10 Murder Evidence

While attending a Colorado storage‑unit auction, Rick Ratzlaff noticed a shed brimming with police car lights. After purchasing the unit, he uncovered additional law‑enforcement gear, including boxes of court paperwork and sheriff deputy uniforms bearing the name Robert Dodd.

Delving deeper, Ratzlaff found several envelopes stamped “evidence.” Inside lay a blood‑stained rope, an axe, piles of documents, and socks soaked in blood. He promptly alerted the authorities.

The stash turned out to be linked to an unsolved homicide involving 17‑year‑old Candace Hiltz, who had been shot seven times inside her residence. Five days prior, she had clashed with a local deputy.

During that encounter, the deputy was questioning Hiltz’s brother, who was a suspect in a trespassing case. Upset by the officer’s tone, Hiltz shouted at him. The deputy threatened arrest and claimed he had seen Hiltz receive envelopes from known drug dealers before storming out.

Three days later, the Hiltz family stumbled upon their dog’s corpse in the woods behind the house, bound to a tree with the rope and slain by the axe—both items later found in Dodd’s unit.

Two days after the dog’s murder, Hiltz’s mother returned home to a blood‑splattered scene, discovering her daughter’s body hidden beneath a bed. An autopsy revealed seven gunshot wounds from three different firearms.

The case remains unsolved. The evidence recovered from the storage unit was turned over to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Deputy Dodd was placed on administrative leave and later faced charges of official misconduct and abuse of public records.

9 A Murdered Family

Near Seattle, entrepreneur George Gennai was intrigued by a storage locker that had been rented for twelve years, hoping to unearth valuable antiques. He peeled back thick landscaping plastic and waded through a three‑foot layer of clothing, only to be hit by a foul stench reminiscent of a Vietnam battlefield. Inside a trash bag he discovered a human skull.

Police were called, and medical examiners identified the remains as 35‑year‑old Barbara Bender and her two sons, 15‑year‑old Mark and eight‑year‑old Brian. All three had died from blunt force trauma to the head, and a blood‑splattered hatchet with hair fragments was recovered from the locker.

The Bender family had been missing since 1980, last seen loading a U‑Haul the day after Barbara filed for divorce. Investigation zeroed in on her husband, Mark, who had rented the unit.

Mark was arrested and confessed to the killings, revealing he had concealed his former family inside the locker. After Bender’s new wife failed to keep up rental payments, the locker’s contents were auctioned. Mark was later sentenced to three counts of first‑degree murder, receiving an 80‑year prison term.

8 Meth Lab

Steve and Ken Bohannon, seasoned storage‑unit buyers, snapped up a unit in Rancho Cordova, California for a modest $80. Their excitement turned to alarm when they uncovered boxes boldly labeled “danger” and “poison.”

Inside, they found pipes, beakers, gas masks, and a half‑filled 20‑liter drum of methamphetamine. Hazmat crews were summoned to handle the toxic equipment, confirming the boxes housed old‑school meth‑making gear.

Authorities remain uncertain whether the lab operated inside the unit, but detectives are tracking down the previous owners to determine the full story.

7 Human Bones

When Robert Wood’s Kentucky storage unit went to auction after his death, the buyers expected only clothes and a model train collection. Their hopes shifted dramatically after uncovering several bright yellow grocery bags.

Opening the bags revealed human bones. The facility manager alerted police, who sent the remains to the state medical examiner. The bones were identified as those of Doris Wood, Robert’s wife, who had vanished sixteen years earlier while traveling to visit her sister.

Robert had told his daughter Jennifer that Doris had abandoned them, sparking her suspicions. Despite extensive searches, investigators found only that Doris’s femur had been sawed in half. The case stays open, with police planning another sweep of the family home.

6 Human Ashes

Bill Smith, a veteran storage‑unit auction participant, made an eerie discovery in Nevada: 27 funeral urns filled with human ashes. The previous renter, April Parks, served as a court‑appointed guardian for senior citizens, managing their affairs after death.

Instead of locating families, Parks allegedly hoarded the cremated remains in the unit. She stopped paying rent after being jailed, facing over 200 charges—including theft, perjury, and exploitation of her wards—totaling more than $550,000 in stolen assets.

Parks allegedly siphoned most of her clients’ bank accounts, leaving only a few hundred dollars each, and never assisted them. If convicted, she and her accomplices could face decades behind bars.

5 A Leg

When Shannon Whisnant purchased a storage unit in South Carolina, he thought he’d found a prized barbecue smoker. Opening it, he was horrified to uncover a human leg inside the smoker.

John Wood stepped forward, claiming the limb. Wood’s leg had been severed in a plane crash that also killed his father; he had embalmed it as a keepsake. Financial troubles from addiction caused him to fall behind on the unit’s rent.

Whisnant turned the smoker into a macabre tourist attraction, refusing to return the leg. Wood sued, and the dispute landed before TV judge Greg Mathis, who ordered the leg returned to Wood and awarded him $5,000 from Whisnant.

4 Body Parts

Philip Knight bought a Pensacola, Florida storage unit at auction and was greeted by a strong odor. Investigating, he uncovered ten cardboard boxes holding over a hundred containers of human organs preserved in formaldehyde and methyl alcohol.

Some containers were cracked and leaking. Police traced the former owner, Michael Berkland, to a former medical examiner’s office where he had been dismissed for failing to complete autopsy reports, leading to revocation of his license.

The organs originated from various autopsies he performed at funeral homes. While doctors may retain tissue samples for a year, retaining whole organs is illegal. Berkland was arrested on charges of improper hazardous‑waste storage and driving with a suspended license.

3 Infant Bodies

Andrea Giesbrecht stopped paying her Winnipeg storage‑unit rent, prompting an auction. Facility staff, upon peeking inside, were hit by a foul odor and discovered trash bags containing the decomposing bodies of six newborns.

Police traced the unit to Giesbrecht, who had used a maiden name and false address. DNA from a used sanitary napkin in her home linked her to the infants, confirming they were her children.

During trial, her defense argued the babies were stillborn, but three expert witnesses refuted this, noting the statistical improbability (1 in 500 trillion) and the likely live birth. Giesbrecht was convicted of six counts of concealing a child’s body.

2 ID Theft Business

In Denver, Brandon Michael bought a storage unit hoping for resale items, but instead uncovered boxes and bags brimming with hundreds of passports, Social Security cards, hospital records, drug paraphernalia, pills, and a printer used to forge documents.

Unsure how to handle the illegal material, Michael handed it to police, who told him to discard it. He instead delivered the items to a news outlet, which exposed that the data had been stolen from a local hospital.

Investigation revealed the theft was orchestrated by former hospital employee Dawn Philbin, who collaborated with professional ID‑theft kingpin Paul Simmons. Philbin confessed to siphoning about 20 patient records weekly for over a year and a half, receiving a four‑year sentence; Simmons got six years for producing counterfeit IDs.

1 James Bond’s Car

In 1989, a Long Island contractor paid $100 for a storage container. The next day, he and his brother uncovered a vehicle with fins instead of wheels, hidden beneath blankets.

Truckers contacting them via CB radio guessed it might be the iconic car from the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. The brothers, never having seen the movie, were clueless.

After watching the film, the contractor realized they’d found the Lotus Esprit used for the underwater sequence. He authenticated, restored, and auctioned the car, which originally cost over $100,000 (about $500,000 today).

The vehicle sold for £616,000 ($997,000) to billionaire Elon Musk, who hopes to develop a functional version of the submarine‑car.

When you glance at your smartphone, you might wonder just how much memory it hides. From a modest 64 GB iPhone to a massive 1‑TB model, storage has exploded, and the story gets wilder the farther back you look. In 1995 the average PC sported a paltry 12 MB of RAM and a half‑gigabyte hard drive. The ten mind‑blowing numbers below illustrate just how far computer memory and storage have vaulted, and they’ll make you see data in a whole new light.

10 The Human Mind May Be Able to Store Petabytes of Data

We often liken a computer’s RAM to the way our own brains retain information – that’s why the word “memory” works for both. While a hard drive is a compact slab of silicon, the brain is a convoluted organ packed with billions of neurons, each storing bits of experience, facts, melodies, and that one line from a movie you can’t stop quoting.

Scientists haven’t nailed down an exact figure for the brain’s storage capacity, because the organ doesn’t function like a binary drive. Still, the exercise of estimating it is entertaining, especially for computational neuroscientists who love to treat the mind as a giant data bank.

Early conjectures ranged wildly: some suggested a meager one terabyte, while others imagined a staggering 2.5 petabytes. To picture that, remember that one terabyte can hold roughly 250 full‑length movies; a petabyte is a thousand of those, and 2.5 petabytes would be enough for about 625 000 movies or 16.25 billion pages of text.

More recent work nudged the estimate toward roughly one petabyte – a figure that, at the time of the study, matched the total publicly available information on the internet in 2016. Whether you believe the brain can truly hold that much, the comparison certainly puts our personal data stores into perspective.

9 You’d Need Unbelievable Space to Store a Yottabyte

A petabyte already sounds colossal – imagine the entire internet compressed into a single storage unit. Yet the metric system marches on, and the next giant after petabytes is the yottabyte. After petabytes come exabytes, then zettabytes, and finally yottabytes, the largest officially recognized unit, equal to one quadrillion gigabytes.

If a yottabyte of data existed today, it would need a massive physical footprint. Rough calculations suggest that the collection of hard drives required to house a yottabyte would stretch across the combined area of Delaware and Rhode Island, demanding roughly a million data centers to accommodate the sheer volume.

While we’re nowhere near that scale yet, the concept underscores just how quickly our storage needs are outpacing the units we once thought were “big enough.”

8 278,000 Petabytes of Traffic Flowed Through the Internet Per Month in 2021

Every time you stream a video, scroll a feed, or send an email, you’re contributing to a massive data river. In 2021, the worldwide internet moved an eye‑watering 278,108 petabytes of information each month – a leap from the 96,054 petabytes recorded in 2016.

Projections for 2023 suggested the flow would surpass 150.7 exabytes per month (about 150,700 petabytes), highlighting the relentless growth of digital communication and the ever‑increasing demand for bandwidth.

7 It Would Take 500,000 Terabytes of Data to Map a Mouse’s Brain

Mapping a brain isn’t just about counting neurons; it’s about capturing every synapse and connection. While a full human brain map is still beyond our reach, researchers have turned to mice as a more manageable model.

Scientists estimate that a complete mouse brain would generate about 500,000 terabytes of raw data. They’ve already begun with a tiny 10‑square‑millimeter slice, which alone is expected to require roughly 10,000 terabytes. Scaling up to the whole organ balloons the demand dramatically.

For context, mapping a human brain is projected to need an astronomical 1.3 billion terabytes, underscoring the massive computational challenges that lie ahead for neuroscience.

6 In 1980, a 1 GB Hard Drive Weighed Over 500 Pounds

Technology’s miniaturization journey is nothing short of astonishing. In the early 1980s, IBM introduced a hard drive that could store a single gigabyte of data – a capacity that today fits comfortably on a key‑chain flash drive.

That pioneering drive cost a staggering $40,000, weighed about 550 pounds, and occupied the space of a typical refrigerator. By contrast, you can now buy fifty 1 GB flash drives for just over $75, delivering the same storage in a pocket‑sized form factor.

The price‑to‑weight ratio alone is mind‑blowing: for the cost of that 1980 behemoth, you could purchase over 26,600 of today’s tiny drives, illustrating how far we’ve come in squeezing storage into ever‑smaller packages.

5 Data on Star Trek Has Less Storage Capacity Than Modern Supercomputers

Fiction often predicts the future, and “Star Trek” gave us Commander Data – a sentient android with a massive memory bank. The series disclosed that Data possessed roughly 800 quadrillion bits of storage, which translates to about 100 petabytes (or 100,000 terabytes).

Back when the episode aired in 1989, that figure seemed otherworldly. Fast forward to today, and the Aurora supercomputer already boasts around 220 petabytes of capacity, comfortably eclipsing Data’s fictional hardware – albeit without true consciousness.

The comparison highlights how quickly what was once sci‑fi fantasy becomes mundane reality in the high‑performance computing world.

4 The Fastest Internet Ever Recorded Was More Than 7 Million Times Faster Than Average

Speed matters as much as capacity. In the United States, the average broadband download hovers around 219 Mbps with an upload of 24 Mbps – respectable, but far from blistering.

In 2021, Japanese researchers shattered expectations by achieving a jaw‑dropping 319 terabits per second using a four‑core optical cable. That speed is over seven million times faster than the typical U.S. household connection.

At that rate, you could theoretically download about 80,000 full‑length movies in a single second, turning the concept of “buffering” into a nostalgic relic.

3 Frontier Is the Most Powerful Computer Ever Built

Frontier, currently perched at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, earned the title of the world’s first exascale supercomputer, capable of performing more than one quintillion (10^18) calculations each second. Weighing nearly 270 tons, housing over 40,000 processors, and gulping power equivalent to 15,000 average homes, Frontier represents the pinnacle of raw computational might.

2 Synthetic DNA Could Have 215 Petabytes of Storage Per Gram

When it comes to packing data into minuscule volumes, nature offers a dazzling blueprint: DNA. Researchers have theorized that synthetic DNA could store up to 215 petabytes of information in just a single gram of material – a density far beyond any silicon‑based medium.

The catch? Writing and reading data from DNA is painstakingly slow, often taking hours, and the cost remains astronomical. MIT estimates that storing a single petabyte in DNA could set you back roughly $1 trillion, making the technology more of a futuristic curiosity than a practical solution for now.

1 Everything Ever Spoken Would Fill 5 Exabytes

Trying to quantify humanity’s collective speech is a wild thought experiment. If we recorded every utterance from every person who ever lived – roughly 117 billion individuals – the total would amount to about 5 exabytes of data.

Researchers estimate that the average person speaks around 860.3 million words over a lifetime. Multiplying that by the total number of humans gives a staggering figure that dwarfs even the most massive data centers we have today.

Since its release in 1981, the movie Silence of the Lambs has become a horror icon. The American Film Institute considers it one of the best films of all time, and it is only one of three movies to win the “big five” Academy Awards for Best Actor, Actress, Director, Movie, and Screenplay.

In a movie filled with terrifying moments, there is one that stands out. While investigating a storage facility, FBI Agent Clarice Starling finds a large jar that contains a human head. The gruesome sight horrified the agent, not to mention the audience.

While discovering a head in a jar might be the stuff of movies, finding human remains in storage units is not unrealistic. Dozens of such cases have happened around the world to people who never imagined seeing a tiny corpse stuffed into a suitcase or a military hero’s ashes on a shelf. From murders to thefts, accidents to suicides, gruesome crime scenes to sadly forgotten histories, storage units have many stories to tell. Here are ten of them.

Related: 10 Family Secrets That Will Truly Horrify You

10 Forgotten Children

The idea of finding something valuable in an abandoned storage unit has made TV shows like Storage Wars and Auction Hunters popular. In those shows, as in real life, if a storage unit goes unpaid or has been abandoned, the owners of the facility can auction off its contents. The bidders don’t know what they might find—it might be valuable art or jewelry; it might be nothing but empty boxes. And sometimes, as in a recent case in New Zealand, it might be something horrific.

On August 11, 2022, after trying their luck by bidding on abandoned storage items in an online auction, a family in Auckland brought home their unknown winnings. They hoped to find something of value. What they found instead, crammed into suitcases, were the remains of two young children, between roughly five and ten years of age.

Authorities were called to the scene, and investigators say the remains have likely been in the suitcases for several years. Although their names have not been released, the children have been identified. After a South Korean woman was linked to the victims, the Korean National Police Agency became involved in the ongoing investigation.^[1]

9 Cali in the Cage

In another horrific case involving a child, the remains of five-year-old Cali Anderson were found in a plastic drum in a Sacramento storage unit in May 2018. The police say Cali had died approximately two weeks before her body was discovered. In an arrest affidavit, Anderson’s stepmother said the little girl was experiencing health problems, but since she wasn’t her own child, she didn’t get her any medical attention.

When Cali died, her body was placed in a duffel bag, hidden in a closet, and finally moved to the storage unit. When the police investigated the child’s home, they found handcuffs in an animal crate, along with clothing belonging to the girl, hinting that little Cali’s short life had been a very tragic one.^[2]

8 No Show of Respect

While storage units have been used many times by killers trying to hide evidence, sometimes the remains are of people who died of completely natural causes. The crimes perpetrated against them and their families instead occurred after death by the very people trusted to handle their remains with dignity and care.

In one such case, the winner of a storage auction in Rhode Island was shocked to find the bodies of two adults and one infant in his unit. The remains of the adults were so decomposed their gender could not be determined, while the infant, found in a small coffin, was thought to be a female. The unit had been rented by funeral home operator Alfred Pennine of Providence. Dozens more sets of remains were discovered in the funeral home he operated. Once his crimes began to come to light, Pennine committed suicide.^[3]

7 A Long-Overdue Honor

In some cases, it is not criminal activity that results in human remains being found in storage but merely time and tragedy. In early 2022, storage auction winner Bob Blank stumbled across the story of a forgotten military veteran. While looking through items he had won from the auction, he found a sealed box with cremated remains, along with other documents, including a letter from former President Ronald Reagan. A death certificate and Army discharge documents said the remains belonged to a World War II veteran. Two medals indicated he had been a heroic one.

Decorated soldier George Ralph Brady died in 1984 at the age of 59, and his ashes were stored in a cardboard box for 38 years. Determining that Brady had no living relatives, the American Legion performed a burial service with an honor guard and a flag line. The once-forgotten veteran’s remains now lie at the Riverside National Cemetery in California.^[4]

6 Work Goes up in Flames

Although most people use storage units to secure their personal belongings, some also use them to work on their own property. Unfortunately for a man in Russellville, Alabama, doing repairs on an automobile might have been responsible for his death.

On January 14, 2022, emergency workers responded to a fire at a storage facility. Initial reports about the number of units involved varied, but they all claimed one thing: that a dead body was found inside one of them. Subsequent reports said the unnamed man was known to have rented several units in the facility and that he often worked on vehicles in them. Authorities speculate the victim might have been using an alternative heat source that could have sparked the blaze. No foul play was suspected.^[5]

5 Murderous Greed

Money has always been a powerful motivator for murder, and hiding a victim’s remains while continuing to rob them is not as rare as one would hope. In one such case in Las Vegas, the bodies of an elderly couple were hidden in trash bins for ten years while their killer stole their Social Security income. The remains were found in a unit at All Storage at the Lakes in 2015, but the last time Joaquin and Eleanor Sierra were seen alive was in 2003.

Their killer, Robert Dixon Dunn, had apparently met them at a nursing home where his own mother was living. After killing them, he succeeded in stealing from them for all those years by moving around the country and using a fake name. After someone reported him for suspected fraud, he was finally caught. His ex-wife said Dunn claimed he was concealing the bodies of his aunt and uncle, who had committed suicide. In truth, the bodies were found to contain drugs and injuries caused by a sharp object.^[1]

4 A Bug Reveals All

That lure of money does not just attract evil strangers to potential victims. Violence within families is not uncommon, sometimes between spouses or between siblings. And sometimes between parents and children. In 2001, police in Las Vegas accused Brookey Lee West of killing her own mother and hiding the remains in a trash can in a storage unit. The remains of Christine Smith, 68, were discovered after reports of a foul odor caused the police to seek a search warrant.

The unit, which also contained many of Smith’s belongings, had been rented by her daughter, though she had used a different last name. During the trial, it seemed possible the murderer might evade justice because the remains were so decomposed that the coroner could not determine a cause of death. West said her mother died of natural causes, and the coroner could not absolutely refute that. But in a surprising twist, an entomologist was able to prove the case for murder. Dr. Neal Haskell testified that the absence of blow flies on the corpse proved she had been put in the can either while she was still alive or immediately after death. West was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

In an interesting footnote, Brookey Lee West returned to the headlines when she tried to escape from prison. Although wearing a disguise, West was spotted and recognized by staff right before she reached the prison exit.^[7]

3 A Daughter’s Deceptive Plan

Even when murder is not involved, the lure of money can cause some people to do unimaginable things. After her father apparently died from natural causes in June 1990, Judith Maria Broughton concocted a plan to steal his Social Security benefits, beginning in 1997. Leasing a storage unit at Econo Self Storage in Lexington, Kentucky, Judith stored the body there and kept collecting her father’s retirement funds.

On January 8, 2014, authorities discovered the mummified remains of Luther Broughton and charged Judith with the theft of nearly a quarter-million dollars. After pleading guilty to the theft, Judith was sentenced to ten years in prison.^[8]

2 Horrific Hoarding

It’s not always murder, and it’s not always money. Sometimes remains discovered in storage units were kept there due to family secrets, psychological disorders, and grief. After her death by natural causes in 1995, Ann Bunch’s body was released to her family for burial. Family members built a casket, domed so the old woman’s hump would fit inside. It was painted blue and loaded into a family van to be transported to Alabama for burial. But the body never got there.

On her deathbed, Ann’s daughter, Barbie Hancock, confessed to her own daughter, Rebecca Fancher, that the remains were in unit B8 of U-Stor. Although Hancock claimed the burial had been delayed because of bad weather and truck problems, family members say otherwise. Fancher’s ex-husband claims his former mother-in-law couldn’t deal with her mother’s death and that her hoarding compulsion made her keep the body nearby—possibly even in her own home before it was moved to U-Stor. Hancock and Fancher’s hoarding eventually led to their house being declared uninhabitable.^[9]

1 A Wife Dismembered

One of the most disturbing instances of remains found in a storage unit would have to be the case of Jessica Rey. On October 20, 2017, Rey gave birth in a Kansas City, Missouri, hotel room. Her husband, Justin, claims she died after the child’s birth, saying at one time that she had committed suicide and at another that Jessica died of natural causes. In any case, Justin spent two days in the room with the corpse, the newborn infant, and the couple’s toddler. Then, in the presence of his children, he dismembered Jessica’s body, put the parts in a cooler, and took it to a U-Haul storage facility. Alarmed by his suspicious behavior, facility workers called the police.

Authorities found Rey in the storage unit—where he might have stayed for a few nights—with his two small children and his wife’s dismembered remains. Faced with charges of endangerment of a child and sexual exploitation of a minor for photos found on his phone during the investigation, Rey was convicted and sentenced to nearly nine years in prison. He remains under investigation in a separate murder case in California.^[10]