Buzz
Whether it’s submerging a body in acid or forcing a snitch to dig his own grave, nearly every movie with a corpse comes with its own method for disposing of it. Hollywood seems to have invested more thought into creative ways of hiding a body than crafting a solid script. But would any of these methods truly work?
In our ongoing attempt to see how far we can push our Google search histories before the FBI arrives at our doorstep, we’ve looked into the most iconic body disposal methods and uncovered what would really happen if someone tried these techniques in real life.
10. Dissolving a Body in a Vat of Acid
Breaking Bad makes it seem like disposing of a body is a breeze. According to Walter White, all it takes is tossing a body into a vat filled with hydrofluoric acid. In no time, you’ll have a murky sludge that used to be your buddy, Gale.
In reality, though, it doesn’t go quite as smoothly. Hydrofluoric acid, while it may sound intense, is actually a weak acid and doesn’t do a great job of breaking down bodies.
It’s a lesson that some people have learned the hard way.
When three murderers in France tried Walter White’s method, they soon realized that all the acid did was make their victim’s body reek to high heaven. It only drew more attention to their crime, and the body didn’t decompose. When the police found the victim, she’d been sitting in the vat of acid for 10 days, and her body remained intact.
A group of German chemists published a paper analyzing White’s theory and suggested that different chemicals could provide better results. However, anyone who attempted it would still be dealing with a horrific smell and a terribly long wait.
9. Recreating a ‘Weekend At Bernie’s’
Believe it or not, someone actually tried to live out the events of Weekend at Bernie’s in real life. The film is a comedy from the ‘80s in which two men cart their deceased boss’s body around for a weekend of partying.
When Robert Young and Mark Rubinson discovered their friend dead in his home, they decided to give him one last wild night out. They tossed his body in the backseat of their car, took him on a bar-hopping spree across three venues, and ended the night by spending $400 of his money at a strip club.
Unlike the movie, they didn’t actually bring their friend’s body into the club. Instead, they left him in the backseat the entire time. So, it’s unclear why they even bothered dragging his corpse around in the first place.
When the night came to an end, they called the police to report their friend’s death. But since real life isn’t exactly a wild ‘80s comedy, the police didn’t just laugh it off. The pair ended up behind bars on a variety of charges, including corpse abuse.
8. Shoving a Body Into a Wood Chipper
The most unforgettable scene in Fargo is undoubtedly when Steve Buscemi’s character is shoved into a wood chipper. Believe it or not, that wasn’t just a fictional moment conjured up by the Coen brothers. It was inspired by Richard Crafts, a man who killed his wife and attempted to dispose of her body in the exact same way.
Wood chippers really are powerful enough to grind up human body parts, including bones, and Crafts’s plan worked surprisingly well. He managed to eliminate enough evidence that most of his wife’s remains have never been recovered.
His method left quite a trail behind. While they never recovered her entire body, crime scene investigators found scattered remnants of hair, nails, teeth, and bones throughout the area. Blood had also soaked into the carpet and furniture.
It wasn’t exactly discreet, either. His neighbors certainly noticed when he hauled in a giant wood chipper and started running it, all without any intention of processing wood. The loud noise was a key reason the police eventually decided to check out his property.
7. Forcing Them to Dig Their Own Graves
The classic Wild West method is to hold your victim at gunpoint and force them to dig their own grave. It’s a clever way to avoid a bit of the hard work yourself. But if you're planning on making someone bury themselves, be sure to keep a few days free in your schedule.
In some ways, this works out better than expected. You might think that most people, given a shovel and staring at their own imminent death, would fight to survive instead of digging. But in reality, that’s not often the case. In many real-life situations, victims seem to accept their fate and proceed to dig.
However, it’s incredibly time-consuming. Professional gravediggers need about an hour with a backhoe to dig a grave, and the better part of a day to do it with a shovel. And that’s under perfect conditions. If the soil is tough and the person digging has all the time in the world to do it, digging a 1.8-meter (6 ft) grave could take days.
The best you’ll end up with is a shallow grave, and the police are experts at locating those. They have 'cadaver dogs' specially trained to detect buried bodies, and they can spot even the smallest surface variations that reveal the presence of a grave. So, a body in a shallow grave likely won’t stay hidden for long.
6. The Norman Bates Method
Technically, Norman Bates from Psycho wasn’t particularly skilled at getting rid of bodies. He simply left his mother’s body where it was, sitting in her home, and continued as if she were still alive. However, when one man tried to replicate Bates's method in real life, it worked out far better than you might expect.
Timothy Fattig managed to pull it off for almost a year. After Fattig’s mother passed away from natural causes, he was too distraught to call the police. Instead, he let her body slowly decompose in her house while pretending she was still alive.
When friends and relatives asked where she was, Fattig would tell them she was in the hospital. This ruse worked surprisingly well for quite some time. It wasn’t until a year later that a police officer visited the house, wondering why no one had seen her. When the officer insisted he knew she wasn’t in the hospital, Fattig finally broke down and confessed.
The autopsy confirmed that Fattig hadn’t killed her, so he was released without facing any charges. Astonishingly, 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. It turns out that a person who leaves his mother’s decaying body in the house and pretends she’s still alive isn’t exactly the picture of mental stability.
5. Cementing Them Into 'Cement Shoes'
Despite what you’ve seen in movies, the Mafia doesn’t actually put concrete on their victims’ feet and toss them into rivers. For one thing, concrete takes hours to dry, meaning the victim would have to stay still for a good portion of the day while the process happens. And, frankly, it’s not very effective.
Gangsters have attempted this in real life—though not the Italian ones. In 2016, Peter Martinez, a member of the “Crips” gang, was fitted with a pair of cement shoes and dumped into Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay. But his body didn’t remain submerged for long.
Air bubbles trapped in the concrete caused Martinez’s body to float right back up as soon as he hit the water. The tidal currents then tossed him around, eventually washing him up on the shores of Manhattan Beach, where a group of families out enjoying the day discovered his body drifting toward them.
4. Calling In The Cleanup Crew
In films, mobsters often have a specialist for this task. Characters like The Wolf in Pulp Fiction are always one phone call away, ready to step in and scrub the crime scene clean with their professional touch.
In reality, such a profession probably doesn’t exist. We couldn’t uncover a single case of someone making a living by cleaning crime scenes before the authorities arrive.
Cleaning up after a death typically takes 9–12 hours. Scott Vogel, a crime scene cleaner, explains that it “involves much more than just rubber gloves and Lysol.” Blood and bodily fluids seep into the furniture, carpets, and even the walls. Often, cleaners must dismantle the entire room's interior to restore it to its previous state.
They say that the toughest part is eradicating the smell of death that lingers in the air. Professionals use heavy-duty machines and specialized chemicals for this task. Still, even with all their gear, they can't always eliminate the stench of blood and entrails.
Some have learned this the hard way. Take Phyllis Simmons, for instance, who spent several days scrubbing her floors after stabbing a man to death. By the time the cops arrived, traces of the crime remained.
3. Burying A Body Beneath A Coffin
In an episode of Dexter, the serial killer protagonist gives another character advice on how to hide a body so it’s never found. His suggestion: bury it beneath another man’s coffin, in someone else’s grave. No one would ever dig it up.
This idea has been attempted in reality, and it worked surprisingly well. Back in the 1920s, the DeCavalcante crime family, who owned a funeral home, buried their murder victims under the bodies of their customers.
They constructed 'double-decker coffins,' with a hidden compartment beneath. In these, they would conceal the body of one of their victims under the remains of a relative from a mourning family. The pallbearers often struggled with the unusual weight of the coffin, exchanging odd glances as they carried it to the tomb. Yet, no one ever raised any questions.
The DeCavalcante family’s scheme wasn’t uncovered until 2003, when a mob informant revealed the method in a courtroom. By then, they'd been evading justice for nearly 80 years.
2. Burning The House Down
A common tactic for eliminating a crime scene is to simply destroy it. In numerous CSI episodes and horror films, characters have disposed of bodies by burning down entire houses, taking all evidence with them.
However, in reality, house fires don’t reduce bodies to the unrecognizable ash seen on television. Crematoriums need temperatures ranging from 1,100 to 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,000 to 2,700 °F) to turn a body to ash—much hotter than the 800–900 degrees Celsius (1,500–1,700 °F) of a typical wood fire. Even then, cremation often leaves behind bone fragments that must be ground manually before being returned to the family.
Those bone fragments can be enough to lead to an arrest. While they’re more difficult to examine, it’s still possible. Investigators also have specially trained dogs capable of detecting gasoline and other indicators that a fire was intentionally set.
Several killers have attempted this method in reality, often left with fragments of bones they couldn’t figure out how to dispose of—ultimately leading to their capture. In one instance, two murderers tried to burn a body three times but still couldn’t eliminate all the bones.
1. Feeding The Body To Pigs
As seen in the film Snatch, the best way to dispose of a body is to feed it to pigs. As Brick Top, the character in the movie, puts it, 'They will go through bone like butter.' He claims they can devour a 90-kilogram (200 lb) body in about eight minutes.
In theory, this method should work. Pigs will eat almost anything, and they don’t even need to be starving. In one case, a group of pigs turned on the farmer who fed them, attacking, killing, and devouring him.
Pigs have been known to consume bones, and it’s suggested that a group of 14 lactating sows could devour an adult man in just two hours. However, the key is using lactating sows—other types of pigs may take weeks to finish the job.
Although this may seem effective in theory, it doesn’t always play out perfectly in real life. More often than not, pigs leave behind chewed-up bones or scattered body parts. Even notorious serial killer Robert Pickton, who made it a habit to feed his victims to pigs, had plenty of evidence lying in pens when he was caught, untouched by the pigs.
