rare condition that fused his fingers and toes into claw-like extremities. He was the sixth generation of his family born with it. His father put him on a sideshow platform at seven years old. And in 1978 he shot his fifteen-year-old daughter's fiancé to death the night before their wedding, was convicted by a jury of his peers, and walked out of that courthouse a free man.

But before we get anywhere near a murder, you need to understand the world that made him.

This is the first of three episodes. Today we're going to Gibsonton, Florida — twelve miles south of Tampa on U.S. 41, across the Alafia River. For seventy years, "Gibtown" was the winter home of the entire American sideshow. It had zoning laws that let residents keep elephants in the front yard. A post office counter built low enough for little people to reach. A fire chief over eight feet tall, and a stretch where the police chief was a little person.

I'll teach you to talk like a carny — ten-in-one, bally, talker, tip, single-O, first-of-May, with it. I'll introduce you to the neighbors: Percilla the Monkey Girl and Emmitt Bejano the Alligator-Skinned Man, who named their property after their adopted son. Al and Jeanie Tomaini, the Giant and the Half Woman, who ran a fishing camp on the highway. Sealo the Seal Boy. Ward Hall, the King of the Sideshow.

And I'll tell you about the year Florida made it a crime for any of these people to earn a living — and about the man who fought it all the way to the Florida Supreme Court and won. That case was decided six years before a Pennsylvania judge decided the exact opposite thing about the exact same man's body. That's the whole series in two sentences.

IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 — Gibsonton, Florida. November 29, 1992. 03:30 — Welcome in 05:30 — How to talk like a carny 16:00 — The town they built 25:00 — The neighbors 36:00 — The year it was illegal to be looked at 44:00 — Seven generations: the Stiles bloodline back to 1805 52:00 — The act, the money, and the woman who married it 62:00 — The Lobster Family 68:00 — The turn: Pittsburgh, 1978 70:00 — Time Killer Files 72:00 — Close

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN What ectrodactyly actually is, how it's inherited, and how rare it is. How a traveling carnival sideshow was structured and what every part of it was called. How Gibsonton became Showtown, U.S.A. Why the 1921 Florida statute banning the paid exhibition of disabled people was struck down in 1972 — and who the named plaintiff was. And why Grady Stiles Jr., convicted of third-degree murder in February 1979, was sentenced to probation instead of prison.

SOURCES Pittsburgh Post-Gazette archive reporting. Joe Nickell, "Secrets of the Sideshows" (University Press of Kentucky, 2005). William Lindsay Gresham, "Monster Midway" (1953). The International Independent Showmen's Museum. New York Times and Tampa Bay Times obituaries of Ward Hall. Associated Press. AMC's "Freakshow" interviews with Grady Stiles III.

Where sources conflict, I say so on the record and tell you which way I lean and why.

TIME KILLER FILES I need help on this one. If your family wintered in Gibtown, worked the carnival circuit, or was "with it" in any capacity — reach out. I'm after the ordinary version of that town, not the sensational one. What was Gibsonton like on a Tuesday?

ABOUT Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton covers true crime, conspiracies, and hidden history — researched properly and told straight. Hosted from Derby, Kansas.

Follow the show so Episodes Two and Three arrive automatically. And if this one got under your skin, a rating and a review is the single biggest thing you can do to help other people find it.

Content note: this episode discusses homicide and domestic violence.

We told ourselves it was a British problem. It isn't. This happened here — four times.

In Part 1, a hospital electrician exploited a mortuary nobody was watching. In this episode, I bring the story home to America — and four cases that prove the same blank space in oversight exists on this side of the ocean.

🔦 Cincinnati, Ohio — Kenneth Douglas, a night-shift attendant at the Hamilton County morgue, abused the dead for years. He was caught only when 2008 DNA testing tied him to the 1982 body of 19-year-old Karen Range. His own wife warned his supervisor — and was reportedly told it was "county business."

⚰️ Noble, Georgia — At the Tri-State Crematory, investigators found 339 bodies that were never cremated. Grieving families had been handed fake ashes. State law had exempted the crematory from inspection.

🕯️ Penrose, Colorado — Jon and Carie Hallford of Return to Nature Funeral Home stored nearly 190 decaying bodies and sent families fake ashes. Colorado was the only U.S. state that didn't regulate funeral homes — until this case forced reform. Both were sentenced to decades in prison in 2025–2026.

🎓 Boston, Massachusetts — Cedric Lodge, morgue manager at Harvard Medical School, stole and sold body parts from donated cadavers through a nationwide network. He was sentenced to 8 years in December 2025, and Harvard was cited for "extraordinary failure."

One question ties them all together: who was supposed to be watching?

⚠️ Content note: discusses abuse and mistreatment of the deceased. Handled factually, without gratuitous detail.

📩 Know a local case I should cover? Email me: JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

▶️ Watch the video version on YouTube. Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton — true crime, conspiracies, and the stories that keep us up at night.

Sources:
U.S. Department of Justice (Middle District of PA) • U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Colorado • federal & state court records • WBUR • The Boston Globe • The Harvard Crimson • NPR • CBS Colorado / KKTV • Axios • TIME • WSB-TV • NewsChannel 9 • Georgia Public Broadcasting • case overviews via Wikipedia

🔖 true crime podcast, Kenneth Douglas, Hamilton County morgue, Tri-State Crematory, Ray Brent Marsh, Return to Nature Funeral Home, Hallford, Harvard morgue, Cedric Lodge, funeral home scandal

🔑 A hospital electrician held the keys to the mortuary — and for 15 years, no one was watching the room.

In 1987, two young women — Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20 — were murdered five months apart in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. The press called them the Bedsit Murders. The case went cold for 33 years, until a familial DNA breakthrough in 2020 finally gave the killer a name: David Fuller, a quiet hospital maintenance supervisor no detective had ever looked at twice.

But when police searched Fuller's home, they uncovered a second, hidden crime that would expose one of the most disturbing institutional failures in British history — and force an entire country to ask a question most of us never think about: 🕯️ who is actually responsible for protecting the dead?

In this episode I trace how the Bedsit Murders were solved, how Fuller used an all-access swipe card to enter hospital mortuaries as many as 444 times in a single year unquestioned, why there were no cameras in the room, and what the official public inquiry concluded about a system where safeguarding the dead was, on paper, nobody's job.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series, Who Guards the Dead. Part 2, The Bodies Nobody Buried, brings the story home to America.

⚠️ Content note: this episode discusses murder and the abuse of the deceased. Handled factually, without gratuitous detail.

📩 Got a case I should cover? Email me: JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

▶️ Watch the video version on YouTube. New episodes of Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton every week — true crime, conspiracies, and the stories that keep us up at night.

In this episode:

• Who were Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce?
• How familial DNA cracked a 33-year-old cold case
• Who was David Fuller — and how he hid in plain sight
• The 444 mortuary visits nobody questioned
• What the David Fuller Inquiry found — and the reforms still pending in 2026

Sources:
Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) case statements • Independent Inquiry into the issues raised by the David Fuller case (GOV.UK) — Phase 1 report (Nov 2023) & Phase 2 report (July 2025) • GOV.UK government response updates (Dec 2025) • BBC News • Sky News • NBC News • The Guardian • Kent Police