Well, there’s always the HBO methods.
From The Sopranos:
Bury corpse in the woods. Years later, come back, dig the corpse up again, vomit for a while, then chop the skeleton into little bits. Smash large pieces with hammers until pulverized. Place into weighted bag and sink it into the middle of a lake.
Chop corpse into itty bitty pieces. Place head in bowling ball bag. See weighted bag, above.
From Deadwood:
Feed to Mr. Wu’s pigs.
The HBO hit, Deadwood, uses feeding dead bodies to the pigs, as a plot line. The Chinaman who runs the butcher shop, and has the pigs in a pen, charges $5.00 a body.
My favorite almost-clever-enough body disposal was a former deputy in North Georgia who murdered her ex boyfriend in his home, pushed his body through a window into a trough in the bed of her pickup truck, covered him with sackcrete, hosed him down, then dumped the trough in a rural area.
The trough was discovered by a caretaker a couple of weeks later (the land was a farm also used as a private hunting preserve).
She might have gotten away with it, if she hadn’t bought the trough and 10 bags of concrete in a single purchase at a local store on the day of the murder. :smack:
The Green River Killer - Gary Leon Ridgway. He killed ~50 women from Seattle to there, IIRC. :eek:
I’m sure I’ve read of this (the news headline “Body found in cemetery” tends to provoke an “Oh, durr!” reaction but compells you to read on). When choosing the grave to add to, you need to be sure that the family aren’t going to be adding any more occupants of their own. I feel sure that I’ve read of a body being found when excavating a grave to bury a wife with her husband (or vice versa). The idea of burying a body in the bottom of the grave before the owner is interred is better but do cemeteries leave holes open overnight like that?
What sank Haigh, the acid bath murderer, was the survival of a gall stone and the dentures of one of his victims, Mrs. Durand-Deacon, which were found in the earth where he dumped the acid sludge. That was with 1940’s forensics so it might be even harder to get away with today.
Won’t work, in most of the US anyway. Most places require caskets to be placed in concrete vaults. These are usually put in the ground as soon as the hole is dug. But if you have a way to lift a 600 pound concrete box, I could see that working very well.
I have heard one of the most efficient ways to dispose of a human body is to feed it to alligators. They eat everything, including bones, and their digestive systems are very thorough. And who would swim in an alligator infested swamp looking for gator poop?
As some have hinted, it always seemed to me that the best way to have a corpse be not found is to not have authorities connect you with the crime in any way. This’d be an issue if you wanted to kill someone close (say, a spouse/best friend/family member/or even co-worker), but if you’re killing someone random, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t bury the person in your back yard, or some other random out-of-the-way place unrelated to the person killed or yourself.
Seriously, if you manage to get involved enough that the police are going to be snooping around you and your place, then you’re probably up sh*t creek anyway. As long as they have no reason to look on your property, it seems to be the best place.
Of course, for all you city folk, hiding corpses in the walls so that neighbors complain of the stink is a major no-no! Also, if you’re going to move, you’ve got to take the remains with you or move them somewhere else.
Actually, I think that trupa was referring to Robert William Pickton. I had heard the dude had a pig farm, but I hadn’t realized he used them to dispose of the bodies — do you have a cite for that?
Not the case here in the Bay Area at least. When my grandfather passed away he was buried at a large local cemetery. Hole in the ground and a plain pine box. The family all helped to shovel the earth back in (this is all part of a traditional Jewish funeral by the way, we’re not crazy or trying to save a few bucks) and unless they came back later, dug it all up and poured cement in I’m pretty sure that it was just…dirt. Digging an extra hole to bury an additional body would be hard, you might get caught, there’s a few hundred pounds of extra earth to sneak out, etc.
If you think through the process of trying to dispose of a body without getting caught it’s pretty formidable. My thought was get a steel drum, load the body into it, fill with cement and cap. Find some deep water and roll it overboard.
Potential problems? Offing the person without leaving any traces, likewise for transporting the body to wherever you’re going to “prep” it (a few drops of blood could be all it takes to nail you). Police sniffing around and asking why you bought a drum and a couple bags of quickrete. Oh you were building something? Can we see it please? Why is there cement dust all over your garage? Now try inconspicuously rolling a drum weighing 300+ pounds into a truck without a neighbor noticing and wondering. Do you own your own boat? Hm, got to rent that (more paper trail)…how do you sneak the cylinder onboard. Dunno who will let you take a rented boat out in the dark of night and too much risk of being seen in daylight…and so on and on. It always sounds simple but you’re not talking about a coin, it’s 200 pounds of bulky object which leaves evidence and residue everywhere it goes.
Tricky thing to do, thankfully. And since most murders are committed in a “moment of passion” the killers don’t tend to have all the stuff onhand. And I agree that most criminals are not the smartest folks around to begin with, so most of 'em are going to get caught.
It’s unknown how many women Ted Bundy killed. Certainly more than we know about. As his execution neared, he dangled more and more names in an attempt to postpone the inevitable, but they finally stopped listening.
One of his techniques was to dump bodies in the woods on the windward sides of the mountains, and simply let weather and animals destroy the evidence.
For anyone who has seen Exotica, I have wondered just how hard it would be to simply dump a body in the woods where no one could find it for awhile. A field, even. Maybe even some random place in the desert, although if CSI is any indicator the remains may mummify instead of decay.
What about adding digestive enzymes to your big bucket full of HCl? Then it would be like a big stomach. Wouldn’t that dissolve bodies faster? 'Course, then you have the added problem of how to acquire large amounts of pepsin (or whatever) surreptitiously.
You could go Weekend at Bernies style so everyone thinks the victem is still alive.
In one of the most bizarre murder cases of all time, Andras Pandy and his daughter Agnes, who had an incestuous relationship, together murdered Agnes’s mother, 3 of her siblings, Andras’s second wife, and one other victim in Belgium.
They dismembered the bodies and dissolved them in barrels of a household cleanser called Cleanest. Some teeth and bone shards remained, however.
In Andras’s trial, prosecutors actually put pieces of a cadaver into buckets of Cleanest – and videotaped it – to show that it could be done.
I’m really not sure our policy allows for such a thread.
I’m closing this.
-xash
General Questions Moderator