How would you dispose of / hide a body?

[Rixus]

In a completely hypothetical situation where you were required to do this, what would you do?

I'm sure everyone has thought about it, but I'd guess that no method I have thought up, however intricate, would result in anything less than a very lengthy prison sentence.

 

[Rixus]

The ideas I've had are:

1) Simplest method is to bag it up, take it up onto the nearby mountains as far away from civilisation as I can in the middle of the night. Dig as a deep a grave as I can (hopefully at least 6 feet) tossing it in and filling in the hole. Top top layers would be grass, so carefully remove those and try to put them back on top.

2) I'd need help for this one. Set it in concrete. Take it onto a boat and sail out at least a few miles to sea. Chuck it overboard. But I'm sure the sea water would erode the concrete eventually, plus I have no boat and no idea how to drive one. And I doubt anyone is going to help me load a big block on concrete onto one.

3) This is the daftest I can come up with and assumes no one will come to my home. Ever. Hang the body over the bath to drain of blood first. Once fully drained, cut it up into manageable pieces. Obviously completely bleach the bathtub at this point. I'm going to have to cook all the pieces enough to cleanly remove all flesh, blend it and flush it. Now to grind all the bones up with various hammers until completely powdered. Hopefully the pieces will all be powdered enough to be flushed also. I think this plan is too silly to be even worth tearing apart.

 

[Turnevies]

Legend says, hungry pigs digest entire dead bodies including teeth.

 

[EditorOne]

"I'm sure everyone has thought about it,"

Ummm - no.

It is, though, a thorny problem and failure to get it done has put a lot of people in jail. Generally, intricate is bad. Intricate means more steps and more people, and that's never good. (Three people can keep a secret - if two of them are dead.)

There was an episode in "The Sopranos" where Steven Van Zandt, as Silvio Dante, Tony Soprano's #1 guy, is reading a book on household cleaning. He routinely faced the problem of taking forensic countermeasures, and, as a professional Mafioso, devoted the time to study. I about rolled on the floor laughing when they dropped that in the scene, no discussion or anything, just put it there for you to see and appreciate or see and not get it, either way.

To the point, though: Destruction by natural means is simple, and that's alligators. Everything else is too "iffy." You just can't count on coyotes, buzzards draw too much attention to themselves, overboard is much overrated (the sea unpredictably gives back what you give it). Can't count on sharks being where you need them. Alligators, though, are easy to find in parts of the country and can be counted on to do the right thing in short order.

You could also pack the body in a crate and ship it to a third world country. While not aimed at concealing a crime, the British army in 1815 packed up the dead body of General Michael Pakenham, killed at the Battle of New Orleans, pickled in alcohol in a barrel, for transport back to England. Somehow it ended up in Chester, South Carolina, two years later. By the time something like that has been sorted out, time has damaged forensic evidence.

 

[EditorOne]

Oh, and then there's wood chippers. Just get one powerful enough, though. Nothing worse than a wood chipper clogged with muscle and fat.

 

[TheManBeyond]

i would pretend i'm 25% hipster and get away with it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxqsMJy5HeI

 

[Rixus]

Alligators are difficult to find in this country. I also heard they won't consume human meat (something about predators not being as tasty and herbivores), but you can cover them in enough beef or pork to get them to tuck. That may be completely bogus, though. A good pyre like they did in old times might work - but the smoke and the smell might alert all those nearby.

 

[Jennywocky]

Your ideas are not bad, Rixus. I just want to know how your boss managed to piss you off this much.

The ideas I've had are:

1) Simplest method is to bag it up, take it up onto the nearby mountains as far away from civilisation as I can in the middle of the night. Dig as a deep a grave as I can (hopefully at least 6 feet) tossing it in and filling in the hole. Top top layers would be grass, so carefully remove those and try to put them back on top.

I thought of that first. In general, mountains and burial under rockfall in isolated area is a pretty good shot. or a sinkhole after which you drop some rocks.

2) I'd need help for this one. Set it in concrete. Take it onto a boat and sail out at least a few miles to sea. Chuck it overboard. But I'm sure the sea water would erode the concrete eventually, plus I have no boat and no idea how to drive one. And I doubt anyone is going to help me load a big block on concrete onto one.

eventually, sure, but if the body rots/dissolves in the water, not a big deal. if it gets reduced to bones, those are not going to float, and who will be skimming the bottom of the ocean for a body up close?

There was the case of Lacey Peterson where it seems her killer encased her head and hands/feet in concrete and sank her in the bay... but her body floated back to surface (sans head, hands, and feet) once the soft tissues dissolved enough. It was bad too since she had been eight months pregnant, so there was a water coffin birth so to speak. Anyway, the body would only float if there were significant parts left that contained gasses / air.

The ruins of the Titanic are kind of eerie, since the bacteria and water content basically eroded the bodies but left the shoes and some other clothing elements there (for right now)... so you can see where the bodies were but the bodies are gone.

3) This is the daftest I can come up with and assumes no one will come to my home. Ever. Hang the body over the bath to drain of blood first. Once fully drained, cut it up into manageable pieces. Obviously completely bleach the bathtub at this point. I'm going to have to cook all the pieces enough to cleanly remove all flesh, blend it and flush it. Now to grind all the bones up with various hammers until completely powdered. Hopefully the pieces will all be powdered enough to be flushed also. I think this plan is too silly to be even worth tearing apart.

If you have enough privacy, this can work. You just don't want the neighbors to wonder what the hell you're up to with all that nose of grinding or pulverizing late at night. And of course you need some time.

People have gone the lye/acid route in plastic barrels as well, but of course you need privacy and time for that as well, and then you have to dispose of the barrel.

Alternately, you can just eat the body over time a la Hannibal. If you know how to prepare and store the meat so it doesn't look human.


- isolated area w/ woodchipper. I've seen where someone sprayed the contents out over a stream, but I think they left some on the shore and they were found by someone.

- feed to animals in remote areas. Gators or sharks are probably good bets, they eat quickly and no one's gonna randomly want to go through their stomachs. Ever heard of air burial too, in Tibet? Really crazy stuff -- they basically butcher the body and feed it to vultures, bones and all, and the body is completely gone at the end.

- Mummify/desiccate body and hang in an exhibit or haunted house display so people think it's fake. there have been some bodies discovered this ways decades after they've been hanging/stored there because people thought they were fake but they were actually real bodies.

- desiccate body and store in a wall or something.

- burn down another building so a bunch of people die and toss in that body as well. (Yeah, people are not gonna want to hang out with me either. But hey, this is brainstorming, right?)

- dump the body in a casket awaiting burial, so it is buried with that body. (or add the body to a grave or even a mixed graveyard site that is known to have remains already in it.)

Basically, with bodies:

- you don't want any forensic evidence of YOU attached to that body in any way, even if it is discovered.

- if you can change the composition of the body so it no longer seems like a body, people will not look further.

- if you can put the body someplace where bodies are SUPPOSED to be, then people also will not question it.

- rid yourself of it in a place where few people will look/go.

- also make the body hard to identify, even if it is found. remove fingerprints, teeth, etc. Investigators who are any good will be able to tell this was your goal but it doesn't help them investigate. DNA testing is fine, but only if they know whose DNA to compare it to.


EDIT: Just read the rest of the thread. Looks like some of these ideas already came up.

Gators over in Africa or someplace just ate some big-game hunter guy a few weeks back. They tracked him to a river, where his pack was, and there were gators in the river. They killed a few and found human remains in their stomach -- DNA testing verified it was him.

 

[nanook]

Why hide it? Put it on a stake. Let it be a warning to the other authorities.

 

[Nebulous]

3) This is the daftest I can come up with and assumes no one will come to my home. Ever. Hang the body over the bath to drain of blood first. Once fully drained, cut it up into manageable pieces. Obviously completely bleach the bathtub at this point. I'm going to have to cook all the pieces enough to cleanly remove all flesh, blend it and flush it. Now to grind all the bones up with various hammers until completely powdered. Hopefully the pieces will all be powdered enough to be flushed also. I think this plan is too silly to be even worth tearing apart.

I thought Jeffrey Dahmer did something similar, and I went to his Wikipedia page to double check..

By 1991, fellow residents of the Oxford Apartments had complained of the smells emanating from Apartment 213, in addition to the sounds of falling objects and the occasional sound of a chainsaw.[116] The manager of the Oxford Apartments, Sopa Princewill, did contact Dahmer in response to these complaints on several occasions, to which Dahmer initially excused the odors from his apartment as being caused by his freezer breaking, causing the contents to become "spoiled". On another occasion, he informed the manager that the reason for the resurgence of the odor was that several of his tropical fish had recently died.

Hah.
& He did cut up bodies in his bathtub. Then he'd put the meat in acid.. or in his fridge. He kept a bunch of bones and skulls though.
He had a TON of evidence all over his house.

A bit off topic. But ... Dahmer has one heck of a Wikipedia page. This is just a small bit but the whole thing is worth a read. Weird stuff.

Spoiler

On the afternoon of May 26, 1991, Dahmer encountered a 14-year-old named Konerak Sinthasomphone on Wisconsin Avenue; he approached the youth with an offer of money to accompany him to his apartment to pose for Polaroid pictures. According to Dahmer, Sinthasomphone—the younger brother of the boy whom he had molested in 1988—was initially reluctant to the proposal, before changing his mind and accompanying Dahmer to his apartment, where the youth posed for two pictures in his underwear before Dahmer drugged him into unconsciousness and performed oral sex on him. On this occasion, Dahmer drilled a single hole into Sinthasomphone's skull, through which he injected muriatic acid into the frontal lobe.[118] Before Sinthasomphone fell unconscious, Dahmer led the boy into his bedroom, where the nude body of 31-year-old Tony Hughes, whom Dahmer had killed three days earlier, lay naked on the floor.[119] According to Dahmer, he "believed [that Sinthasomphone] saw this body," yet did not react to seeing the bloated corpse—likely because of the effects of the sleeping pills he had ingested and the muriatic acid Dahmer had injected into his skull. Sinthasomphone soon became unconscious, whereupon Dahmer drank several beers while lying alongside Sinthasomphone before leaving his apartment to drink at a bar, then purchase more alcohol.[120]

In the early morning hours of May 27, Dahmer returned towards his apartment to discover Sinthasomphone sitting naked on the corner of 25th and State, talking in Laotian, with three hysterical young women standing near him.[121] Dahmer approached the trio and explained to the women that Sinthasomphone (whom he referred to by an alias) was his lover, and attempted to lead him to his apartment by the arm. The three women dissuaded Dahmer, explaining they had phoned 911.[122] Upon the arrival of two officers named John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish, Dahmer's demeanor relaxed: he informed the officers that Sinthasomphone was his 19-year-old boyfriend, that he had drank too much following a quarrel, and that he frequently behaved in this manner when intoxicated. The three women were exasperated and when one of the trio attempted to indicate to one of the officers that Sinthasomphone was bleeding from his buttocks and that he had seemingly struggled against Dahmer's attempts to walk him to his apartment, the officer harshly informed her to "butt out,"[123] "shut the hell up"[124] and to not interfere, adding the incident was "domestic."[125]

Against the protests of the three women, the officers simply covered Sinthasomphone with a towel and walked him to Dahmer's apartment where, in an effort to verify his claim that he and Sinthasomphone were lovers, Dahmer showed the officers the two semi-nude Polaroid pictures he had taken of the youth the previous evening. The officers later reported having noted a strange scent reminiscent of excrement inside the apartment (this odor emanated from the decomposing body of Hughes).[126] Dahmer stated that to investigate this, one officer simply "peeked his head around the bedroom but really didn't take a good look." The officers then left, with a departing remark that Dahmer "take good care" of Sinthasomphone.[124][127] Had they conducted a background check upon Dahmer, it would have revealed that he was a convicted child molester under probation.[128] Upon the departure of the two police officers from his apartment, Dahmer again injected muriatic acid into Sinthasomphone's brain; on this second occasion, the injection proved fatal. The following day, May 28, Dahmer took a day's leave from work to devote himself to the dismemberment of the bodies of Sinthasomphone and Hughes, whose decomposing body had been lying in his bedroom as police brought Sinthasomphone back to his apartment. He retained both victims' skulls.[129]

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I mean my mind's going right to Hannibal but

That's just me

[bimgx=277]https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-01/27/18/enhanced/webdr10/enhanced-5290-1422403098-13.png[/bimgx]

A great way to throw off suspicion is to invite the FBI over for dinner & serve em the person they're looking for.. Maybe try to hold back from the cannibal puns though.


-

In all seriousness though I'd probably deal with it by using whatever parts I can, and then finding a safe way to dispose of what I won't use.
Try out some new recipes, feed parts you don't want to your dog or the local wildlife.. carve some knives out of leg bones, use tendons/sinew for string and tying arrowheads, etc.. Just like using as much of a deer or other animal as possible.
You could make some really nice jewelry.
Blood tastes good with chocolate.
Grind up or compost bones and use as fertilizer in your garden.
Make sure to do something about the teeth and other things that'd be noticeably human.
Not sure what I'd do with the skin though... I'd prefer a deer hide rug on my living room floor..

You also sell the entire body on the black market. I'm definitely not an expert on the details of how to go about that though.



..aaaand if the government takes me away it's because of this post.

 

[Reluctantly]

Using chemicals to break down the flesh into a liquid form that could be flushed down would be a decent start. I can't see much going wrong with putting a body in the ground and building a house over it either. The chances of the house getting demolished in my lifetime is slim and even if it did to pave way for another house or building, the body would still have to be dug up. But if I was going to do that, I'd remove all the teeth of course, just in case the bones were found.

 

[Reluctantly]

Why hide it? Put it on a stake. Let it be a warning to the other authorities.

As cool as that sounds, unless you have the capable firepower of a military-sized battalion, the police will get you and drag you away to rot your life away in a smelly concrete cell with your friendly neighborhood rapist as your bunk mate. Sounds very fun. Unless you mean to go out in a blaze of guns, taking out as many people as you can; I guess that would at least be interesting and there's no prison at the end of it.

 

[Rixus]

Your ideas are not bad, Rixus. I just want to know how your boss managed to piss you off this much.

Not my boss this time. Maybe customers some days - but what I'd prefer to do to them is dress up in scraggy overalls, put on a hockey mask and walk into their office waving a chainsaw about them until they involuntarily urinate. No, I haven't thought about killing anyone. Lately.

I thought of that first. In general, mountains and burial under rockfall in isolated area is a pretty good shot. or a sinkhole after which you drop some rocks.

I'm limited to mostly soft grassy mountains. But I'm sure 10 or 20 minutes drive into the mountains should be far enough. The main problem here is that the dirt is quite soft and if you disturb it, you might have it wash away a few feet of dirt. So gotta make sure it's really deep and filled in correctly.

eventually, sure, but if the body rots/dissolves in the water, not a big deal. if it gets reduced to bones, those are not going to float, and who will be skimming the bottom of the ocean for a body up close?

There was the case of Lacey Peterson where it seems her killer encased her head and hands/feet in concrete and sank her in the bay... but her body floated back to surface (sans head, hands, and feet) once the soft tissues dissolved enough. It was bad too since she had been eight months pregnant, so there was a water coffin birth so to speak. Anyway, the body would only float if there were significant parts left that contained gasses / air.

The ruins of the Titanic are kind of eerie, since the bacteria and water content basically eroded the bodies but left the shoes and some other clothing elements there (for right now)... so you can see where the bodies were but the bodies are gone.

That's why I said encase the whole body in concrete. Don't want bits of it washing up somewhere. But once it erodes, its going to be pretty well preserved. Could always drilled some holes in to allow the fish to get in and have a nibble?

There's supposedly a body in one of the lakes in these mountains somewhere. A guy killed some woman and dumped her up there somewhere but wouldn't tell where. He did the time anyway but they never found the body. Or so the urban legend goes (haven't been able to verify this one so it's probably as real as the White Lady in every local farm in the world).

If you have enough privacy, this can work. You just don't want the neighbours to wonder what the hell you're up to with all that nose of grinding or pulverising late at night. And of course you need some time.

The neighbours are probably just used to weird crap from me so I doubt they'd notice.

People have gone the lye/acid route in plastic barrels as well, but of course you need privacy and time for that as well, and then you have to dispose of the barrel.

Ah, the favourite method used in Breaking Bad. I believe a program called Myth Busters tried it with pig carcasses and found that no acid available to the public would be strong enough. So trying to procure some industrial strength acids might raise some eyebrows. I'm sure there's something you could mix up out of household chemicals if you had enough knowledge - but in Breaking Bad they deliberately got some of the chemistry wrong so as to be able to tell the story without giving anyone any workable ideas.

Alternately, you can just eat the body over time a la Hannibal. If you know how to prepare and store the meat so it doesn't look human.

But you've still got the bones to dispose of.

- isolated area w/ woodchipper. I've seen where someone sprayed the contents out over a stream, but I think they left some on the shore and they were found by someone.

Might work - but very, very messy. Plus you'd leave blood and DNA everywhere. That's why I drained the blood in the bath and bleached it clean.

- feed to animals in remote areas. Gators or sharks are probably good bets, they eat quickly and no one's gonna randomly want to go through their stomachs. Ever heard of air burial too, in Tibet? Really crazy stuff -- they basically butcher the body and feed it to vultures, bones and all, and the body is completely gone at the end.

I'd have to take a plane to get to any of those. And I don't see me getting a body onto a plane in luggage. Unless the legend of pigs eating everything is true, it's not going to work. Chickens will eat anything, though. Just have to grind it up small enough for them.

- Mummify/desiccate body and hang in an exhibit or haunted house display so people think it's fake. there have been some bodies discovered this ways decades after they've been hanging/stored there because people thought they were fake but they were actually real bodies.

Never thought of that. But surely it's going to found some day. In my art class in high school, there was a skeleton hung up on a stand to draw. No one knew whether it was real or not, so you could do that bones and everyone would assume it fake.

- desiccate body and store in a wall or something.

It's gonna be found one day. There was a serial killer who buried his kids under the foundations of his house and they were eventually found.

- burn down another building so a bunch of people die and toss in that body as well. (Yeah, people are not gonna want to hang out with me either. But hey, this is brainstorming, right?)

That works as long as it isn't too obvious that the body wasn't meant to be there and didn't die in the fire. Have to look up whether dead bodies burn differently to ones that freshly burn alive. And I'll hang out with you - imagine if we worked together. Mwhahaha.

- dump the body in a casket awaiting burial, so it is buried with that body. (or add the body to a grave or even a mixed graveyard site that is known to have remains already in it.)

As long as it isn't an open casket. Just tell people that myth that dead bodies weigh twice as much as living ones. Wonder if that's where that comes from Or you need a corrupt undertaker and a lot of money. And then you've got him to dispose of afterwards anyway to keep the secret, so you're back to square one.

- also make the body hard to identify, even if it is found. remove fingerprints, teeth, etc. Investigators who are any good will be able to tell this was your goal but it doesn't help them investigate. DNA testing is fine, but only if they know whose DNA to compare it to.

I forgot to mention that part. Even with the burial or sea disposal, still smash to face in to remove the teeth, and sand off the fingers. Get rid of the teeth? Just drop one in a series of bin along a few streets.

Gators over in Africa or someplace just ate some big-game hunter guy a few weeks back. They tracked him to a river, where his pack was, and there were gators in the river. They killed a few and found human remains in their stomach -- DNA testing verified it was him.

So it will work? TV lied to me. Again.

 

[Cognisant]

Boil it in a barrel until the flesh falls off the bones, grind up the now very soft tissues and use them as fertilizer, nobody's going to be too surprised by the smell:

Spoiler

Mix it in with the soil well so it decomposes quickly.

As for the bones, dehydrate, hammer/saw to pieces then burn in a nice hot fire, even if they're not completely destroyed the remains will be unrecognizable as human bones if you've done it right.

Edit: Mix the ash in with the fertilizer, you're going to have a great veggie patch.

 

[Pyropyro]

eat it. It's good protein

 

[nanook]

If the body is still alive, give it a good scare and it may hide itself.

Convince them they are stupid and they may go live with all the other disposable trash.

 

[BronzeBlue]

Pack a clean set of clothing. Take the body somewhere remote and airy. Burn old clothes and the body, including what you put it in to carry it. Change into fresh clothing (I guess timing is important because you don't want any evidence of the corpse's remains on you. So preferably after the next step, but eh). Scatter the ashes in the wind, bury them or dump them in a large body of water. Go take a shower or bath and put current clothes in laundry to get rid of smell of burning.

The body is gone and you shouldn't be traceable via left over DNA or fingerprints etc. You won't smell of fire, suspicious chemicals or corpse either. I probably missed something though.

Oh right. I forgot the bones. Obviously, I'd be crap at getting away with murder. Hmm, maybe you could grind them up into dust. Either scatter too or make something out of it. I read something about how you could use ground up bone to make a sword but I don't remember specifics.

Also, don't use a body bag unless it's fabric. Plastic would melt and leave more traces and I'm guessing non-plastic material would leave more 'dusty' residue. You could go for that trick Cleopatra is supposed to have used to sneak into Caesar's camp; roll the body up in carpet. Just make sure it's big enough to cover it. Bodily fluids like blood shouldn't leak through if you can wrap the body enough times. Unless it's bleeding a lot. Uh. Maybe go for a non-bloody death/minimal bleeding.

 

[Jennywocky]

Oh, the good ol' "Hey, nuthin' but me carrying this big ol' lumpy carpet out to my van at 3am, nuthin' to see here!" trick, eh?

 

[BronzeBlue]

Well, getting rid of a body will always be awkward unless you do it often enough that you have a foolproof system. I mean, transportation of the body wasn't really addressed anywhere, just the actual disposal method. So why not? :P

I didn't specifically mention a time anyway, so being found out before getting rid of evidence could be an issue for all methods in the thread. Potentially, anything could set off alarm bells unless weird behaviour is expected of you and/or the body doesn't have to be moved (much) in the first place. I doubt putting the body in a body bag would be less conspicuous.

 

[nanook]

You should totally starve that body before you but it to rest. For the average american you could reduce the suspicious material by 50%. The rest would be feces and urin.

 

[Reluctantly]

I didn't specifically mention a time anyway, so being found out before getting rid of evidence could be an issue for all methods in the thread. Potentially, anything could set off alarm bells unless weird behaviour is expected of you and/or the body doesn't have to be moved (much) in the first place. I doubt putting the body in a body bag would be less conspicuous.

You might be surprised what you can get away with by acting casual.

https://youtu.be/UTq-BgAs0Fs

 

[BronzeBlue]

You might be surprised what you can get away with by acting casual.

https://youtu.be/UTq-BgAs0Fs

Good point. Which means that carrying around a lumpy carpet could totally work.

 

[Minute Squirrel]

One word. Volcano. Two words. Active volcano.

 

[Creeping Death]

You'd need to make it easier to transport to your disposal site first. Assuming you killed them indoors, take them to the bathroom, sever major arteries with a box cutter to bleed them out in the bathtub. Use a hacksaw, not an electric saw that can be heard easier, and dismember into ten sections: head, torso, 2 upper arms, 2 forearms, 2 upper legs, 2 lower legs. This will be significantly easier to transport in a couple travel or duffel bags after you've arranged the parts in trash bags or something.. there shouldn't be a problem draining/rinsing away the blood in the shower. If so, you could always use a higher quality drain cleaner, like Rooto sold at Ace Hardware. Ace and True Value are waayyy better for chemicals than Home Depot and Lowe's.
Pick up a dog from the pound.
In the woods or some secluded area, dig a hole, throw in remains. Fill hole halfway. Shoot the dog, throw the dog in. Fill the rest of the hole.

Disposal is a step that often seems pointless, Editor One's first post points out flaws in disposal.
Nothing wrong with robbery gone bad. Get an AR-7 (.22lr) and make a pvc suppressor, shoot them a couple times in the head. Do some ransacking, take a few small valuables and credit cards. Dump them soon afterwards, storm drain, river etc. Same with the AR-7, which is an easy disassembly. Run a file thoroughly thru the barrel before tossing and meticulously drill away the serial number on the trigger assembly.