In regard to the crime in Canada where a man stabbed another on a Greyhound bus then cut him up
The AP Article reads:
Now my question is how fast could he stab someone and then procede to cut him up. How fast could you cut off his head and then show it around? Or is this easy to do?
I’m trying to picture this, did the passengers on the bus just run away? I am not suggesting they shoud’ve fought him, but you think they could’ve thrown luggage or rocks at him or something.
News reports say the standoff lasted around three hours.
So the simple answer is it took less than three hours.
My understanding is that it’s pretty tough to decapitate a live human or a fresh human corpse. The spinal cord is pretty tough. Even axe-wielding executioners have been known to botch the job and require three or more chops. Cutting off a head by sawing it off with a hand-wielded knife would be worse. I haven’t seen those infamous middle eastern videos of decapitations, but I understand the process was pretty lengthy on those.
So I think it woul;d’ve taken many minutes to do it in a bus. But in my experience there aren’t a lot of rocks on buses, or of any other easily-throwable objects likely yo cause immediate damage and harm. And I wouldn’t want to rile a guy with a Crocodile-Dundee-style knife if I was on a bus andcouldn’t get away easily. Certainly a lot of people worki ng together could take a guy down, but they’d have to coordinate their efforts, or at least agree to do it, and even then the few closest to him are likely to get hurt. Most people, I suspect, wouldn’t trust the others on the bus to participate unless they knew each other or were, say, members of a group like the Police or the Army.
One could sever a head pretty rapidly with a sharp knife and/or saw, careful dissection, and a bit of anatomy knowledge.
So once the victim stops resisting, it wouldn’t be all that difficult.
Well he showed the passengers the long before the standoff ended.
I’ve taken buses and there are luggage, suitcases and there are rocks and stuff at the side of the bus. Go up pick up rocks and start throwing them at him. If a guy is stabbing someone chances are he didn’t have a gun.
You could see if he had a gun. Well anyway that’s a different question.
Thanks for the answer to the question, so it’d be rather easy to sever his head.
I have decapitated several mammals, all quadrupeds, and it’s not all that difficult. I’d want to use a hacksaw, but with a strong sharp knife and a little probing to go between the vertebrae rather than through it’s probably less than 10 or 15 minutes work.
And to answer the questions about stopping him, my understanding is he first stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. If I was unarmed I’m not sure how great my enthusiasm would be for facing an lunatic armed with a “Rambo” style knife if the only goal was protecting a corpse. I’d probably just figure let the undertaker fix him up for the funereal.
I don’t know if you saw any of the terrorist videos with the beheading of Western hostages. Decapitation was very quick in the couple that I watched, a matter of half a minute or less.
Caveat: I’ve just realized, there may well have been editing, so they’re hardly reliable records.
Am I correct in thinking that the hardest part would be locating and cutting through the discs between the vertebrae?
I can’t imagine a sufficiently motivated and strong person would have much trouble doing this pretty quickly, given that O.- er, I mean someone managed to almost completely sever Nicole Brown Simpson’s head even when they had someone else to contend with at the same time.
I’ve beheaded a deer after taking the cuts of meat off of it. A lot harder than you’d think. I’d compare it to hacking through a 5" diameter live tree. You could do it fairly quickly with an ax or really large/heavy machette, or relatively easy with a saw. But trying to hack through with a hunting knife would be difficult, messy, and take a while.
Why would you watch those?
Yup. It would take some finesse to get around the facet joints of the vertebrae.
In fact, I did decapitate my cadaver years ago in medical school, with nothing but a scalpel and a little patience.
(It was a planned step in the dissection, the better to study the structures of the head)
Why would you not? Unpleasant as they are, they were out there on the net, they were news, and they were being discussed on boards. Having said that, two was certainly enough.
Am I the only one sick enough to think the thread title would have been funny if preceded by “Quick:”?
My only first-hand experience with decapitation is when I beheaded me some fetal pigs after my bio class dissection was over. (I had some fetal pigs, and a knife, and some people egging me on, and, well…) I was only armed with a kinda wimpy knife, but it was more difficult than I expected. Those vertebrae are tough–it was like trying to cut through hard plastic with a steak knife.
Of course, if you’ve got yourself quite a sharp sword and a decent knowledge of how to use it, all this is reduced to a matter of split seconds.
And if the OP’s user name were Highlander?
A movie moment verified to be true (by Marines who were there at the actual battles) -
In ‘Windtalkers’, with Nicholas Cage and Christian Slater, Slater’s character gets beheaded by one swing of the samurai sword by a Japanese officer. With a sharp enough short knife, assuming tempered steel, it’d probably take a few minutes.
Cut through the majority of the soft tissue. Grab and twist and pull. It’s likely to come off on its own. Shake a bit if it doesn’t. If it still isn’t off trim the remaining bits and try again.
At least that’s the technique hints I picked up from various hostage videos. It only takes a few minutes.
Look, has anybody here besides me actually removed a human head from its body?
Wish Gabriela was still here. She did it all the time…
I was gonna extrapolate based on my experience with various ruminants, but it looks like our illustrious QtM already won the thread. 