I guess I found a person who didn’t watch Fried Green Tomatoes.
The bar in the ground floor of my aunt’s house has had some, ah, issues with the law. Turns out the previous renter wasn’t doing very well and one of his cost-cutting ideas was stealing the electricity; he did it so clumsily a casual passerby who saw it reported it as a fire hazard (I haven’t seen pics, but considering some of the electrical work I have seen, it must have been something). Anyway, eventually the guy got evicted; neither the owner nor the rental agency bothered clean up the place. The new renter saw the equipment but didn’t think of opening the freezers and fridges (why oh why? Closed fridges can hold such lovely, multi-colored biotes! Why would you miss a chance to look at them and get a lower rent at the same time?). So, new guy gets the place, opens a fridge… and realizes that he.
Probably.
Should get some guys with Hazmat suits for the freezers.
One of them was full to choking with what had been frozen crabs, scallops, barnacles and other shellfish. Worth in the six figures range, before they spoiled in place.
Anyway. A common problem with fridges and freezers is the seal: often it goes bad, and it’s a relatively cheap repair that can give the machine several years for very little, but many people don’t know it. If the seal had given, the murderer hadn’t noticed, and then the motor broke while he was out of town… let’s say he’s the kind of people whose house gets gone over by a team to prepare it before he uses it… the prep team might find an unexpected puddle… (it wouldn’t even need to get to the “hazmat suits” point, if the door is vertical: the seafood guy’s freezers were all chests).
The only criminals that actually get caught by anomalous electric bills are good-sized marijuana grow ops, the lights use a lot of power (or, more likely, show up as a giant glowing beacon through the roof if they’re flying a helicopter over at night and somebody glances at the IR camera). Though both of these have been somewhat reduced with modern low-power LED lighting.
Roald Dahl had another short story which featured an exclusive restaurant that served a delectable meat periodically that was called “the special.” I don’t think Dahl ever came right out and said it but it was clear that “the special” was human flesh.
If you did kill someone and kept them constantly frozen at -18C or lower for 20 years, would the body once thawed be passable as a fresh corpse to someone with no medical expertise?
If you could flash freeze the body then the tissue damage would be smaller. But if the warm body was just placed in the freezer, as the body began to freeze from the outside in ice crystals would begin to form and they would damage the tissue. Also if the temp in the box varied much more ice crystals would form.
Not as fresh to anyone with experience of meat (not necessarily human!); but I think it would be hard to tell whether it was 5 or 25 years old. After all, the famous Ötziwas initially thought to be the victim of a recent mountaineering accident…
I don’t live in the wifi zone, and don’t have much time in it when I am able to escape my captors and slip inside. I shall save this discussion and devour it ravenously in the offline zone when I have time.
Richard Kuklinski aka The Iceman would routinely freeze bodies for say a year or two in order to throw off the assumed time of death after he disposed of the body. Authorities discovered one of the bodies that was not thawed properly, it had ice crystals in it on a hot spring day and knew something fishy was going on.
I shall save this discussion and devour it ravenously in the offline zone when I have time.