Don’t do this in a neighborhood where the neighbors will call the police if they see anything suspious. The cops might walk in on your little scheme.
I think I can make this simpler: "Don’t do this " 
The odds of the accomplice calling the police would be pretty slim. That would require him to admit to being an accessory to a crime. Still, word would get around about the incident. You’d need a pretty good way to get rid of the body, so that no one would ever know what exactly happened to the guy.
Okay, so it’s not legally okay to premeditatively (is that a word?) lure and kill burglars.
What if, instead of killing the intruder, you set things up so that the intruder is just trapped. Like closing him into a cage or something, where he won’t be hurt, but will be securely held. Then calling the police to come get him. Is there anything legally wrong with that?
Where’s the fun in that?
The cage is airtight?
I was thinking of something more evil and torturous, possibly involving boiling drain cleaner, fire ants, or a one way trip to Detroit.
I don’t think you would get away with this for very long. I’d think that burglars would tend to hang out with others who don’t see burglary as much of a taboo, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they mentioned to their family/friends/acquaintances that they were going to a certain house or neighborhood to rob it.
In fact, that’s something I can’t understand about how Holmes got away with all those terrible murders. I can’t believe that, of all those victims, none of them mentioned to their family or friends anything about where they were headed so that, when they turned up missing, the trail could have been followed to Holmes. What a disturbing story, at any rate. Unbelievable how sadistic some people can be.
Well, I guess the fun would be in engaging in some legal vigilanteism–presuming it is legal, of course. And figuring out different ways to lure the would-be burglars into the house.
Granted, it wouldn’t be as fun as using boiling drain cleaner or pits full of vipers and sharks or anything, but if it would keep you out of jail?
I can tell by that quote that you have never had much connection with the criminal element.
Junkies and thieves tell EVERYONE when they score. They tell their friends, they tell their girlfriend, they brag to everyone that will listen. Why do you think houses get hit more than once? Not always the same person but someone else heard how easy it was and what kind of great stuff was to be had.
If you are thinking like a good citizen of course YOU wouldn’t tell anyone but you have to remember, that most times the authorities are the enemy and even when an innocent person hears about the break in, they would never tell.
But the kicker here is that they’ll never score because they’ll be killed in the process. Unless thieves and junkies tell everyone before they rob a location, none of their cohorts will know their last job before they went missing, surely?
I’ve always thought that it would be easy to kill people and get away with it. I mean, who leaves the weapon lying around the scene or in the bushes nearby? Who dumps the body in the local lake instead of taking it hundreds of miles away or disposing of it more efficiently? I suppose, DNA evidence has made things a lot trickier.
However, you’d probably come undone by something really trivial that you never thought would trip you up. How many times have we seen those cop shows where the puzzled investigators were helped along by a chance encounter with someone or something that blows the whole thing wide open? Somebody changed their routine for one day. Someone left a ticket-stub on the floor. The killer dropped a button.
Every time you kill a burglar (or anyone, for that matter), you roll the dice. After enough rolls, your number will come up. For every person you kill, you disrupt the routines of their co-workers, friends, girlfriends, dry cleaners and so on. Even loner junkies are links in a chain, however small that chain may be. If you dick around with the system, it will likely bite you in the ass somewhere down the line.
Say, in this scenario, you have killed a burglar, dumped the body and no living soul but you knows about it. However, you have to repair the door that the now-dead thief kicked in. Your neighbour sees you fixing a smashed lock and starts asking questions. Do you lie or say that you were burgled? What about the next time, and the time after that? What if the neighbour tells a cop friend that you’ve been burgled 3 times in the last month? What if the cop friend, bored at work, makes inquiries and finds no crime records on that property for years? A bit strange for somebody not to report burglaries on their property, isn’t it?
In modern society, nothing exists in a vacuum, and it is for this reason that such a plan is fatally flawed.
A complicating factor is the burglars vehicle. If he really wants to clean the place out, he may have a moving van (Maybe even rented). It may be parked at your place. It may be parked elsewhere until the thief is ready to come get it. If cars start piling up in your neighborhood that all belong to men with criminal histories, that might make police pretty suspicious.
Also, there are thief teams. One or two helpers can really help a guy clean out a house of even the big stuff fairly quickly. If one gets away, he just might risk the heat of identifying you, especially if the guy you nailed was his brother or close friend.
I think the concept needs a robot clown and some puzzle traps…and a secret passageway leading to a mysterious, filthy bathroom.
Whoa… slow down there Dio, I’m taking notes as fast as I can.
I don’t think you could get away with this for long in a city neighborhood. Personally I think sound would be your biggest enemy. People can get very NOISY while dying. And I imagine this could be even worse with some kind of automated death house. A booby trap might badly wound someone who could take hours to koudly die. Or the rigged shotgun firing would itself be heard.
You might say, “Ah, but I’ll make the house soundproof”. But… the burglar has to break in, and it would be extremely difficult and probably impossible for the house to automatically seal itself airtightly behind a break-in.
If you want to make this an ongoing proposition, you need human intervention in the process. You can have the house trap the burglar – but you need more flexibility on how and when to make the kill.
Boyo Jim, you’re right that you can’t soundproof a house perfectly, but I think it’s possible to do a better job that you give credit for. Things like cork on the ceiling, heavy drapes on the walls, thick shag carpeting, and large, soft furniture like sofas can all absorb lots of sound; while I agree a house couldn’t be perfectly soundproofed, I think you could do a good enough job to cover up anything short of said shotgun blast and ensuing screaming as long as you killed the burglar at least one or two rooms away from where he(/she, I suppose) broke in and breached your soundproofing. Something like a fairly fast acting poison or a trap door dropping into the basement (into the snake pit, preferably) would keep the burglar either quiet or far enough from the door that it wouldn’t be too much trouble.
You’re right that no booby trap could act this well without human intervention, but astro is assuming some human intervention:
Presumably, you can spring the trap effectively enough to kill the intruder, and you can get out of this secure part of the house in time to finish off the burglar with your silenced assault rifle or 1920s style death ray.
Foxy40, I’ll freely admit that I have no experience with the criminal element, but do these petty thieves and junkies brag before or after they’ve hit a house? If it’s after, it may not be a factor. And Hypno-Toad is definately right about needing to take care of the getaway car. If there’s a getaway driver, it’s a mixed blessing; you’ve got no way to kill him, but he’s unlikely to go to the cops and implicate himself.
Can any legal-type Dopers give us a hint at whether the getaway driver’s word that his buddy didn’t come out of this house is enough for the cops to get a search warrant for the house?
For soundproofing, you can make all the doors in the house the self closing, spring-hinge type. Which locks silently. That way, the guy might get in quite a bit before realizing he can’t get out.
At least 8…so far
This was the first thing I thought of. I read a few years ago that because Americans in recent decades are, for whatever reason, tending to shun the company of their immediate neighbors, crews of well-organized burglars are able to pull a moving van into a target house’s driveway and, in full view of the neighborhood, empty the house completely, without anybody getting suspicious. For myself, if there were suddenly a lot of moving-type activity around the house on my left, I wouldn’t know whether or not it was legit.
Presuming there’s something to this, what’s your plan for getting rid of the vehicle?