How to hide a body

How to hide your own body? [closed]

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It’s the perfect locked-room mystery: the police find the victim murdered, but the room is locked from the inside. How did the killer escape? He didn’t. After committing the murder, the killer committed suicide and then destroyed his body, leaving no traces.

How can a person destroy their body so that no traces of it are visible?

To clarify, the traces of the person’s body do not have to be completely undetectable, but a non-expert should not be able to find anything suggesting a corpse (i.e. Sherlock Holmes could deduce that the killer had destroyed himself, but Inspector Lestrade wouldn’t be able to work it out).

6 Answers 6

If the locked room is a morgue, then the murderer poisons his own twin brother and makes sure the body is checked into the morgue. Before the autopsy, he lures the victim there, murders him, burns his twin brother’s body in the medical incinerator, burns all of his own clothes, rearranges all the bodies in the morgue (just to mess with investigators), and then lying in a morgue refrigerator crisper bin or whatever they are called, swallows the poison he used to poison his twin brother.

Oh, and he hasn’t eaten anything for 48 hours, and gave himself an enema, and peed before laying in the cold metal thingy they keep bodies in so he doesn’t crap and piss himself when he dies.

How much time is allowed before discovery?

The room has a sink made of a material that can take a good amount of heat. Stainless steel comes to mind but there very well might be other materials that aren’t coming to mind at the moment.

After doing his dirty deed the killer climbs onto a contraption sitting in the sink. (This will be a bit precarious due to the narrow base it must have. There could be additional supports while he was getting in that are then removed.) He’s lying on a membrane separating himself from a mixture of sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide. After he’s dead a timer triggers, making a hole. In time the chemicals dissolve the body. (Yes, this is basically a scene from Breaking Bad. The show didn’t give the details and it wouldn’t have worked exactly as shown anyway.)

After enough time has elapsed a second timer opens a drain line which is run down the drain past the metal parts. Away goes your chemicals and all obvious traces of the body. Removing all that weight causes the device to fold up (and pulls up the drain line) and triggers the next stage—the release of a solvent for the plastic of the main part of the machine. The last piece to melt through is another drain—that part is now gone.

Yet more time, a container of water ruptures, washing the gunk out of the trap. At this point you have some scaffolding, the bowl that held the melting plastic and whatever held the water. (The timers are chemical in nature, no electronics are involved.) These are all built out of something that will burn slowly and cleanly, the last stage is to burn it. (This timer might be as simple as something that will spontaneously ignite once dry—but it was in the water holder.)

There’s no such thing as truly zero residue from burning a solid, there will be traces left but not much. A disguise of a controlled kitchen fire earlier would make it even harder to find. (Something on the stove burnt in a situation that kept the size of the fire down. Lots of smoke but no fire damage. Leave the burnt stuff as evidence of the nature of the fire.)

How to Hide a Dead Body AdVenture Media

How to Hide a Dead Body is a new podcast about how to get ahead in business, advertising and the technological intersection of the two, hosted by the CEO and COO of one of New York’s hottest agencies. If you want to be dead weight and fall behind in the race to win big in advertising and in life, then this podcast is probably not for you. But if you’re interested in knowing how to hide a dead body, then give us a listen.

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How best to use a celestial body to hide a space station?

In science fiction secret space stations typically seem to exist inside of a nebula or an asteroid. However it occurs to me that in warfare space stations hidden in nebulae would likely be discovered by enemy scouts. (Intel is key in war, and a conveniently located nebula is the obvious hiding place everyone would scout.)

So my question is if you were looking to hide a secret space station, how would you hide it? Or to be more specific, what celestial body would you hide it in/on/behind?

Edit: In this question I am more interested in what celestial body it would be best to use to hide a space station in. You can assume soft-science teleportation style FTL if you need to in order to reach a specific celestial body, but in this case assume also soft-science detection methods to allow for the searching of vast areas of space.

The general idea is to identify what object would make for the best cover/camouflage, not to simply lose the space station in the vastness of space. (For instance dropping it light years from any solar system, hiding in the emptiness.)

9 Answers 9

If you believe you can hide in a nebula that you don’t understand what nebula are. Space is vast. It’s trivial to hide anything, if distance is not important. Do you know how many Oort Cloud objects we know about, compared to how many are estimated to be out there? (None known (arguably) and billions estimated to exist at 20 km wide size range, trillions at the 1 km size.) I politely suggest you modify your post, or post again with some size and emissions criteria. If your «secret space station» can be supplied only occasionally, and is black as far as emissions go (a great reason to build it inside a (metallic) asteroid), then you’ll only «find» it by great luck. I can imagine a future with Hubble quality telescopes being cheap and commonly used by computer surveillance systems. In such a future, hiding anything of significant size within 10 AU of Earth would be very difficult, but at 50,000 AU? Not a problem.

Behind a star or planet would be a good place; not in orbit but powered to remain behind it from the perspective of some other POV. However, any kind of «behind» implies a single direction or location of viewing. I can easily stay behind the Earth’s Moon from the POV of Mars, taking all those orbitals into account: At any given point in time Mars and the Earth’s Moon form a line I can be on to put the Moon between me and Mars.

That breaks down if we add Venus to the mix. Generally Venus and Mars are not both on the same line as the Moon, so hiding from one may not hide me from the other. If the enemy has a lot of scouts, hiding behind the star might work, but if they are on all sides of it, even something that big wouldn’t work.

A better idea would be a disguise: Disguise the space station as an asteroid (or several of them) in the asteroid belt, or Oort cloud, or as a chunk of rock orbiting a planet like a Moon. Remember in space the disguise is weightless; so it could be an actual shell of rock or asteroid ice, perhaps even manufactured from the asteroids and dust in the belt (or wherever it is hiding); glued or netted together.

An even better approach would be a station that could land on small low-gravity moons and disguise itself as a natural terrain feature.

The strategy is to become a mottled brown needle in a haystack.

Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Adams was talking about all of Outer Space, but the quote is still true if you are just talking about a solar system. It is big. Really really big.

So, you have guessed that the enemy has a space station in an asteroid. somewhere in this system. Now find it. Not as easy as you might think. There is a large number of asteroids and they lie very far apart.

Let’s narrow the scope a bit. You are fairly certain that the enemy is hiding an installation on/in Ceres, the largest asteroid. Now find it. Still not as easy as you might think.

If it functions as a space ship hangar, it will have a hatch you might see, but that hatch will be camouflage painted to look like the surrounding rock and will be very hard to spot from any distance at all. Even little Ceres has 2,770,000 km² of surface to search through. Good luck with that.

In short, hiding is easy if you don’t do anything to attract attention, like using a radio.

@Amadeus answer is pretty comprehensive. I was wondering if there might be something else.

You could hide your station by having it be one dimensional. Or essentially so. Objects are detected by how they emit / reflect radiation or how they occlude radiation. A piece of paper is easy to see face on; on edge no. A thread is not easy to see at all.

This station would be a long, low albedo black tube; essentially one dimensional by standards of bodies in space. It is big enough in diameter for a crew person to move along the interior. Initially I pictured a ladder but if the tube were very smooth on the inside, the few personel on board could move from place to place using pressurized air and an occlusive sabot.

The tube is long but would not emit or reflect or occlude much at any particular space. You would have to run into it to detect it unless crew activities gave it away.

Ouroboros station becomes a weapon when needed: the head grasps the tail and it becomes a ring. Across the ring is stretched a mirror or reflective mirror equivalent. By changing the curvature of the mirror, the station can concentrate sunlight at any given spot on the far side of the star. If there are 2 such stations between them they can cover the solar system.

The main problem with hiding a space station, or any powered space-based object, is waste heat. Anything that does anything worth it (electrical generator, life support, varied machines, crew. ) generates waste heat, and this waste heat, at some point, has to escape the station. So an opponent only has to search for thermal signatures and detect objects that are hotter than they should to detect your station.

The question, then, is how to avoid this?

The simplest solution is to bury your station in a big asteroid, moon or Kuiper object. Then you can dump your energy in the celestial body, and it is simply too big to be meaningfully heated by it, making your station undetectable. It is not strictly a space station anymore, but depending on what it is supposed to do, this may do the trick.

There will be enormous logistical constraints. You need to supply it with cryogenic liquid hydrogen on a regular basis, and the tankers will also have to be Hydrogen Steamers to avoid revealing your station. Their own hydrogen sources will have to be hidden, possibly aforementioned buried stations. Hydrogen Steamer endurance scales with its size, though, so a big enough station could theoretically last years or even decades on one refill. Maintenance will also have to be done with Hydrogen Steamer service crafts, and may have to deploy a shroud around the sections to be serviced.

None of those problems are insurmountable, though, only complicated and expensive.

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10 Ways To Get Rid Of A Body (And How They’d Really Work Out)

Whether it’s stuffing a body in a vat of acid or forcing a snitch to dig his own shallow grave, almost every movie with a body in it has its own way of getting rid of the corpse. Hollywood has expended more creativity into thinking up ways to hide a body than into writing a good script. But would any of it really work?

As part of our ongoing effort to see how much we can put into our Google search histories before the FBI breaks down our doors, we’ve investigated all the most iconic ways to dispose of a body and found out exactly what would happen if somebody tried these methods in real life.

10 Dissolving A Body In A Vat Of Acid

Breaking Bad makes getting rid of a body look easy. According to Walter White, all you have to do is throw a body in a vat and fill it with hydrofluoric acid. Soon, all that will be left will be a murky goo that was once your friend Gale.

In reality, though, it doesn’t quite work out that well. As far as acids go, hydrofluoric acid is actually a weak acid and is especially ineffective at breaking down bodies. [1]

That’s a lesson that some people have learned firsthand.

When three killers in France tried Walter White’s approach, they quickly found out that all the acid really did was make their victim’s body stink to high heaven. It called more attention to what they’d done, and the body didn’t even break down. When the police found the victim, she’d been in a vat of acid for 10 days and her body was still intact.

A team of German chemists wrote a paper on White’s theory and suggested that you could get better results with different chemicals. But anyone who tried it would still be looking at a horrible smell and an awfully long wait.

9 Pulling A ‘Weekend At Bernie’s’

Believe it or not, somebody’s tried acting out Weekend at Bernie’s in real life. The movie is an ‘80s comedy where two men take their dead boss’s body out for a weekend of partying.

Unlike the movie, they didn’t actually drag their friend’s body into the club. They left him in the back seat of the car throughout the whole fiasco. So it’s not entirely clear why they bothered dragging his corpse around at all.

When the night was over, they called the cops to report that their friend was dead. But since real life isn’t a raunchy ‘80s comedy movie, the police didn’t just laugh it off. The paired ended up in jail on a pile of charges, including abusing a corpse. [2]

8 Stuffing A Body Into A Wood Chipper

The most memorable moment in Fargo has to be when Steve Buscemi’s killer is caught stuffing him into a wood chipper. Believe it or not, that wasn’t just a scene from the Coen brothers’ imaginations. It was based on Richard Crafts, the man who killed his wife and tried to get rid of her body just like in the movie.

Wood chippers really are strong enough to pulverize human body parts, including bones, and Crafts’s plan actually worked out fairly well. He was able to get rid of enough evidence so that most of his wife’s body still hasn’t been found.

His approach left quite a mess behind, though. Even if they never found her whole body, crime scene investigators found fragments of hair, fingernails, teeth, and bones scattered around the crime scene. Blood had also soaked into the carpet and the furniture. [3]

It wasn’t particularly subtle, either. His neighbors definitely noticed when he rolled in a massive wood chipper and started running it without bothering to gather any wood. All that noise ended up being a big part of how the police knew to check his property in the first place.

7 Making Them Dig Their Own Graves

The Wild West classic is to hold your victim at gunpoint and make him dig his own grave. It’s a fine way to avoid a little backbreaking labor. But if you’re going to make someone bury himself, you’d better leave a few days open in your schedule.

In some ways, this works better than you’d think. It would seem that most people, when armed with a shovel and staring their own death in the eye, would fight for their lives rather than dig. But, in practice, that doesn’t really happen. In most real-life accounts, the victims appear to be resigned to their fates and dig.

It takes an awful lot of time, though. Professional gravediggers need an hour to dig a grave with a backhoe and the better part of a day to do it with a shovel. And that’s in ideal conditions. If the soil’s hard and the person digging has every reason to take his time doing it, digging a 1.8-meter (6 ft) grave could take days.

The best you’ll get is a shallow grave, and police are experts at finding them. They have “cadaver dogs” that are specially trained to sniff out buried bodies, and they know how to spot the subtle variations on the surface that give away where a grave is hiding. So a body in a shallow grave probably won’t stay hidden long. [4]

6 The Norman Bates Approach

Technically, the specialty of Psycho’s Norman Bates wasn’t getting rid of bodies. He just left his mother’s body right where it was, sitting in her house, and went on acting like she was still alive. However, when one man tried the Norman Bates’s approach in real life, it worked out a lot better than you’d expect.

Timothy Fattig got away with it for the better part of a year. When Fattig’s mother died of natural causes, he was too distraught to call the police. Instead, he let her body slowly decompose in her house and pretended that she was still alive.

When friends and family asked where she was, Fattig would tell them that she was in the hospital. It worked for a surprisingly long time. It took about a year before a police officer finally came to her home, trying to figure out why nobody had seen her. When the cop said he knew that she wasn’t in the hospital, Fattig broke down and told the truth. [5]

The autopsy showed that Fattig hadn’t killed her, so he was let off without any charges whatsoever. Believe it or not, the real-life Norman Bates was allowed to return to society.

Well, for a few years anyway. Today, Fattig is in prison for an unrelated theft charge. As it turns out, a person who leaves his mother’s dead body in the house and pretends that she’s still alive tends not to be mentally stable.

5 Fitting Them For Cement Shoes

The Mafia doesn’t really pour concrete on their victims’ feet and throw their bodies in the river despite what you’ve seen in the movies. For one thing, concrete takes hours to dry, so they’d have to get their victims to stay still for the better part of a day to pull it off. Plus, it doesn’t work particularly well.

Gangsters have tried this in real life—just not Italian ones. In 2016, Peter Martinez, a member of the “Crips” gang, was fitted with a pair of cement shoes and thrown into Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay. His body didn’t stay hidden for long.

Air bubbles in the concrete caused Martinez’s body to float back up nearly as soon as he was thrown in. The tidal flow then knocked him around and sent him washing up on the coast of Manhattan Beach, where a group of families trying to enjoy a nice day out with their kids found him drifting up to the shore. [6]

4 Calling The Cleanup Crew

In movies, the mob usually has a professional on hand just for this job. Men like The Wolf in Pulp Fiction are always just a dial away, ready to use their expertise to make the crime scene spotless.

In reality, this job probably doesn’t exist. We couldn’t find a single example of a person making a living by cleaning up crime scenes before the cops could find them.

Scrubbing the scene of a death takes an average of 9–12 hours. According to crime scene cleaner Scott Vogel, it “requires much more than rubber gloves and Lysol.” The blood and human waste seeps into the furniture, the carpets, and even the walls. Crime scene cleaners often have to tear apart the whole interior of a room to get it back to normal. [7]

They say that the hardest part is getting rid of the smell of death that lingers in the air. Professionals have large machines and specially formulated chemicals for that purpose. However, even with their equipment, they aren’t always able to get rid of the stench of blood and guts.

Some people have learned this the hard way. For example, Phyllis Simmons spent several days trying to scrub her floors after she stabbed a man to death. When the cops caught her, there was still evidence left over at the crime scene.

3 Feeding The Body To Pigs

According to the movie Snatch, there’s no better way to get rid of a body than to feed it to pigs. “They will go through bone like butter,” the character Brick Top says in the movie. “They will go through a body that weighs [90 kilograms (200 lb)] in about eight minutes.”

Theoretically, his idea should work. Pigs really will eat anything. They don’t even need to be that hungry. One group of pigs attacked, killed, and ate the farmer who owned them while he was giving them food. [8]

They have been known to eat bones, and it’s been theorized that a group of 14 lactating sows could work through an adult man within two hours. It has to be a lactating sow, though. If you use other types of pigs, it can take weeks.

No matter how effective this seems to be in theory, it has never worked perfectly in practice. In most cases, the pigs have left gnawed-up bones or scattered body parts behind. Even serial killer Robert Pickton, who made feeding his victims to pigs part of his signature, had a wealth of evidence lying in pens, untouched by the pigs, when he was arrested.

2 Burning The House Down

One classic way to clean up a crime scene is to get rid of it altogether. In countless CSI episodes and horror films, people have disposed of bodies by just burning the people’s houses to the ground completely, taking all the evidence with them.

In reality, though, house fires don’t turn bodies into the unidentifiable ash you see on TV. Crematoriums usually have to get their temperatures as high as 1,100–1,500 degrees Celsius (2,000–2,700 °F) to turn a body into ash, far hotter than the 800–900 degrees Celsius (1,500–1,700 °F) you’ll get in a wood fire. Even then, cremations usually leave behind little bone fragments that have to be ground up by hand before they can be given back to the family.

Those fragments are enough to get somebody arrested. They’re harder to analyze, but it can be done. Crime scene investigators also have dogs that can sniff out gasoline and other signs that a house fire was set on purpose.

Several killers tried this approach in real life and were usually stuck with fragments of bones that they couldn’t figure out how to get rid of—and that ended up incriminating them. In one case, two killers actually tried to burn a body three times and still couldn’t get rid of the bones. [9]

1 Burying A Body Beneath A Coffin

In one episode of Dexter, the serial killer star gives another character a tip on how to hide a body so that it will never be found. Bury them in someone else’s grave, he says, underneath another man’s coffin. Nobody will ever dig it up.

This idea has been tried in real life, and it actually worked fairly well. In the 1920s, the DeCavalcante crime family used a funeral home that they owned to bury their murder victims under their customers’ bodies.

They built “double-decker coffins” with a secret compartment underneath. There, they would hide the dead body of one of their victims underneath the corpse of a relative of some grieving family. The pallbearers would notice the unusual weight of the coffin and would often give each other strange looks as they struggled to carry it to the tomb. But nobody ever asked any questions.

No one figured out what the DeCavalcante family was doing until 2003 when a mob snitch described the technique in a courtroom. By then, they’d been getting away with murder for about 80 years. [10]