Fake News: Son Of Funeral Home Owner NOT Accused Of Building Sex Doll Out Of Dead Body Parts

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk

STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

A fake news site by the name of abcnews-us.com published a story (archived here) titled "Son Of Funeral Home Owner Accused Of Building Sex Doll Out Of Dead Body Parts". It opened:

Milwaukee, WI | The son of a Milwaukee funeral home owner has been arrested after he allegedly used limbs and several body parts from corpses at his father's business to make himself a customized sex doll.

Steven Adams, 38, had been working as a funeral home director for nearly two years after taking over his fathers business at the Adams Sons Funeral Home in Milwaukee. He drew suspicion when authorities exhumed the female body of a 27-year-old cold case victim in the hope of backing up new evidence. Upon exhumation, technicians were shocked to find missing limbs inconsistent with how the victim died.

The investigation quickly led to Mr. Adams as the main suspect and a warrant was issued to search his home where authorities found the makeshift sex doll in the basement. The suspect confessed to using a saw to cut limbs off of cadavers and placing them in a plastic bag which he then placed in a backpack before bringing them home where he apparently reassembled them later.

The story is false, there is no "Adams Sons Funeral Home" in Milwaukee, and the site abcnews-us.com has nothing to do with the real ABC News website even though it uses their logo.

funeralsexdoll.jpg

The image used with the story actually came from a report about a different funeral home named Hickory Hill in the Fox Meadows neighbourhood of Memphis, Tennessee which was abandoned with some bodies still inside somewhere in 2016.

The website abcnews-us.com is a relatively new fake news website. Manic News already ran a little investigation into it and found:

The WhoIs record from RegistryDB.com indicates the domain was registered by "Scott Lee," using the e-mail address [email protected]. The About page for abcnews-us.com is simply a copy-and-paste from a different fake news site called the Jackson Telegraph.

By looking at some data collected by our Trendolizer engine we were able to confirm the site is indeed also connected to the (now defunct) fake news site cnn-internationaledition.com which we reported on earlier and so it is probably also related to the network of fake news sites that suddenly went offline about a month ago.

Earlier today we also reported that the site was spreading a hoax about marijuana being legalized in Wisconsin and we updated an old report on a hoax about a morgue worker getting accidentally cremated which was also copied by the site (and which used the same Hickory Hill funeral home picture).

Don't be fooled!

Updates:

  • 2017-12-06T21:42:06Z 2017-12-06T21:42:06Z
    Seems like the original source was the satirical/fake World News Daily Report, but it placed the story in Texas:
    Austin, TX | A Texas morgue employee has been arrested after he allegedly stole limbs and several body parts from corpses at his workplace to make himself a customized sex doll.
    Jesus Cesar Franco Gonzales, 38, who had been working as a janitor for nearly two years at the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office in Austin, drew suspicion when lab technicians started reporting missing limbs on several bodies after his work shifts.

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  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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