An extraordinary case of police mistaking a sex doll in a suitcase for a human corpse – complete with lifelike bruises and grazes – has shocked Australia and raised questions about how such a bizarre mistake could have gone unnoticed for more than 20 hours.
Police insisted that investigators followed proper procedures, taking painstaking steps to avoid contaminating the suspected body or the suitcase before reaching their final conclusion.
New South Wales police responded to a call in Oallen, a town about 200km southwest of Sydney, on Sunday after two members of the public found a suitcase dumped on a roadside. They opened it and found what they suspected were human remains.
Later that day, police said they believed it was a woman’s body and sent the case for forensic testing, which determined on Monday that the item was “a lifelike doll wearing clothing, with hair and a nose piercing".
"The item also had markings that resembled bruises and grazes," the police said in a statement.
The police claimed that investigators had decided to examine the bag and its contents at a mortuary and not at the remote Oallen crime scene to avoid potentially losing fragile forensic evidence.
Dr Xanthe Weston, a forensic expert at the University of Newcastle said the roughly 20-hour timeframe was “not extraordinary” and was expected from a forensic perspective.
“So, whilst it seems almost ridiculous that a doll could be mistaken for a human, I can totally see how that could have happened and the police did absolutely the right thing," the expert told the ABC. “Not disturbing that scene and making sure that it wasn’t forensically relevant rather than destroying the scene, suspecting it could be a doll. So they actually followed protocol."
Had it been a body, she noted, disturbing it could have destroyed crucial evidence such as fibres, hair, skin cells, and DNA.
Modern lifelike dolls were quite convincing as the market demanded realism, Dr Weston said, adding that she had examined both adult and childlike ones professionally.
She cautioned that the “bruise and graze” markings were not necessarily intentional and could simply represent dirt or damage interpreted as injuries by investigators who assumed human remains.
The best practice for potential bodies in containers like suitcases or wheelie bins was not to open them fully – since doing so could destroy fibres, blood or other evidence on zippers – but to X-ray them, Paola Magni, a forensic science associate professor at Murdoch University, said.
In this particular case, she said, examiners would continue checking the doll for traces like semen or DNA in case it was linked to another crime.
“It’s a doll, but if it’s connected to another crime, they can use that opportunity to link it to something suspect,” Ms Magni, an expert in decomposition, told the Guardian.
“Any potentially suspicious situation has to be treated with the best practice in forensic investigation.”
Owning an adult-use sex doll is legal in Australia. However, federal and state laws strictly prohibit any sex doll that resembles a minor or a child. Possessing, importing or distributing a child-like sex doll is a criminal offence carrying up to 15 years in prison.
Police said that the doll found in Oallen was not childlike and that investigation into it had concluded.
In 2023, police in the UK closed off a road for two days to investigate a report of a dead body dumped in a wooded area, only to find out that it was a discarded sex doll. The Warwickshire police said it was with “great relief” that a hand and foot seen poking out of undergrowth turned out to be on an inflatable love aid.
