- Just don’t murder anybody, okay? You won’t get away with it.
Committing a murder is easy; getting away with it is the hard part. Fortunately, we’ve all seen enough crime thrillers to know several corpse disposal methods to cover our crimes.
However, most of those methods have been tried, typically with poor results. The criminal masterminds in the movies get away with them because, well, it’s a movie.
Here are 9 famous ways to dispose of a body from pop culture. We’ll also explain why they’ll get you arrested, so you’re better off not committing any murders.
1. Burial Under the Floorboards
You could pull a Tell-tale Heart and bury the body under your floorboards (or in the attic, or any other unused nook of your house). In addition to the famous Poe story, you’ve seen people attempt this in countless movies, TV shows, and (sadly) real-life cases.
And virtually everyone who attempts it gets caught because, believe it or not, corpses are incredibly unsanitary. Even if you were to wrap the body in several layers of plastic, there will be all manner of oozing, dripping, and smelling as the corpse decomposes.
In addition to stinking to high heaven, the rotting corpse will leave very obvious stains and other signs. Eventually, somebody will notice, and you will get arrested.
2. Burial in a Box
Okay, so instead of putting it in the attic, you’ll instead seal the corpse in some kind of container and stuff it out of sight. Maybe you’ll drop it in the woods or hide it somewhere in your backyard.
This method, however, carries the same issues as the first one. Unless your container is perfectly hermetically sealed (and it’s not), someone will smell the corpse and call the cops.
That, or a wandering animal might get you busted. For example, in 2020, a runaway pet duck led the cops to the hidden body of a murdered grandma.
If you’d like to read more about that, check out our article on 7 animals that helped solve a crime.
3. Dumping the Body in Water
If burying the body in the ground won’t work, maybe dumping it in a lake, river, or sea will. It’s certainly served all the concrete boot-making mobsters well.
However, you probably don’t quite understand how much gas a decomposing body produces. A corpse will sink at first but will soon pop back up on the surface like a morbid buoy.
Even those cement boots won’t help. Unless professionally prepared, concrete will have air bubbles in it, which—together with the body’s own gases—can lift the body up. It happened in 2016, when the body of murdered gang member Peter Martinez floated back up to the surface, cement shoes and all.
4. Vat of Acid
Maybe you got inspired by Walter White in Breaking Bad and decided to dissolve the body in an acid bath. However, do you remember how Walter and Jesse’s first attempt to dissolve a body ended?
That’s probably how your attempt will go as well.
Despite what movies would have you believe, even hydrofluoric acid isn’t some magical wonder fluid that eats through everything. It will likely leave plenty of ooey-gooey remains behind for the cops to find. What’s more, just like in Breaking Bad, it may dissolve your container and cause one heck of a mess.
To illustrate, in 2015, three students, apparently inspired by Breaking Bad, tried dissolving their murdered teacher’s body in acid. But all it did was cause such an awful smell that the kids got caught, and the body was still intact after 10 days.
5. Feed the Body to Pigs
Pigs will eat virtually anything, so throwing the murdered body into a pigsty could, in theory, get rid of it. It’s certainly been tried in Snatch, Hannibal, and others.
Although pigs will crunch through bone and have no qualms about eating a human body, they don’t eat everything. There’s going to be a lot of undigested bits of bone and clothes in the pig pen, enough for the cops to find out exactly what went down.
6. Digging Your Own Grave
Perhaps the best way to dispose of a corpse is to have the would-be corpse do it themselves. Just drive them to a remote place and have them dig their own grave.
Hopefully you don’t have any pressing plans. Digging a grave takes a long, long, very long time, and your unwilling victim is certainly not going to hurry the process up.
Well, perhaps you decide a shallow grave is enough. But it’s not. The reason we bury bodies six feet under is that animals will smell the corpse in a foot-deep grave, and scavengers will come dig the evidence up.
7. Burn the Body
Fine, fine! You’ll just torch the house and burn the body. There won’t be much left after the fire, and it’ll just look like an accident.
Maybe that was true in the past. Modern forensic science, however, can absolutely tell that the charred body in the burnt-down house didn’t perish from the fire.
Additionally, a house fire usually reaches around 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, which doesn’t turn a body into ash. Crematoriums use furnaces that go up to 2,500 degrees—and even then, there are bits left that the crematorium workers have to grind up by hand.
8. Wood Chipper
Speaking of grinding, how about feeding the body to a wood chipper, like what happened to Steve Buscemi in Fargo? On paper, this method might work, as a wood chipper has enough power to pulverize meat and bones.
But did you consider the horrendous mess flying out of the machine?
The chipper will spit out a stream of viscera that will soak into everything in sight. No matter how well you clean up, there will be plenty of evidence left behind simply because the mess is so awful.
That’s how Richard Crafts, the murderer who inspired the Fargo scene, got caught. And you will, too.
9. Weekend at Bernie’s
Now you’ve got it! No one will think there’s been a murder if the person is still alive! So, you devise one macabre puppet show in the vein of A Weekend at Bernie’s.
Unlike the cast in black comedies, though, real people can definitely tell when a person is dead. However intricate a puppeteering mechanism you come up with, you can’t hide the complete lack of muscle tension or the deathly pallor.
That hasn’t stopped people from trying, though. In 2024, somebody took a dead relative to a bank to get cash on two different occasions in Ohio and Brazil.
Spoiler alert: neither worked.