I was wondering if someone could answer this question for me.
The other night I was watching an Orson Welles movie called “The Lady from Shanghi”. Well, in the film, one of the characters claims that even if you sign a written confession that claims you murdered someone, you can’t be convicted if no body is ever found. This comprises a central plot point of the film.
Now, my question is, is that true? It seems like that would be wrong, but I don’t know enough about law to be able to answer it.
No. Urban Legend. If there is enough evidence that a murder has taken place, it does not matter if the body is ever found.
You can find a good discussion on the matter in Vigin Islands v. Harris, 938 F.2d 401 (3rd Cir 1991), including a great three page summary of law from all American jurisdictions.
Now go let your wife out of the trunk, fiend!
It’s not impossible, but it’s very hard to convict someone of a murder without the victim’s body.
After all, if no body is found, how do you know that the victim is dead? The prosecutor must prove that a murder took place before anyone can be tried for it.
That said, I’ve heard of a guy in Louisiana who confessed to murdering his girlfriend and feeding her body to the 'gators. No trace of the girlfriend was ever found. He went to prison, so it must be possible to convict based solely on confession.
Convictions for murder have been obtained without discovery of a body.
Someone will pop along and provide a few links for you but in the UK right now it is 23:37 and I am too lazy, and drunk to be of much use, so if you suddenly vanish at least you can take comfort from the fact that the person who did you in will still likely meet a nasty end in a sterile room in a US prison somewhere.
I’m pretty sure that is wrong (certainly in the UK). Obviously if there is no body then the prosecution will have a harder time, but if you can still meet the reasonable doubt requirements, I don’t see why not.
Perhaps the film meant that if someone hadn’t been officially declared dead (which they can be without a body) then you cannot be prosecuted for murder.
Not true. This article at Snopes discusses a legend based on a case where no body is found, and includes some of the legal background.
One of the best known cases of a murderer being convicted without a body was Joe Hunt of the Billionaire Boys’ Club, who was convicted of killing Ron Levin although no body was ever found.
(Hey, I’m late to the party, but at least I brought links.)
I should add, there used to be one exception: my own Texas. Under the Old Texas Penal Code, one of the elements of the corpus delecti of murder was that the body “must be found and identifed”. This requirement was repealed in 1974, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals still required it as late as 1986. They finally joined the rest of the U.S. in 1993.
As others have pointed out, a body is not legally necessary (though, as always, state laws may vary). However, it is a very common feature of state law that a confession must be supported by corrobrative evidence. That is, there has to be something external to the confession that indicates it is true before the defendant can be convicted. A similar rule often applies to the statement of one criminal implicating another person as taking part in the crime.
I think that if a couple of witnesses testify that you pushed someone into the ocean, the lack of a body wouldn’t matter in the slightest.
Of course, Texas had the likes of hangin’ judge Roy Bean who were not very constrained by the statutes 
It only took one to get Thomas Capano convicted.
Charles Manson is one example of a person convicted of murder when the body of the victim was never located. Among the other crimes for which he was found guilty, Manson was sentenced for the killing of “Shorty” Shaw, a cowboy who worked at the Spahn Movie Ranch where Mason and his followers stayed.
People sometimes misuse the term “corpus delecti” to mean the body of a murder victim, and this is probably one source for the error. The expression in fact refers to the overall body of evidence demonstrating that a crime has been committed. In one of his books on common misconceptions Bergen Evans tells about a woman who told the police how she had destroyed the body of a child she murdered by stuffing it in a furnace. From the way he told the story, it wasn’t clear but that maybe the woman thought it was safe to tell the police since they couldn’t recover the body.
There also comes to mind a Dick Tracy story from the early 60s. In it a villain took to singing “no more corpus delecti”. He had somehow put the body of his victim into orbit.
This is the situation in the book “The Client” by John Grisham. A mobster murdered someone-he is on trial for the murder. There is a good bit of evidence, but it is doubtful that he’ll get the max penalty (life, D.P. I don’t remember) without a body.
So yes, you can convict someone for murder w/o a body, it is just a lot harder.
The trouble is that in order for the prosecution to convict someone they need to demonstrate two things. One, that a crime has taken place, and two, that the defendent commited the crime. Without a body, it can be very difficult to prove the first point. If you can’t prove that the victim is dead, you can’t get a conviction. And even if you can convince the jury that the victim is dead, it’s very difficult to establish the cause of death without a body.
“I was just out for some tar-get practice down by the shore”