Is it routine for a coroner and/or a funeral home to independently identify the body when it is being processed?
That is, someone calls 911 and says my father Mr. Jones just passed away. Send over the coroner and police. They arrive, the body is identified as Mr. Jones by the grieving relatives, and off it goes into the system. Absent any suspicion by the authorities that there might be funny business going on, does the coroner and funeral home just take someone’s word for the identity of the body? Or do they routinely check fingerprints or run DNA just to be sure?
Seems like an easy way to dispose of some inconvenient corpses. Just come up with some convincing grieving relatives, move from county to county to avoid suspicion (one normally has relatively few dead fathers-but keep moving and no one will notice) and you can keep at it for a long time. Just don’t allow an autopsy out of respect for the dead and you are in business.
I believe you have to have a doctor sign a death certificate for the corpse. And normally, a doctor won’t do this unless it’s a patient he knows, and he knows the cause of death. Usually because he has been treating the patient for that illness for some time.
If you just show up with a corpse at a doctor new to you (or the corpse), expect the doctor to go through some effort to identify the cause of death, possibly including an autopsy. In many jurisdictions, the county coroner would be involved.
when you report a body to the police they take a statement from you and everyone who was in the immediate vicinity. The more suspicious things are the more they will dig deeper. So consider who or what type of people you’ll be murdering and/or disposing of; it’s less suspicious to report a dead old lady laying in an old lady bed and house… But if you’re reporting your 30 year old tattooed male cousin of a different race than you who supposedly died in his sleep while wearing a suit, well there’s the start of your problems. I think the idea of moving around the country maintaining multiplied identities and inviting the authorities to examine your handiwork (not to mention giving them a signed report that can be used against you) runs pretty much dead contrary to any sane method of trying to hide your evil deeds.
FTR, you ID them twice, once, to somebody when you tell the police who the the dead guy is on their hands, and, since it’s you on record, when the caring funeral service flips open the casket days later–when, if he was at a public morgue, his postmortem freshening up hasn’t been of the finest, shall we say–in front of family and mourners passing by without telling you that’s why they brought you over to the casket at the entrance to the hall.
My dad’s uncle Joe died a couple years ago, and the family went to the funeral home the day before to see the body. Except it wasn’t Joe in the casket.
“Well, you can explect him to look a little off,” the funeral director said.
Half a dozen family members said it wasn’t him.
“He had been sick for awhile,” the funeral director said.
My aunt finally convinced them to check this body for scars since Joe had bypass surgery and (some other surgery). No scars found.
Turns out Joe had been burried the day before during this body’s funeral.
:smack:
I heard it was hard not to chuckle at the service when people walked up to the (closed) casket and said things like, “It feels like Joe’s here with us!”
