How To Properly Dispose Of A Body? Don’t Ask The Internet Questions You’re Not Comfortable Getting Answers To…

September 5th, 2008 | by Ginnie | (Visited 238,449 times)

Yikes! I remember growing up, we always had those discussions in our groups about stupid questions like how to get away with something.

How to sneak out at night?

Stuff your blankets in the shape of a body and quietly crawl through the window.

How to cheat on a test?

Write the answers on your palm.

How to get away with murder?

Someone would always bring up something from a prison movie or something where some stealthy murder weapon was used. An icicle so the evidence melts, etc. That was about as far as we got. Not actually planning a murder, we didn’t really need to go much further than baseless conjecture and entertaining TV plot twists.

For example, if you’ve watched Guy Ritchie’s movie “Snatch”, you got a disturbingly funny and unusual answer from Brick Top:

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 sh*t, 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”.

But then if you’ve seen his other films like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, there’s always a collection of great quotes to be gleamed from those movies.

David Lamar Anthony - How NOT To Dispose Of A Body

As I was thinking about this, it reminded me of the bodies police found buried in oil drums out in Buckeye, Arizona. It used to be the boonies, but as the Arizona real estate housing bubble hit and even the boonies had new development going up for homes, Walmarts, Costcos, and other cookie cutter commercial landmarks, the oil drums were discovered by a backhoe. A family member had just moved into the new homes across the street from this location and watched the construction screech to a halt while the investigation went on:

On October 18, 2005, construction workers who had been contracted to work on the building of a Walmart store found two trash drums hidden under a tree in Buckeye, forty miles from downtown Phoenix. Skeletal remains were found inside the drums.

Police were called to investigate the area, and, after collecting the skeletons, DNA testing was performed, confirming that the skeletons belonged to Donna Anthony and her daughter, who was fourteen at the time of her death. On October 31, police investigating the area found a third trash bin, with more remains inside. The third trash can was found with help of a metal detection machine that had been loaned by the Phoenix Police Department from the United States Air Force. Maricopa county sheriff Joe Arpaio, a particularly outspoken sheriff, told the Arizona Republic that he was “99 percent sure” that the remains inside the bin belonged to Donna Anthony’s son Richard, who was twelve at the time of his death.

But then you go and ask the internet, what they would do? You get some very scary answers.

One answer that came up from this Metafilter post posing the question, “Suppose you killed somebody… How would you dispose of the body without getting caught?” made me realize that you never ask the internet a question you don’t intend to get a detailed answer on:

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.

If you want to bury, I recommend seperating the body into several parts, and burying them seperately. For one thing, it’s easier to dig a deep enough hole for a head than for an entire body. this reduces your chances of being discovered while you are actually outside and digging the grave.
That is the one thing you can’t do inside the doors of your house, and represents a vulnerable moment you want to keep brief, under 2 hours. Do it between 3 and 5 am. It’s also less likely for someone to call the police if their dog digs up some chunk of meat, than if they dig up an enitre body. They may assume it’s an animal carcass disfigured by decomposition, and leave it alone or dispose of it. It’s also more likely that the dog will consume all of it before anyone knows the difference. A whole skeleton is another story. You can cut a body into 6 pieces faster than you think. It’s not much different than boning a chicken, but it takes more work, a big knife, and time. A hammer will be useful for pulverizing joints or driving the knife deep where it doesn’t want to go. Anyway it’s wise to crush as much of the skeleton as you can along the way. It will aid in making the body less identifiable for what it is as it decomposes.

Don’t return to the same site 6 times for 6 burials.You’ll attract suspicion from anyone nearby, and you’ll wind up placing the body parts close enough together to be found by any serious investigation. Put them in plastic bags with lots of bleach, and store in a freezer until you have enough time to bury them all.

Depending on what tools you have available, you may find that you’re get really good at deconstructing the body. You might prefer to slowly sprinkle it down a drain without leaving your house. This avoids the long-term risk of discovery associated with burial, and the overwhelming supply of bacteria in a sewer accellerates deconomposition, whil e providing a convenient cover smell.

Truly grinding down a body takes a lot more work, and you run the risk of fouling your plumbing and calling in a plumber. So don’t try it unless you know how to clear bones and meat out of a drainpipe. A good food processor can be useful. But don’t over-use it, or power drills or saws. They’re noisy and they attract attention. And forget the kitchen sink. It’s better if you actually remove one of the toilets in your house from its base, which will give you direct access to one of the largest sewer pipes that enters your house. Follow any disposals with lots of bleach and then run the water for 5 or 10 minutes on top of that. And plug that pipe when you’re not using it, to prevent any sewer gasses from backing up into your house. Usually, a U-trap inside the toilet does that for you.

Wow. Talk about creepy. I suppose most med students would have general knowledge of this, but given the question asked and the detail of the response, it reminds you that you’re not exactly having that innocent conversation with your friends anymore.

Digging deeper into that page, some other, outlandish and lighthearted suggestions come to mind:

What if you took a person, tied him up or whatever, and just tied a bunch of balloons, like, 300, to HIM? And sent him up up and away to watch the balloons pop, until eventually, he just plummets to the earth?

What a horrible way to die, could you imagine?

And like, you could put him on like a raft maybe, tied to balloons, so as it plummets, he falls off, and the balloons now are able to rise and keep going back up, so the cops find him hundreds of miles away, and just see cause of death as a huge fall, and think, “maybe he jumped from a plane?”

And you’d be easily alibied, cause you could make sure to be seen before and after, and of course you couldn’t have had time to go so far away to kill this guy, and…

You’d be scot-free!

“jaded” mentioned a book that sounds interesting for those into crime dramas:

One of my favorite books ever has the title “The Ability to Kill”. It’s a bunch of case studies about people who had almost pereptrated the perfect murder (or murders), but ended up getting caught due to one stupid detail.

I can only remember two of them though: in one, the guy disposed of the bodies with sulfuric acid, and then poured them down the drain. The other took place during WW2 and is far to grisly to explain this early in the morning.

My vote would be for the sulfuric acid, if you can get ahold of it.

When this discussion was found by a few other sites we also got some very interesting and disturbing suggestions and explanations:

Actually there’s a reasonably good way to do it without much mess or fuss - using a vacuum furnace.

The body is placed into a chamber - obviously the bigger the better, that way you can fit an entire body in without cutting it in half.

Once in the chamber you close the lid tight and bleed the air out with the vacuum pump. The water in the body will boil out into the chamber and out through the valve. If you cool the airstream down as it exits the chamber you can condensate the water and drink it. It should even be pure. That would really benefit you if you’re a serial killer who is both a) OCD about cleanliness, and b) wants to consume parts of his victim.

After the air has been bled out, you then replace it with nitrogen. Once an all nitrogen atmosphere is in the chamber, you turn the furnace on to about 1000 degrees Celsius.

Without oxygen, the dried out corpse will then be subjected to Pyrolysis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis

Pyrolysis is when an object is burned without the presence of oxygen. Essentially your victim’s body is turned into charcoal. At a high enough temperature, the bones should also break down into powder.

After enough time has passed, you can then remove the victim’s remains from the chamber. They will have turned into charcoal. This can be used for:

1) Having a Barbecue. You can invite Hannibal Lecter around and consume some below-average violinist he killed while using the remains of your own victim to cook Lecter’s victim.

2) Fertilising your garden. All you need to do is dump the charcoal remains of your victim into your garden. At this point it is probably a good idea to pulverise the charcoal into fine pieces before putting in the garden - otherwise if the cops come around and dig in your garden then might find your victim’s charcoal head. Of course, dumping all the charcoal in one place isn’t good so it would be better if you spread it evenly over the lawn. If this is difficult ask a neighbour - who you can kill and turn into lawn fertiliser later if he refuses.

3) If you live on a farm it might be a good idea to nix the pyrolysis bit and remove the dessicated body of your victim from the vacuum chamber so you can use him as a scarecrow.

The mafia’s always been good at this sort of thing:

I used to work on a ship moored at a Pier on Staten Island (the USNS Denebola if anyone is familiar) back in the 90’s/early 2000’s. One night i flicked a cigarette off the bridge wing and it didn’t make it all the way over the edge.

I walked over to the bulwark and picked up the butt, about to flick it over the side i noticed 2 men in a small rowboat paddling along the side of the ship. It was 430ish (?) in the morning. We were on a restricted pier far far from any good fishing spots. The guys were dressed in button down shirts, pants and loafers. They had hair gel and visible chains - hardly fishermen.

In the middle of the boat was a giant cooler box.

I didn’t flick the butt (put it out and put it in my coffee cup). Called the USCG about some ’strange activity’, they came over in 5 mins or so (the coast guard station has a boat on standby in that area) stopped the guys and arrested them on the spot.

About a year later I read that a massive body dumping - mafia linked - network had been uncovered in Queens in some defunct trash compactor place or something.

I’ve always wondered if those two guys in the boat were the source of that info…

And I guess you can’t spell “slaughter” without “laughter”:

Well, I certainly applaud anyone wanting to get rid of a body, but take it from this old slaughter rat, I’ve spent my entire adult life disposing of bodies, and a program like this one can do more harm than good.

If you only dispose of one part of your body (and that’s all a single method like acid is going to do for you), you’re setting yourself up for prison time down the road. I’ve seen it a hundred times.

It’s like putting the body of a raped and murdered cheerleader in a shallow grave. What will you accomplish?

Kn ives and machetes basically only sever the chest muscles and to some extent, the triceps. What you really want to do is pulverise the entire body, all the major muscle groups (chest, back, abdomen, legs, shoulders and arms) at the same time, over the course of an evening. And don’t forget your cardiovascular work!

I’m proud of you guys wanting to do this. Three cheers! Falling in love with slaughtering innocents, disposing of cadavers, etc., is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself. And you WILL fall in love with it if you can just force yourself to stick with it a year or two and experience the amazing progress you’ll make.

But do it right, okay?

My advice, find a good secluded spot, with qualified accomplices who will design your disposal methods for you (especially in the beginning, until you get the hang of it yourself) and guide you in your quest for perfect butchery. Thirty to 45 minutes a day, three days a week, is all you’ll ever need to do (I refuse to believe anyone is so busy that he or she cannot make time for that, especially considering how important it is).

And don’t worry about being embarrassed the first time you systematically chop up a body. You have to start somewhere and almost every one of us were there ourselves at one time. So no one will say anything to you and very, very quickly you will progress way beyond that stage anyway.

Now get out there and do it!

But at the end of the day? I think I’ll just stick to watching CSI.