I thought of this last night while I was falling asleep.
It seems to me that the best way to dispose of a murder weapon is to dismantle it, or reduce it to tiny pieces, then flush it down the toilet. Once it hits the sewers, it could go almost anywhere.
A very small knife, like the kind on a keychain, could easily kill someone then be flushed. The problem there is that knife wounds tend to gush and you have to worry about getting blood on yourself.
A handgun is neat and, if you have a screwdriver, can be dismantled and flushed. The problem with a gun is the noise, unless you have a silencer, but I think those are pretty rare. You could probably make your own with information from the Internet.
Is the search now for the perfect murder weapon? (Don’t worry, I’m not going to off someone. I’m supposed to be writing a short screenplay and this is the best idea I’ve had so far.)
Reminds me of a story by the same guy who wrote “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”
The lady, who is the murderer, killed her husband with a frozen calf leg. She gets rid of the ‘weapon’ by cooking it and serving it to the policemen at her house investigating the murder.
That story was made into an episode of "Alfred Hitchcock presents. It culminates in her serving the lamb to the police officer investigating the death.
I aslo recall an ep of CBS Radio Mystery Theatre where a blade was somehow fashioned out of dry ice which evaporated after the murder.
Flushing: you’d be surprised how many pieces might stay in the plumbing.
The Perfect Murder Weapon: is no weapon at all. Not all murders require a weapon, and any weapon increases the likelihood of tying the weapon back to someone.
This was in an episode of Walker: Texas Ranger too. The assassin would fashion blades out of ice, stab the victims and then dispose of the blade in the nearest river, toilet, etc.
Also, on CSI once, they had a story line where a guy packed frozen meat and made his own bullets out of it, that way no bullet would be found to trace the murder weapon back to him. He got caught because he didn’t clean the molds used to pack his own bullets.
LostCause and Otto both came up with the episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that I came in to mention, so I’ll just add that the title of the story was “Lamb to the Slaughter”.
Amp, in the CSI episode you mention they also found hamburger within the bullet wound and couldn’t figure out how it got there at first.
Is acid easy to come by? It’s definitely traceable. “Traceable?” That doesn’t look right.
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Flush some at the scene, take some with you to flush at McDonalds, dump some in the river, bury some in a garden, turn some into art. It still seems charming to me.
I don’t know what kind of death you’re suggesting, but when I think of “no weapon at all” I think of strangulation. As a martial artist I know a few dozen different techniques to strangle someone to death, but I also know that’s a bit of a giveaway. Even if the coroner can’t tell the difference between common hands-on-throat strangulation and a rear naked choke, a cross-collar choke, or a clock choke… actually, I don’t see how they could fail to tell the difference. Untrained strangulation is usually a painful windpipe compression. While martial arts also have airway chokes, an arterial compression will take about ten to fifteen seconds to kill and would be quieter (thrashing) and quicker than a windpipe choke.
I don’t know where I’m rambling with this. In short, an efficient weaponless death is traceable, in my opinion, while an inefficient weaponless death is inferior to an efficient weaponry death, so why consider it?
Although this doesn’t help with original ideas for your screenplay, I’m more of a fan of eliminating suspicion by eliminating motive, a la Strangers on a Train. I think it’s easier to tie a discovered weapon to a potential suspect when you, well, have a suspect.
My perfect murder scenario would probably be a random poisoning, with some very common and untraceable substance. The victim would be a stranger, so there would be no personal connection, and the killer would dispose of the poison in a gutter or someplace it could wash away cleanly. I suppose gloves would also be key, plain old latex and disposed of separately, to prevent fingerprint identification.
Somehow I don’t see a toilet as a very effective disposal mechanism. How many flushes does it take to get the usual matter to clear? How likely is it that metal fragments will flush? A toilet where I worked once had a quarter in the bottom of the bowl for the longest time - it never did flush away. It wasn’t stuck there - it moved a bit in the rushing water, but it never moved far. I can’t see the barrel of a revolver of the clip of an automatic going down the drain, even in pieces.
I would think the best means of disposal is deep water. Of course, your story needs to take place near deep water, but I imagine pieces of a gun spread over the floor of a bay or in a long river won’t be found too easily.
I saw about 10 minutes of a show the other night (Sci-Fi channel, maybe) where a sniper was supposed to use a bullet made of ice to kill the First Lady. The bullet would then melt inside her, destroying the evidence. Has anyone else seen this show? I think Jon Voight was in it also. Is this even possible? It seemed so interesting in it’s simplicity, and I wondered if it was possible, why haven’t we heard of anyone trying it before?
Yes, I remember those. And they were pretty successful (so to speak), weren’t they?
All this talk of flushing reminds me of Dennis Nilsen, who was arrested for murder after dismembering a victim’s body and flushing the pieces down the toilet. When other toilets in the building began to clog, a plumber investigated the sewer and found a “pile of rotting flesh.”
I tried flushing a Q-tip down the toilet once.
backed up for days. Half a pencil once caused us to take the toilet off the mount, take it outside and dig out the obstruction.
If you can dismantle a gun into small enough pieces that it is flushable, then you no longer have the need to be creative. toss the fragments out the window on a highway somewhere, bury them in the back yard, hell, throw them out with the trash. I think at that point it wouldn’t matter.