Pigs. Definitely pigs. I’ve seen what pigs can do to a deer carcass and it ain’t pretty. All that remained were hooves, fur, and teeth. So, shave your victim, take off their fingernails, and remove their teeth then toss them to the little piggies. Shouldn’t be too tough to ready the body post-mortem.
BUT, i’m sure pigs devouring a human carcass would catch a farmer’s attention. So it would have to be either a cash-strapped farmer who wouldn’t mind disposing of the corpse for a little scratch or a friend who thinks it would be funny to see pigs eat a human. And a friend who helps you dispose of bodies is a true friend indeed. I think Randy Newman wrote a song about that.
Sneak into a graveyard and bury it underneath a freshly dug grave. After the next day, when the casket is interred and they pour in the cement, they’ll never find it.
Call (501) 555-SDMB and ask for Mephisto. I understand he has connections in both construction and various aspects of metal working and manufacturing. Which means he could help you cut, grind, burn, melt, and/or ship almost anything you want.
Seriously, though, did you see the end of the second Terminator movie? If you’ve got access to the right kind of facility, I think dropping pieces of organic material into molten metal would be a very cop-proof method of disposal. And if the authorities ever grew suspicious, what could they do? I imagine it would be very difficult to figure out what molten metal the bits and pieces were added to, figure out what batch of metal was formed into what I-beams, figure out where those I-beams were sent, then get a warrant to disassemble a building to test those I-beams for aforementioned bits and pieces. It could happen on CSI: Miami, but in real life . . . nah, I don’t think so. Can you imagine, though . . . wow, there’s a lot of story potential there . . .
opens new document and begins typing next best-seller
If your story takes place near a deep body of water, I would think a weighted corpse or corpse pieces could be sunk fairly easily. But the depth is the key, and beyond the continental shelf would be best.
Nice Ideas all, keep them comming, I have a big family to do some field testing before writing. The hogs are a nice idea but so overused in Hannibal, besides my protagonist dont keeps them and wants to have no other person to know.
Actually, it’s not that hard to obtain at all. Hobbyist kilns for pottery hold about 8 cubic feet, cost about $1200 and fire to 2350 degrees F.
I’ve always wondered why no mystery writer that I have read has explored this possibility. Of course, explaining the smell of burning flesh would tend to limit it to somewhere out in the country.
Heck, out the the country, even burning flesh isn’t going to be that unremarkable. Anyone who has had a freezer go out a month after picking up a cow at the butcher shop will know that sometimes you have to burn a little meat.
Having burned 30 lbs. of meat on a fire, it really doesn’t smell that bad.
Ooh, How to Get Away with Murder is my favorite game to play when caught in boring meetings.
I vaguely recall a local mortuary used a ceramics kiln for cremation when the proper doo-hickey didn’t work, a few years back. The papers never mentioned how big a kiln was required (I’m thinking it was the expensive walk-in kind because they were doing more than one body at a time) or the exact procedure used. Moisture content must have caused problems in acheiving a good firing since even slightly wet clay can explode like a bomb and blow out the fire/cause the kiln to shut down if you don’t do it just right. Even a really slow start with low temps would be problematic since people are so very juicy.
Now if the body were de-hydrated first, how would you deal with the smoke produced? You’d have to do it outdoors in a wood-fired kiln, I’m thinkin’… This method has other advantages since it’s cheap (think of it as an over-acheiver’s pit barbecue), easy to put together and take apart, etc.
What I’d do with the ashes and bone fragments I haven’t figured out yet. If I were bold I’d put them in an urn and refer to them as Grandpa if anybody asked.
Ooh, How to Get Away with Murder is my favorite game to play when caught in boring meetings.
I vaguely recall a local mortuary used a ceramics kiln for cremation when the proper doo-hickey didn’t work, a few years back. The papers never mentioned how big a kiln was required (I’m thinking it was the expensive walk-in kind because they were doing more than one body at a time) or the exact procedure used. Moisture content must have caused problems in acheiving a good firing since even slightly wet clay can explode like a bomb and blow out the fire/cause the kiln to shut down if you don’t do it just right. Even a really slow start with low temps would be problematic since people are so very juicy.
Now if the body were de-hydrated first, how would you deal with the smoke produced? You’d have to do it outdoors in a wood-fired kiln, I’m thinkin’… This method has other advantages since it’s cheap (think of it as an over-acheiver’s pit barbecue), easy to put together and take apart, etc.
What I’d do with the ashes and bone fragments I haven’t figured out yet. If I were bold I’d put them in an urn and refer to them as Grandpa if anybody asked.
