Why can't you just dispose of evidence in the bin

[someladdersandsnakes]

I'm reading a thriller and the character done a murder and has destroyed her clothes by burning them. I feel like that would draw attention though. It wasn't the sort of crime that would be discovered immediately and the character wouldn't be suspected immediately either so I would have thought just putting them in the bin would be a good option really but nobody ever does that. Why not? Like surely once the rubbish van has come, and everything from the bins has been combined and smooshed down, there's no way any evidence would be recovered? Who's gonna dig through all that?

Then your car is tracked (or the phone you either suspiciously turned off for the duration, or foolishly left on) and your journey worked out and they look in that public bin

In UK there is CCTV everywhere, you'd probably get spotted driving or disposing.

Someone like me though.... cycles off into countryside with pannier bags quite often, so totally normal enough. I could maybe disappear my stuff well enough. I think in a not-urban-enough-area there's a lot of potential to distribute bits of evidence in lots of bins.

Get a job in a funeral directors. Stuff the evidence in the bottom of coffins heading for the crem. You could probably dispose of a whole extra body that way.

If you want to get away with it you either need to destroy the evidence or hide it. The trouble with hiding it is that it has a habit of being found again. Especially when you're talking about a murder, the police don't just give up, if they think there might be evidence in the landfill they'll take a look.

If you've got bloodied clothes and they're in a bin there's a risk of leaving DNA evidence in the bin even after it's been emptied. That's why burning is so popular.

Of course burning clothes draws attention. Some people have a habit of regularly lighting bonfires in their gardens, presumably this is so that nobody notices anything unusual when the time comes to burn evidence.

Even if the police aren't actually looking for evidence of the murder you committed there's a risk that they'll check your bins whilst investigating an unrelated matter. A few years back my bin was searched because of a stabbing a couple of streets away, they went through all the bins in the area in case the knife had been abandoned in one. I didn't have anything to worry about on that occasion but Sod's law dictates that if you've put some bloodied clothes in one in anticipation of the bins being collected tomorrow, that'll be the day some tosser stabs someone at the end of your street.

Loving the strategy of planning a murder to coincide with a declutter 😁 I wonder if Marie kondo has made a note of this.

London "landfill" rubbish is normally incinerated for energy reclaim so if you managed to put it in a bin without being spotted on CCTV then it would be burned within what? A week or two? And much more thoroughly than you could do it yourself.

I‘d hack up the body with the hacksaw we use for cutting up the Xmas tree, put it in a bunch of small separate freezer bags, put them in the freezer, then dispose of them one by one in the bin.

(Can’t believe I just wrote that)

Yes I agree re cctv everywhere
I remember being stunned at the amount of cctv footage looked at for Caroline Hogg In portobello and that was 1983. Years later, v important for James Bulger and that was 30 years ago.

Also having a phone and maybe a watch for location will soon show up if you go to woodland that is not normal for you

There was the man convicted of killing his wife who he had said he came home to find muredered. His watch showed him up and down the stairs and active around the home (cleaning up) and this was basically the evidence that convincted him.

Or cook it up bit by bit and keep feeding it to the cats.

Move to an area where they incinerate rubbish rather than landfilling it. A lot of people think bleach will clean up blood. It won't. You need biological washing powder.

Isn’t it more British to get away with murder by avoiding the messy physical bit and going for the jugular of being passively aggressive until the victim wants to die?

Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Withering Look

Miss Scarlett in the Kitchen with the Tinkly Laugh

It's not that hard to get blood out of clothes these days.

What about if you thoroughly washed the bloodied clothes before you disposed of them in the bin? Because if police are going through landfill, presumably they're looking for bloodied clothes, not just any clothes that are discarded. Or would they take all the clothes and check them?

Could you wash them and take them to one of those 'pay by the kilo' for clothes places?

Or just keep wearing the clothes that you used to kill someone in. If they're like jeans and a t-shirt, then as long as there are no stains, why should anyone suspect you murdered someone in them?

I’d surreptitiously bestow bits of evidence on unsuspecting people so they unknowingly take it away for me. My family members have received some odd presents this year

Having watch years of CSI - I'd leave clothes in bleach in hope of destroying DNA and then dispose of them with more innocuous items somewhere ie recycling for clothes or somewhere less likely to have CTTV - walk in woods of canal.

If you have wood or rubbish to burn or burn regularly it's near Nov 5 then much less likely to attract attention.

I know they caught a man in some backwater area in USA as friends raise alarm about wife and he rented a woodchipper - he had no real reason to - from that found freezer with some DNA in and tested wood chipper for blood - worked out killed her froze her and wood chipper her remains over a nearby fast flowing river.

A crime was solved by the police asking the bin men to work with them to collect evidence against a suspected murderer. They rooted through his rubbish and found nothing as he knew it was a way they could get his DNA. Unfortunately, (very fortunately) he dropped his cigarette butt out of the car window and they caught him that way.

Have watched a few where body parts were disposed of in public bins and been found by homeless etc.

Book a cruise, make sure everyone on board sees what good terms you and your victim-to-be are on, get them drunk one night and shove them off the balcony of your cabin. Go back to the bar, have another couple of drinks, then go back to the cabin and find them "missing", raise the alarm and try to look frantic.

There's always the option of waiting until there's a disaster of some sort - flood, earthquake, wildfire, etc - and using it to your advantage by reporting your victim as one of the missing.

Yes, because of CCTV, you have to act normally, and do things that are typical of you, and leave Stuff where it will be dispersed in ways that are difficult to find or if found are difficult to track back.

So how much clothing are you trying to get rid of, OP?

Dropping in a tidal river would be a good one as it could move some distance. But you'd have to do it unobserved, and your appearance before and after dropping it would have to be the same (which is why large items might have to be cut up).

Having a history of dyeing clothes might be useful then you could perhaps dye both something you keep (to give a reason for your action) and also a guilty garment which if then discarded wouldn't necessarily match the description of items the police are interested in.

If summer, a shredded garment could be added to a BBQ fire, ashes pulverised and dug in to (several) flowerbeds.

This is the most brilliant thread. I am entertained, engrossed and a teeny bit scared of my fellow MNers!

Slightly off topic...I use a moon cup and have heavy periods, I often wonder if anyone was monitoring the sewerage/water ways and identified a larger amount of blood (yes I know it will thin out when mixed with loads of water), if that would ever raise suspicion

I think this thread might be of considerable interest to some of the posters on MN today lamenting yet another miserable Xmas 😉

Where I live the bins are 4-weekly, they'd have found the maggotty body by then!

My brother was the QC for the prosecution many years ago where a woman had stabbed another woman because she was in love with her husband. Though the police strongly suspected the woman they could not find the murder weapon.
The police (in disguise) took over the bin collection for the area and went through the rubbish. The murder weapon was found in a neighbour's bin.

I think you practically have to atomise murder weapons and clothing to destroy evidence. The smallest traces can give you away if the police have reason to suspect you, so the answer is to ensure that you aren't a suspect (kill someone you don't know or that nobody knows that you know) and ensure that weapon and any traces of you and the victim being together (car, home etc) are destroyed thoroughly

Think I'd probably settle for getting them black out drunk and setting fire to the house using a non-suspicious method (leaving a pan on the stove or lighting an open fire with an 'unexpectedly long' piece of wood touching fabric). And making sure that when the place did go woosh, I was a long way away with a conspicious alibi.

It wasn't the sort of crime that would be discovered immediately and the character wouldn't be suspected immediately

So she has plenty of time. Couldn't she just wash the clothes tons of times and then put them into a clothes recycling bin?

I seem to remember a case where it was almost certain that a missing person’s body had gone to a rubbish dump? The police said it was impossible to search for the body. I doubt the police would go grubbing around on rubbish dumps for bits of clothing.This sort of evidence collection probably only happens in fiction. I think there is an ongoing case in Canada where a serial killer dumped bodies at a rubbish dump and they can’t be recovered due to the cost. One of the victim’s daughter holds a vigil there for her mother. Very sad. Most people have washing machines. Do a good boil wash with biological washing powder. Then into one of those clothes recycling bins in the supermarket car park. I think those clothes just go for rags? The pushing someone off a cruise ship is ideal no body and no evidence.