Reaper Career dead bodies are not spawning

I've had a sim going through the Reaper career, but after the 3rd rank or so I found it much harder to advance because of a peculiar situation. Twice now, once for the Comedian disaster, and once for the Cowplant disaster, I traveled to the map to perform the reaping needed, and there were either not enough dead sims (2 out of 4 were there for the Comedian event) or no dead sims at all (for the cowplant one). 

In the Comedian event I was forced to just...wait the entire day on the site, since you can't travel while the event is in progress, and I couldn't finish the event. Fortunately I saved it before the cowplant event...but unfortunately every time I scry for assignment it ALWAYS comes up cowplant again, and the event is always bugged again. So that game is essentially unusuable. I tried using pack cheats to spawn a different event even, but nothing happened. I still pulled bugged cowplant.

Has anyone else had this happen? Any suggestions on how I might fix it?

I guess I can salvage the sim by quitting the Reaper career entirely, but that'd be a real shame. It was going quite well up until these specific events started happening.

Thanks for any suggestions.