A closer look into Felicity Marmaduke’s story

Necrophilia involves sexual attraction toward dead people. It’s difficult to fathom why a person would find a corpse attractive, let alone like to have sex with it. However, cases of necrophilia occasionally hit the news, drawing near-universal shock and condemnation. Serial killer Ted Bundy confessed to having sex with his victim’s corpses. 

Perhaps the depravity of people like Bundy explains why they would draw sexual gratification from intercourse with a corpse. However, when ‘normal’ people stand accused of necrophilia, the weight of the accusation often defies explanation. 

Over a decade ago, a news outlet accused Felicity Marmaduke, a mortuary attendant, of having sex with a corpse and getting pregnant from the intercourse.

Felicity was washing the alleged corpse when it got aroused

In late November 2010, Dead Serious News released a story claiming that police had arrested Felicity Marmaduke after she had sex with a dead man. 

The story claimed that Felicity worked at the Mourning Glory Mortuary in Missouri. It added that the corpse ‘experienced a post mortem erection while being bathed.’

Marmaduke allegedly had sex with the aroused corpse and was surprised when the victim had an orgasm. During a routine medical exam several weeks later, Marmaduke discovered she was pregnant.

After informing the doctor of the circumstances leading to the conception, the physician called the police. Authorities allegedly charged Marmaduke with necrophilia and desecration of the dead and held her on a $250,000 bond. 

A bewildering update to the story claimed that Marmaduke was suing the dead man’s estate for child support. 

Snopes disproved the Felicity Marmaduke story as a hoax

Investigative outlet Snopes interrogated the story after it became an internet sensation. A quick look at Dead Serious News’s site exposes it as a fictional outlet. It’s about page reads: 

“Dead Serious News is a satirical website that is updated on an irregular basis. With the exception of the names of public figures, all names are fictional.”

Snopes found that another fake news site, World News Daily Report, recycled the story six years later. This time, a DNA test exposed another mortuary attendant, Jennifer Burrows, for having intercourse with a corpse she was scheduled to autopsy. 

According to the report, Burrows had sexually assaulted many corpses, and this time, her perversion led to pregnancy. World News Daily Report claimed that Jennifer had assaulted more than sixty dead bodies belonging to males as young as seventeen and as old as seventy-one. 

Like Jennifer Burrow’s story, Felicity Marmaduke’s story was a hoax. Due to its bizarre nature, necrophilia forms the basis of sensational headlines and stories, which fake news stories can’t help but publish. 

This article is a testament to the longevity of such fake stories: It’s been over eleven years since Dead Serious News posted Felicity Marmaduke’s story, and despite outlets disproving the report as false, some still fall for the hoax.

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