A lifelike sex doll was briefly “mistaken” for a murder victim after it was found inside a suitcase dumped in rural Australia, police and local media said on Monday.
Two men were driving through the Australian countryside on Sunday when they stumbled across an abandoned suitcase seemingly packed with human remains.
A strike force of homicide detectives and forensic experts was set up to solve what police initially treated as a murder.
But tests soon showed the suitcase was actually stuffed with a lifelike sex doll, public broadcaster ABC reported.
“They were mistaken for a human originally,” New South Wales Police Superintendent Linda Bradbury told reporters.
“They are very realistic in terms of looking like human remains.”
Police said “forensic examinations” had shown it was actually a “lifelike doll”, replete with clothes, hair and a nose piercing.
Further muddying the waters was the fact the doll “also had markings that resembled bruises and grazes”, police said in a statement.
“Investigations have concluded.”
Not the first time a lifelike doll has sparked a murder investigation
The bizarre discovery is not the first time a lifelike doll has triggered a major police response.
As manufacturers have produced increasingly realistic mannequins and sex dolls in recent years, emergency services in several countries have been called out to what appeared to be bodies dumped in public places.
In 2022, police in Thailand launched an investigation after what looked like the body of a woman was found floating in a canal. Officers rushed to the scene, only to discover that the supposed victim was a highly realistic silicone sex doll that had been discarded in the water.
A similar incident occurred in the United States in 2016 when residents in California reported what appeared to be a woman’s body lying on a roadside. Police secured the area and began treating the scene as a possible homicide before determining that the figure was a life-sized sex doll.
British police have also dealt with several false alarms involving mannequins and realistic dolls. In one widely reported case, officers responded to reports of a body wrapped in plastic near a roadside, only to find that it was a discarded shop mannequin that had been mistaken for human remains.
Law enforcement experts say such incidents are becoming more common as modern silicone dolls are manufactured with realistic skin tones, body proportions and facial features. When found in isolated locations or partially concealed, they can easily be mistaken for a deceased person, prompting emergency responses and forensic investigations before the true nature of the discovery is established.
