One night, a burglar breaks into your house. Despite warnings to halt, he continues-you shoot him, and he falls dead. After rifling through his wallet, you find that he is an unemployed drug addict, most likely a petty criminal. So, as to avoid the hassles of calling the police (and possibly being sued), you decide to dispose of the body. You carefully put the corpse in a plastic bag, then wrap it in a blanket. You then clean up the scene, and remove all the blood stains. The pistol you used , you destroy (you smash it to bits and bury the pieces in the woods. Now, you have access to an industrial kiln (concrete kiln)-you take the body to it and burn it…after a day of running, you clean out the ashes, then sift for any teeth, bone fragments, etc. These you crush, and take the ashes to the sea coast, where you dump them into deep water. Throughout all of this, you wear gloves and coveralls…after the disposal, you take all of the clothes , shoes, gloves, etc., and burn them as well.
What are your chances of being caught for this?
Need answer fast?
Need answer fast?
Remind me to remove my “Unemployed Junkie Club” membership card from my wallet before I go out on my next round of thieving.
Hypothetically speaking, I think your biggest chance of getting caught is if the neighbours hear the gunshot and call the police. Second is if you get caught transporting the body by sheer chance.
When you’re transporting the body, be sure not to break any traffic laws. Based on what I’ve read, ordinary traffic stops account for an amazingly large number of criminals getting caught.
Eh, it’s a crapshoot. He may have just come from robbing a neighbor, and the police were already called. He may have robbed someone on the street who might have called. Maybe even someone saw him come onto your property. Maybe his brother or dad is a local homicide detective who loves him dearly. He might even have told someone where he was going. How can you quantify these things? I think your odds of getting caught and imprisoned for this are higher than your odds if you just shoot him and call the cops immediately.
Your going to need a bone grinder, too. The big bones don’t burn to dust, but are ground into gravel sized chunks after burning. Otherwise, they’ll still be recognizable as bones.
This is really an unanswerable question, though, isn’t it? If people are getting away with it, we won’t know, because they’re getting away with it. All we know of are the cases where they didn’t get away with it, like this “ceramics” place that was using their kiln for illegal cremations.
Seems to me fairly unlikely that you’ll be able to transport 200 pounds of leaking smelling bodily fluids all the way to an offsite kiln and get it turned on and heated up and use it for 2-3 hours without someone noticing and asking what your project was, though. But again, if someone’s done it, no one noticed.
Your biggest worry is someone you right now wouldn’t suspect at all:
ralph124c who gets a guilty conscience (thinking that burglar probably has a mother who loves him…).
Your second biggest worry is nosy neighbors.
And that burglar may have told his buddy or girlfriend where he was going to burglar.
On discussing “perfect crimes” Leopold and Loeb comes to mind:
Leopold and Loeb were idiots. They kidnapped and murdered a teenage boy from a wealthy family. There was bound to be a major investigation of the crime. And the two idiots knew the Franks family and would have been suspects just from a regular background investigation (except that they bungled the crime so badly they were already suspects).
Wait, what was the crime? You killed him in self-defense; that’s a justifiable homicide. Maybe you’re guilty of improper disposal of a corpse and some other issues, but you haven’t committed murder.
It sounds like you’ve watched Mr. Brooks, in which the protagonist is a serial killer who shoots his victims and then meticulously destroys the evidence (his clothes, shoes, weapons) in a clay-firing kiln.
You are correct-they made all kinds of stupid blunders…like leaving a pair of glasses (which were custom made and easily traced) next to the body. They both showed “inordinate” interest in the police investigation.
Of course, being psychopaths also made it easy for them…killing their cousin wasn’t a big deal for either of them.
Although I suspect if you get caught while trying to dispose of the corpse, the authorities might cast a jaundiced eye on any self-defense claim and charge you with murder after all.
The premise kind of reminds me of Dorothy L Sayer’s “The Five Red Herrings” in which the victim is killed in self defense. The guy who did the killing then tries to (a) stage a scene to make it look like the victim died accidentally; (b) create an elaborate alibi in case part a fails. Inevitably, Lord Peter Wimsey untangles the case, and the killer gets caught and convicted of manslaughter. If he’d just called the authorities when he killed the guy, the inquest probably would have ruled it justifiable homicide and let him walk.
My main question was in regard to the corpse’s DNA-by burning everything that contacted the body, I have reduced that chance of DNA being associated with me.
From reading detective stories, it appears that :
-not having a body makes any kind of prosecution difficult
-burning anything that has been in contact with the body lessens the chances of any DNA evidence emerging
To avoid the hassle of contacting the police and possibly being sued for doing nothing wrong, you decide to commit a crime that will possibly get you charged with murder?
Anyway, no body makes the prosecution difficult but not impossible, especially in this case because they have some other evidence of the murder if you’re being prosecuted in the first place. And your worries about DNA don’t make sense. If they detect DNA it’s in something that wasn’t burned and you failed to dispose of. And if they find evidence that a human body was baked in your kiln they have evidence you disposed of a body even if they can’t identify it.
Next time you kill a card carrying unemployed junkie when he breaks into your house just call the police.