The Casey Anthony case (the mother of Caylee, the girl who everyone knows is dead but the body hasn’t been found) has me wondering.
Let’s take a hypothetical case:
Bill and Gary have a huge fight in a bar, lots of witnesses. They’re physically separated by onlookers and Bill repeatedly screams “I’m going to kill you, you SOB!” but they cool off and leave in separate cars.
Gary doesn’t show up for work for a couple of days and police go to his house. There’s signs of a struggle, there’s a bloodstain on the floor ID’d as Gary’s (a lot of blood but not enough to bleed to death from). A search of Bill’s house reveals a knife with Gary’s blood. Bill says “yeah, we had a fight, he came at me with a knife, I stabbed him in the shoulder, he left, said he was going to the hospital”. Nobody believes him obviously, pretty much everything says Bill killed Gary, but there’s nothing that’s absolutely incriminating (e.g. there’s none of Gary’s blood in Bill’s car or any evidence of a body having been in there) and no witnesses who saw Bill entering or leaving Gary’s place that night.
How long before Gary can be ruled ‘dead’? Does the blood and signs of a struggle expedite his being declared dead or is it the same as if there was absolutely no trace of him? Is there any kind of “probably died of foul play” verdict that can be made without a body? And can Bill be indicted for “probable” murder?
I assume Jimmy Hoffa is declared dead by now; while it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion he was murdered, is that indicated on his death certificate? What is on the death certificate for people whose bodies were never found and whose exact cause of death is unknown (i.e. they didn’t die in a plane crash or fire that destroyed their remains)?
It’s getting easier to win such convictions, in fact, as your OP’s scenario indicates: Without DNA, you can’t reasonably tie the blood to Gary and, therefore, can’t reasonably tie his disappearance to Bill.
However, easier doesn’t mean easy: The defense just has to introduce reasonable doubt into the minds of the jury, not propose a convincing alternative theory (although that is a possible way to introduce that doubt) and certainly not have Gary walk dramatically into court in the final act. If Gary had reasons to leave — bad debts, a breakup, a lost job — the prosecution’s case becomes very hard to make and an acquittal seems likely. Then even if they find Gary’s body stabbed to death, they can’t ever convict Rick because jeopardy has attached. Since there is no statute of limitations on homicide I can imagine the case being kept open months or years until they do find a body simply so that can’t happen.
Assault & Battery (though self-defense is claimed), failure to report a crime, failure to render assistance.
Given this situation, it’s likely that the County Attorney would bring charges against Bill on one or more of these crimes, and then use the disappearance of Gary to influence the Judge to give the longest possible sentence to Bill.
Right. And if they find the body while Bill is in prison, he can be charged with homicide: Double jeopardy doesn’t apply to multiple crimes arising from the same incident.
The Wikipedia article doesn’t say, but ISTR that one reason that Capano was convicted, in spite of his excellent ties to the legal and political community, was that the extent of the known blood stains found in the house were sufficient to provide evidence of a lethal wound. So, while the prosecution couldn’t point to a body as proof of death, they could point to the extent of the blood seepage and make the point that, absent dramatic life saving techniques, no one could lose that much blood and live.
Which makes the situation significantly different from the situation posited by the OP.
As Ann Rule wrote in her book on the case “And Never Let Her Go,” Capano said his other girlfriend Debbie McIntyre actually shot Anne Marie Fahey, and stalked her from prison when she didn’t go along with his “alibi.”
You slander sacks of shit by that statement. He’s a vile, murdering tapeworm of a person.
And the fact that he’s been taken off death row was the final straw for me, to get my support for ending the death penalty as a political position. When someone as vile as Capano can use family connections to keep himself from being justly executed for his crimes, it ends any hope that some of us death penalty supporters may have had that capital punishment was something that could happen to upper class criminals.
Just a few months ago we had a no-body murder case here in Columbia that was pretty well publicized - no crime scene, no weapon, no witnesses, no body. The defendant was scouting for hotel rooms for a bachelor party with the victim. People heard gunshots. Nobody ever saw the victim again. I think there was a hung jury.
Several years ago they did convict a guy for killing his mother although there was no body. However, in January of this year he confessed from prison and led the cops to the body.