I any piece of your clothing gets snagged on anything, just turn yourself in. You’re screwed!
One theoretical technique I’ve heard of for that is called “A-B-C murders”; instead of killing the person you want dead right off, you kill someone who shares a characteristic with that person. Then another person with that characteristic, then the person you actually want to kill. The idea is that the cops will then be looking for a pattern killer instead of someone with a grudge towards just one of the victims. In other words, say you want your uncle the rich Freemason dead so you can inherit; so you start killing Freemasons and include him in the victim list in the hopes the cops will be looking for someone with a fanatic hatred of Freemasons and not you, a person with a clear profit motive.
There was an 87th Precinct novel with that technique used. Googling reminds me that it was Mischief .
Whaaat? No. Everyone knows that pencil thin mustaches are for solving mysteries (too).
It’s already been said a number of times, but it bears repeating: SHUT THE EFF UP about what you did.
First corollary: Don’t keep trophies.
For our purposes, not having enough evidence to convict is as good as never being suspected in the first place. I’ve heard of a lot of killers getting caught because the victim’s hair or other DNA evidence was found in their car. (It kind of puts a hole in the ‘I’ve never seen her before’ defense.) Don’t use your own car. Don’t bring the victim into your house. Don’t leave anything of yours with the victim, but do burn everything you were wearing.
That’ll be after the Agatha Christie book, The ABC Murders. One of the first episodes of Castle used basically the same plot.
It was the pilot episode, I believe. Castle’s called in to help the police when an apparent serial killer starts setting up crime scenes that look like the ones from his books. He figures it out when he realizes that the killer got some of the details wrong - something a supposedly obsessed fan would never have done. Castle uses the opportunity to get himself an invitation to hang around and ‘help’ with more cases, which is the premise of the series.
Kill a whole bunch of people along with your target - crash their plane, bomb their bus, derail their train, arson their office tower, grenade their café terrace etc… No way anyone is going to try making connections and “who benefits from this” for each singular victim of a large scale tragedy.
Only the guilty say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Do NOT insist on getting back your cash deposit on the rental van.
Do not just before you kill someone, take out a big insurance policy on them. That just raises suspicions.
If you’re killing someone for their money, die yourself shortly afterwards, so your loved ones inherit.
Don’t act like this senior policeman did when asked by a Parliamentary committee if he’d ever received a bribe.
Have you ever seen a more guilty response in your life? Not that he’s actually been charged with anything - but if a reaction to a question could be used as evidence he’d SO be behind bars.
Mark Hoffman tried a variant of that. He killed the person he wanted to first (the guy who was about to expose him as a forger) with a bomb, then left another bomb at the house of the victim’s business partner which killed the wife of the partner. The police were looking into this angle, when Hoffman was severely injured in a third bomb in his own car.
So, add this to the rules: Don’t blow yourself up.
I don’t see guilt in the response.
If you want a REALLY guilty-seeming response, check out Jerry Sandusky (about 40 seconds in).
Man I do. In my opinion it was canned: he pre-empted her question before she’d finished asking, it seemed like he’d practiced it, and his response was ridiculously OTT compared to a simple “no”, which would have sufficed.
ETA: Sandusky’s response was, however, clearly not rehearsed and pretty damning.
- Don’t tell anyone.
- Don’t talk to the police. Don’t talk to the police. Don’t talk to the police. No matter how good an actor you think you are, don’t talk to the police.
- Construct a plausible alibi.
- If you’re doing it for revenge or something else personal, don’t be stupid and do it immediately upon getting angry. Wait YEARS. Act as if you’ve no interest in the person at all.
- If it takes the police fewer than three investigative steps to connect you to **any peice of the crime **you’ve done a shitty job.
If you commit a really serious crime that isn’t wholly random, they’re going to catch you unless you do a great job covering your tracks.
It is way hard. There was a thread here of a similar vein some years back, and a suggestion was made to buy a 150 lbs. hunk of meat, bone and skin, say a whole pig, and try disposing of it discreetly. A bled, gutted pig from the butcher won’t do, as blood and guts are a big part of the messy problem.
Bury the victim? You need a pretty huge, deep hole in the ground to hide a human body for good. Digging the grave means conspicuous, time-consuming work, and animals inconveniently like exhuming rotting meat and bones in the woods. The filled grave will be noticeable for quite some time, archaeologically for millennia, and a man-sized spot of disturbed soil is instantly interpreted as a grave. Flesh rots readily, but large dense bones such as femurs take a really long time to disappear, and can be DNA-matched for decades to centuries. Hair and fingernails keep quite well, too, while teeth are both extremely durable and identifiable.
As a dirty fingerprint is enough to create a DNA fingerprint, any speck of blood, hair, bone, skin etc. left behind will be condemning evidence. A true story: a mink farmer killed his wife, put the body through his industrial meat grinder, fed the minced body to his minks and cleaned the machine up. Still there were enough fragments of teeth found that the man was sentenced for murder.
If you are driving while drunk and you hit and kill a motorcycle rider, you can avoid drunk driving charges by having a drink after the accident. Just like this this RCMP officer did.
He is about to lose his job and he is being charged with obstruction of justice, but in the eyes of the law there is no evidence to charge him with alcohol related misconduct causing death.
They haven’t closed that stupid loophole yet? And I remember a CSI episode where someone told their dad? to do the same thing! Way to stay legal and classy guys (yeah I know its fiction but damn thats like an SVU character trying to help their friend cover up a rape).