Forensic Fact-Check
Want to add some realism to your character's injuries? Need to make sure your detective is finding real clues? Look no further!
Last week, I talked about some of the typical ways in fiction that characters dispose of bodies. As it turns out, one post just isn’t enough to cover all of the fun methods writers have tried (hopefully not in real life!) to get away with murder, so here is part two. Mummification
Let’s just get this one out of the way for all those Norman Bates wannabes. Can you keep a corpse in your house with you? Sure. I’m certainly not going to stop you. But if anyone ever visits the chances that you’ll be reported are quite high (unless your guests are really understanding). What if I hide the body for guests? Unfortunately, you can’t hide the smell. Until you’ve been in an enclosed space with a rotting corpse, I can’t possibly convey how strong that smell is. Or how distinctive it is. Piranhas I deeply regret to inform you that piranhas are actually relatively small and don’t usually attack humans. If someone fell into a piranha tank, the piranhas would hide, not bite. Even if they did, their bite strength is very low, and they can’t open their mouths wide enough to take a good chunk. Now, they are scavengers, so if you’d already killed the person, the piranhas would probably scavenge the corpse, but it would take a while, and they certainly wouldn’t ingest the whole kit and caboodle. Wood Chipper Could Fargo have been onto something here? Maybe, but even if you happen to have a wood chipper on hand, it’s one of the messiest ways to dispose of someone. By far. Don’t get me wrong; it absolutely will destroy a body. The prosecution will have to make do with bone or tooth fragments, bits of hair, and maybe a finger. That’s not ideal for a murder case, but it’s been done. And they will have those bits because a wood chipper doesn’t eradicate a body; it sprays a body. Suitcase This is basically a worse version of the wood chipper. You’ve cut someone up, stuffed them in a suitcase, and…what? Left it at an airport? A train station? Put it on a cross-country bus you conveniently forgot to get on? Wherever you leave it, someone will find it, and now you’ve got to hope that none of your DNA has gotten in or on there. If your goal is to get away with murder, having the body turn up is a poor start. Landfill Unless, of course, you’re taking the suitcase to a landfill. Now here’s a good idea. Assuming you don’t have incriminating blood seeping out the side, no one’s going to look twice at dumping an old suitcase. But your timing has to be good. Ideally, you want that body going on just before they cap it (meaning it’s reached capacity, and they add a layer of plastic to seal everything in). If you can’t manage that, you’d want the suitcase sealed tightly and going in with quite a lot of other smelly trash to mask the scent of decay.
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