HOWTO dispose of murdered bodies

Salim sez, "Ask Metafilter tackles the important question: 'How would you dispose of the body without getting caught?' - the asker insists that he is not a murderer, nor does he have any intent to murder... but I'm not sure about the responses. One for lovers of crime-fiction." From June, 2004 -- wonder how much of this is different today? "

First, be smart from the very beginning. Pulverize all teeth, burn off fingerprints, and disfigure the face. Forcing a DNA test to establish identity (if it ever comes to that) might introduce the legal/forensic hurdle that saves your ass down the line. An unidentifiable body can, in a pinch, be dressed in thrift store clothes and dropped in a bad part of town where the police are less likely to question it. I don't reommend that disposal method, I'm just saying an easily identifiable body is an even bigger threat than the opposite.
Assuming you have it inside a house where you can work on it a bit, the first thing you want to do is drain it of fluids. This will make it easier to cut up, and slow decomposition a little bit. The best way to do this quick and dirty is to perforate the body with a pointed knife, and then perform CPR on it. Cut the fronts of the thighs deep, diagonally, to slit the femoral arteries. Then pump the chest. The valves in the heart will still work when dead, and the springback of the ribcage can put apply a fair amount of suction to the artria. Do this in a tub. Plug the drain, and mingle lots of bleach with the bodily fluids before unplugging the drain to empty the tub. This should help control the stench of death, which would otherwise reek from your gutter gratings. Do everything you can to control odors. Plug in an ionizer, burn candles, leave bowls of baking soda everywhere. Ventilate the room in the middle of the night, but otherwise keep it closed. Keep the body under a plastic sheet while it's in the tub.

Suppose you killed somebody... (Thanks, Salim!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Science

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

joshmillard

I found the comments on the post to be nothing short of delightful. All of the users were polite, even when they disagreed. Perhaps it had more to do with fear of being tracked down by those with more… err… knowledge on the subject than anything else, but I found myself enjoying the user comments.

We’ve got a small but explicit set of guidelines on Ask Metafilter (I’m one of the mods at MeFi) for what flies and what doesn’t on the site, which was refined out of what had already existed for Metafilter proper when the then-new Q&A subsite was launched, so it’s partly an expression of that that the comments are on topic and polite. The site is, regardless of the occasionally bizarre subject matter, first and foremost aimed at utility — getting questions answered and problems solved — and so a lot of the generalized chat you might see, warts and and all, in an open forum aren’t part of what goes on there.

Ryan is right when he notes upthread that the question as stated probably wouldn’t fly today; when AskMe first went live it was very much an experiment, and fairly Wild West in that sense as people played around and pushed the envelope, but as it grew and took on a culture of its own somewhat apart from that of the main Metafilter content, the guidelines were firmed up a bit to keep the focus on utility a little bit clearer.

There’ve been offshoot sites to take up some of that hypothetical/chatfilter overflow — I started up Big Big Question as a tiny cousin site a while back for that specific purpose, even — but all in all the hazy line of what is and isn’t too chatty or hypothetical for the site remains one of the vocal, recurring discussions on the site. It’s an interesting challenge, and, yes, volume and utility both very much come into the direction of the site and the compromises we’ve made to balance one set of desires against another.

Anyway, it’s great to see that old comment get some love. It’s a landmark in Mefi history, and still makes me smile and grimace every time I read it.
semiotix

Metafilter, Fark, /., and now BoingBoing. I love these for the clever things people think of, but also for the inevitable flame wars in which people indignantly challenge one another’s murdering expertise. (“Um, have you ever tried to cut bone with a flensing knife, you MORON? Seriously, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, just STFU…”)

My $0.02: kill a complete stranger on a whim in some violent and quick way, and who cares what you do with the body. As long as you’re not standing directly in front of witnesses, and as long as you haven’t given it more than two seconds thought prior to the commission of the act, you’ll probably be fine. Just walk away, whistling a cheerful psychopathic tune.

Unfortunately, most people have “reasons” to kill other people, so, you know, your mileage may vary.
DeWynken

Feed the corpse to pigs. Or watch ‘Dexter’ for helpful hints.
Enochrewt

Absolutely no mention of Lye? I call shenanigins.
Jonathan Badger

Lye tends to act as preservative. Makes the body unfit for eating as well.

Scandinavians would disagree with the last part…
LindsayC

I found the comments on the post to be nothing short of delightful. All of the users were polite, even when they disagreed. Perhaps it had more to do with fear of being tracked down by those with more… err… knowledge on the subject than anything else, but I found myself enjoying the user comments.
Anonymous

has anyone on here ever killed a person?? i know loads of us have been tempted to
nehpetsE

re 35

i was thinking about it in terms of feeding to pigs.
If you have a bunch of hungry Scandinavians waiting for the “special stuff” go right ahead.
dbarak

Bookmarked for later…

This should be posted over on Lif- er… Bodyhacker.
guvnor

I’m surprised there hasn’t been any mention of the chicken-wire method.

If you’ve got a relatively deep body of water with fish in it, just buy a large quantity of fencing material, and that’s pretty much that.
Doug Nelson

Plastic barrels and duct tape worked for Dahmer. He got caught for other reasons, the barrels were a total surprise.
Chaos Engineer

I tried this and it didn’t work. Now what?
zale x

Some thoughts:

Depending on the moisture content of where your body is (buried?) it can either preserve or destroy it.

Even commercial crematoriums do not completely break down bodies – they are then put through a mesh sieve to break the pieced down further and there have been cases of these cremains being identified by forensic scientists. So DIY cremation is out.

To limit trace evidence exchange while transporting your body I’ve always thought that freezing it first might help – no leakage and freezing and thawing would help speed up the decomposition.

@#12 – nice to see someone else who reads Terry Pratchett… I’ve always liked the chicken wire and cement block method myself. A good addition to this though would be a depth finder. Make sure you sink your body in a very deep part of whatever body of water you chose and also put on LOTS of weight. You’d be surprised how many bodies get dragged up by fishermen after a while.

“Murder a stranger” and get away with it: poison a chocolate bar and give it to a homeless person – if you do it in the winter you even have reason to be wearing gloves.

Personally? Why miss this opportunity to start breeding and keeping dermestid beetles as a hobby?
pencilear

assuming I have a human body to dispose of that I personally may or may not have killed I have several practical methods that were not alluded to.

put the body in a concrete truck, allow to spin for some time to obliterate the body then pour concrete into foundations of building. this is an old mobster favorite.

the method I favor being as I live near a large body of deep sea water is to put the body into a 55 gallon drum, fill the drum with concrete and dump into the Puget sound. the concrete ensures that the body will sink the depth of the sound ensures that it will sink a long way. this method means I must be careful not to place the drum in a high current area because I wish to avoid it being swept onto a beach as the concrete and barrel will retard decay of the corpse.

then there is always the pig farm or my dad’s favorite, crab trap bait.
Rob_Scheflo

I’d do it the way the Chicago mob has done it. This chop them up and hide them in a building foundation, no one is going to tear apart a building to prove you killed someone.
caitifty

Stuff the body in a 44 gallon drum. Half-fill the remaining space with gravel. Load onto a boat. Punch a whole bunch of holes in the drum just before you roll it off the side, preferably somewhere with a lot of currents. After a couple of months of rolling back & forth on the sea floor, the gravel will have ground the bones and the fishies will have gotten the rest.
indiie

I second the “Dexter” comment. Power Saw to the People!
freeyourcrt

Here’s another two:

I had a new garbage disposal installed a few months back by a professional plumber. At the time I asked him about the available models and he mentioned that he had commercial grade disposals for restaurants that could dispose of anything as long as it could fit in the drainage hole. That got us to wondering if there was a good reason the stereotypical mob boss is also a restauranteur. I also family in law enforcement and they retell stories of crime scenes where empty jugs of acid are found littered around a bathtubs.
jjasper

Bones v. Dexter?
Hawkman

Of course who can forget the ol’ wood chipper trick in Fargo?
jeffjonez

Unwonderful.
Graydon

This whole conversation is so creepy and fascinating.

Dexter wins. every time
north

I took a forensic anthropology class in college which largely dealt with identifying people through remains (b.t.w. CSI is mostly b.s.).
Anyway, the prof said this question came up every semester and he devoted an entire class session to it.
Eventually we agreed the best way to dispose of a body was to break down the entire body through chemical means, essentially liquefying everything and then just pouring the “victim” down the drain.
Of course there was substantial barriers to this method – obtaining said chemicals was not easy and would leave a paper trail in most cases, handling these highly caustic chemicals was very dangerous and probably couldn’t be done safely anywhere outside a lab, and you still had to dispose of the liquid remains.
We were stumped at this point on how to pull it off, but the prof informed us that this very act was done almost daily, at the nearby medical school. It seems they disposed of their lab animals, mostly pigs I believe in this way. Stage a b&e, steal some computers, and then just slip your remains into the mixture…
/cue maniacal laughter
Mattz

A lot of folks remember the acid bath murderer, who famously tried to dissolve his victims in sulfuric acid to get rid of the evidence. One of my lecturers openly mocked this, then proceeded to share with us the REAL acid bath method: Hydrofluoric Acid. This stuff eats human flesh like napalm ( google for pictures at your own risk.) and can’t even be stored in glass containers because it destroys that too. In small quantities they use it to etch glass.
However it’s my belief that with a hacksaw, a large blue fertilizer drum and a supply of HF, you could toast away a body to it’s component molecules in a DNA unrecognisable state in a very short amount of time.
And they said this forensics degree wouldn’t teach me anything useful :D
Skeeper

Would the best place to put a corpse not be a freshly filled grave? Just dig up a little soil, dump body and cover with soil.
Beryllium

Should I point out that the word “murdered” in the headline is superfluous? These instructions should work for pretty much any body.
guy_jin

What’s wrong with good ol’ fire? if you live out in the country (where most people burn their trash) you could just chop up the body into hideable bits and burn it piecemeal.

the bones can be pulverized. Start with the skull, of course.
phead

“Even commercial crematoriums do not completely break down bodies – they are then put through a mesh sieve to break the pieced down further…”

Also there is the problem of the false parts that will never burn. I remember watching “life of grime” where the crematorium had a bucket full of hips and knees joints etc.

I think they all have a serial number on them, so any method that doesn’t involve checking the remains and doing a little angle grinder work is out.
Bloodboiler

This is one creepy comment thread. Fortunately there are so many people opting for methods that leave plenty of victim’s DNA everywhere or need hard to get chemicals that probably kill or disfigure the disposer.
guy_jin

@ 19: not really. “howto dispose of bodies” would just lead to a discussion of modern mortuary practice (and probably how screwed up it is.)
Takuan

elect it to Senate?
grayman23

Sledgehammer the skull and teeth as small as possible, bury deep and out of the way with a dusting of septic booster on it before you put the dirt back in the hole. From the tastacular book Contingency Cannibalism.
felsby

@ #40:
the “Tolne gang” in northern Jutland, Denmark, killed a man, buried him, digged him up, put him through a wood chopper and burned the remains in the stove. They mixed the ashes with cement and made a carport floor. Later, they torched the carport. But when the police found the dead manÂ´s wallet on the premises, they sawed up the concrete floor and a forensic with a phase contrast microscope concluded that the cement were full of human bone fragments. Conviction, jail.
acrocker

Um, I don’t know what to say Boingboing… thanks?
Takuan

Didn’t Samuel Clemmens write a good piece on this?
Roughing It maybe?
hassan-i-sabbah

Re hydrofluoric acid;See TV series Breaking Bad for a how NOT to-
http://www.amctv.com/originals/breakingbad/
The lesson- don’t use hydrofluoric acid in an enamel bath!
Ryan Waddell

Ahhh, Ask Metafilter used to be so much more fun back in the days when they allowed questions like this. Nowadays, it would get deleted very quickly as “hypothetical-filter”… Though I can understand why the rules are in place now, since AskMeFi has MUCH more volume than it used to.
hassan-i-sabbah

Re hydrofluoric acid;See TV series Breaking Bad for a how NOT to-
http://www.amctv.com/originals/breakingbad/
The lesson- don’t use hydrofluoric acid in an enamel bath!
jesseg

I’d drop the feet in the waters off British Columbia.
Michael

Mm. Delicious long pork.
nanuq

When I worked in the prison system, we had a stepfather whose stepdaughter disappeared but it took forever for him to end up confessing what he did with the body. He said he placed the body in a plastic bag and took it to a sanitary landfill. He told them that he was disposing of a pet’s body and that was that. Even with the confession, they never found her.
nehpetsE

Lye tends to act as preservative. Makes the body unfit for eating as well.

might help quell the stench if that’s your short term goal
CommieNeko

What’s wrong with a clever, a garbage disposal and lots of hot water? Isn’t that the way they did it in EC comics?
A New Challenger

All I can think of is one of the better scenes in the film Donnie Brasco.
cha0tic

Whatever you do. When you go to do the murder or dump the remains. Leave your mobile at home and take the GPS out of the car. Your mobi’ will provide you with a nice electronic alibi for being home all eveing and the GPS won’t give you away.
Thebes

Go out to middle of nowhere.
Dig a hole.
Make it deep.
Deposit body.
Fill in hole.

If you follow these simple steps the odds of the body being recovered without your help are minimal. Do this well, a few extra hours of work could save decades of incarceration.
Takuan

leave Joe Pesci at home though.
Gilbert Wham

Perfect murder? Ask a fireman: get them so drunk they can’t see, put the chip pan on, leave surreptitiously.
cstatman

totally +++ for the “Snatch” quote,

and Semiotix comment #8 rings in my head. Truly, shoot, walk away. why dispose.

Of course, I am guessing it is cause you bumped someone you know, for some nefarious reason, and do not want to get caught.

As a younger, angrier man, there were people I may have wanted out of the way. However, in middle age, I realize, aging is the best revenge. we all kill ourselves one way or another. None of us gets off this ride alive.

so I can wait….

:)

btw – lye is messy. 55gal barrel – quickcrete – lake.
g.park

This + “Grow Your Own Fake ID’s” = Win.

I think the next one should be HOWTO Hire Trustworthy Henchmen, followed immediately by HOWTO Hollow out a Volcano for Use as a Lair.
jonathan_v

I’m surprised Hans Reiser didn’t chime in. He pretty much got away with it.
joshmillard

I found the comments on the post to be nothing short of delightful. All of the users were polite, even when they disagreed. Perhaps it had more to do with fear of being tracked down by those with more… err… knowledge on the subject than anything else, but I found myself enjoying the user comments.

We’ve got a small but explicit set of guidelines on Ask Metafilter (I’m one of the mods at MeFi) for what flies and what doesn’t on the site, which was refined out of what had already existed for Metafilter proper when the then-new Q&A subsite was launched, so it’s partly an expression of that that the comments are on topic and polite. The site is, regardless of the occasionally bizarre subject matter, first and foremost aimed at utility — getting questions answered and problems solved — and so a lot of the generalized chat you might see, warts and and all, in an open forum aren’t part of what goes on there.

Ryan is right when he notes that the question as stated probably wouldn’t fly today; when AskMe first went live it was very much an experiment, and fairly Wild West in that sense as people played around and pushed the envelope, but as it grew and took on a culture of its own somewhat apart from that of the main Metafilter content, the guidelines were firmed up a bit to keep the focus on utility a little bit clearer.

There’ve been offshoot sites to take up some of that hypothetical/chatfilter overflow — I started up Big Big Question as a tiny cousin site a while back for that specific purpose, even — but all in all the hazy line of what is and isn’t too chatty or hypothetical for the site remains one of the vocal, recurring discussions on the site. It’s an interesting challenge, and, yes, volume and utility both very much come into the direction of the site and the compromises we’ve made to balance one set of desires against another.

Anyway, it’s great to see that old comment get some love. It’s a landmark in Mefi history, and still makes me smile and grimace every time I read it.
joshmillard

I found the comments on the post to be nothing short of delightful. All of the users were polite, even when they disagreed. Perhaps it had more to do with fear of being tracked down by those with more… err… knowledge on the subject than anything else, but I found myself enjoying the user comments.

We’ve got a small but explicit set of guidelines on Ask Metafilter (I’m one of the mods at MeFi) for what flies and what doesn’t on the site, which was refined out of what had already existed for Metafilter proper when the then-new Q&A subsite was launched, so it’s partly an expression of that that the comments are on topic and polite. The site is, regardless of the occasionally bizarre subject matter, first and foremost aimed at utility — getting questions answered and problems solved — and so a lot of the generalized chat you might see, warts and and all, in an open forum aren’t part of what goes on there.

Ryan is right when he notes that the question as stated probably wouldn’t fly today; when AskMe first went live it was very much an experiment, and fairly Wild West in that sense as people played around and pushed the envelope, but as it grew and took on a culture of its own somewhat apart from that of the main Metafilter content, the guidelines were firmed up a bit to keep the focus on utility a little bit clearer.

There’ve been offshoot sites to take up some of that hypothetical/chatfilter overflow — I started up Big Big Question as a tiny cousin site a while back for that specific purpose, even — but all in all the hazy line of what is and isn’t too chatty or hypothetical for the site remains one of the vocal, recurring discussions on the site. It’s an interesting challenge, and, yes, volume and utility both very much come into the direction of the site and the compromises we’ve made to balance one set of desires against another.

Anyway, it’s great to see that old comment get some love. It’s a landmark in Mefi history, and still makes me smile and grimace every time I read it.

(I hope this doesn’t go through twice; I’ve been experiencing some bumpiness with BB’s comment posting.)
dainel

You could use C4 to blow the body to bits. With bits small enough, it will essentially disappear. Oh, wait, that didn’t work. Perhaps they should have put the body on a boat, and push it to the middle of a lake before blowing it up?
Takuan

it’s all about the prep
pupdog

Other than the being in jail part
Oskar

I would just like to point out that even if you were able to dispose of the body permanently, that does not necessarily mean you are home free. You can still be convicted of murder, even if there is no body. See for instance Hans Reiser. So it would be smart to do this to someone you did not know.
joshmillard

Ack! The hose seems to have come unclogged at last.
mgfarrelly

Oh dear.

As a young adult librarian I’ve gotten some truly weird reference questions. This reminds me of the very cheery, very nice kid who asked “What’s the best way to kill someone?” He immediately followed up by adding “It’s for a story I’m writing.” Cue nervous laughter from both of us.

If asking questions like this were reason to be suspect the enitre writing staffs on CSI, BONES, LAW & ORDER, MONK, PSYCH and countless other crime shows would be on death row.
Takuan

of course it did, once they realized we were onto them they moved on.
V

“You’re always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together…

And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it’s no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies’ digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don’t want to go sievin’ through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, ‘as greedy as a pig’.”
LYNDON

There’s and Umberto Eco essay where he imagines stuffing the victim of a crime of passion into a large bag and leaving it on the luggage carousel of some particular major European train station, where it can revolve unnoticed forever.

I also saw a crazy Australian film where the victim was bronzed and placed in a public park.

US readers may know of a chap accused of killing his wife in New Zealand and skipping the country. Her body was in the car parked in front of the house. If he hadn’t abandoned his daughter at Melbourne airport I hate to think how long it would have been before anyone started looking; and in the end it was the media prompted the police to look at the car.
Kay the Complainer

Is it just me, or is there a sinister tone creeping into these HOWTO posts?
MichaelRN

Plus infinity for the Brick Top quote from “Snatch”.
alisong76

Lyndon – yeah, and the car had been ignored by the cops for so long that by the time they got to it, any forensic evidence that may have been there was useless. The media people had been using the car as a sort-of desk while covering the story.

(Also, he abandoned the child at Southern Cross railway station, not the airport. Small detail :-))