In every murder case ever the victims are found in shallow graves, so that its obvious their bodies are there. Why don’t murders dig deeper graves?
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Cite please.
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Have you ever tried digging a six foot hole?
Maybe some do dig deeper, but you don’t hear about them because they don’t get caught.
It’s a lot of work digging a grave. Killers only go deep enough to conceal the body.
Murder is hard work. They’re tired.
Digging a deep hole can be very hard, tight packed soil, clay, rocks, roots, etc can all be factors. Add in the mental/emotional state some people would be in, and it’s easy to see how a person could tell themselves it’s deep enough. Esp for an unplanned murder.
Wag, ymmv, imho, etc…
It doesn’t sound as cool: “Three days of desperate searching for the 56-year-old came to a tragic end on Saturday afternoon when searchers found a perfectly normal depth grave …”
Murderers don’t always dig shallow graves.
Cite:
http://staugustine.com/stories/050407/news_4575213.shtml
As for why it is common to dig only a shallow grave, I had to dig grave for a tiny Shih-tzu dog once in soil that was more clay than dirt, and digging in some types of ground is very hard work. He ended up maybe 2 1/2 feet down. I wasn’t going any further, and this was a lot smaller of a hole than what you would need to bury a full-size human.
Covering a body with a couple of feet of dirt is plenty to hide it. The dig site itself though will be fairly obvious for a while, as it will be the only spot in the area with recently disturbed dirt (it doesn’t matter so much if it is deep or shallow at that point). Eventually, grass and foliage will grow over the grave site and it won’t be obvious.
When you dig a hole and fill it back in, you don’t compress the dirt anywhere near as much as it was when it came out of the ground. Over time the dirt will naturally compress, leaving an indentation on the ground. Some victim’s grave sites have been found by looking for depressions like this from helicopters.
Jack Straw from Wichita cut his buddy down,
And dug for him a shallow grave and laid his body down.
Half a mile from Tucson, by the morning light,
One man gone and another to go, my old buddy you’re moving much too slow.
– Bob Weir, Robert Hunter
Because top soil only goes down a foot to 18 inches (YMMV). After that, its hard clay. You can’t dig hard clay with a round head shovel for long as you’ll get tired & make almost no progress.
Now, if you have a pick axe with you, its doable, but it means:
*Chopping loose the clay at the bottom of the hole.
*Switching tools
*Shoveling out the loosened clay
*shoring up the sides
*Switching tools
*Chopping loose the clay at the bottom of the hole.
*Switching tools
*Shoveling out the loosened clay
*shoring up the sides
*Switching tools
~Repeat for Hours~
This is still a LOT of work, even if you have the endurance.
…of course if you dig the hole ahead of time, all bets are off.
There’s a lot more biological activity 2 feet down than there is 6 feet down. Decomposition is faster in a shallow grave. That might be considered a feature, not a bug in certain circumstances.
Depends on where you are.
Where I am you go down past topsoil you’re likely to hit sand, sand, and more sand (former lakeshore area). Which, yes, is easier to dig through than clay but is more likely to collapse on the digger which, in our hypothetical, might leave one person in a middle-deep grave and a murder victim still on the surface.
But yeah, digging a hole of any real depth in any soil type is hard work.
This illustrates why it’s best to commit your murders in coastal communities (especially down south) where the soil is sandy and you can dig a nice deep grave without too much trouble.
In the Midwest, you’re much more liable to strike heavy clay a few inches down, and lemme tell you, it’s a lot of work digging through that stuff. And when you’re nervous and rushed to begin with (and there are other things to do, like disposing of clothes and weapons and establishing an alibi), you don’t want to spend hours on gravedigging.
As I say, criminals are not very bright. If they were more intelligent, they would have a job and not need to lead a life of crime! (Or would be able to resolve their differences with other people in some manner other than murder.)
Aren’t some of these shallow graves just loose dirt and debris tossed on top of a dead body?
Police Officer: So, what are you doing with that backhoe?
Murderer: Oh, I just like to tow one around. Is there a problem?
Do you really want to spend a lot of time doing something very conspicuous in the middle of nowhere ? Any backpacker, lost kid, trekking couple or wilderness warden and the jig is up. If you dig the grave at night, the light might be seen from miles away whereas if you dig at night in pitch darkness you’ll get eaten by a grue.
Think of how wide a hole a hole is going to have to be which is as deep as you are tall if you’re going to be digging by hand and be able to easily climb out. That’s a lot of digging.
Between this and the evidence of unreliability of cement overshoes, it’s truly a PITA to get rid of a dead body w/o industrial grade machinery.
Most bodies that are found buried in shallow graves are probably not the work of career criminals, but people who have killed on the spur of the moment and are in a hurry to dispose of the evidence.
The Mafia or other organized criminals will either kill someone and just leave the body there, or if the body is in an inconvenient place just dump it. They depend on not being caught by not leaving evidence by disposing of the gun or other weapon. In many cases they want the body to be found as a warning. In cases where they want to conceal the fact that the killing has been committed at all, they will have some reliable way of disposing of the body.