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?

Don't put your blooded clothes or trainers in the washing machine if you commit murder. The forensic team will drain and take samples of the water left in the pump of the washing machine, test the drain hose and drain. They will also test the bath and sink U
bends for blood.

What a delightfully dark thread!

Could you wash them then cut them up and use them for filling a cushion or something and then donate that to a charity shop as a less obvious way of them being identified as the clothing that was being searched for?

Getting a bit too invested in this.

Police searched a tip and found a dehydrator that they took for evidence in Australia, didn't they? That case involving the death cap mushroom deaths.

Most serial killers don't do things properly, they'll bag up bloody fabrics, body parts and weapons into the same bags and put it all in the bin at once, the trick is to do it in stages, say a leg one week, an arm the next, put something in your neighbours bin, take a walk and put things in public bins, put it in-between normal household waste so if anyone does open a bag, all they see is normal stuff. This time of year you can keep chopped up parts outside in separate bags ready to go on collection day.

@RoseAndRose I’ll try not to cross you, as yours is a well thought out plan 😀.

@someladdersandsnakes , burning seems more permanent, so I’d be more confident, given how efficient forensics is.

I once read a supposedly true story in the memoirs of a New York coroner. In the 1960s a man had gone to the police to say he had disposed of the body of someone who had died accidentally. It had been just after Christmas and public and private bins were overflowing with wrapping paper, cardboard, etc. He and someone he knew with medical training and equipment had cut the body up into lots of small pieces and wrapped each bit in Christmas paper and put one only in each rubbish bin all over the city. Even for the two guys it took them a few days. It was months later the guy reported it. The police wanted the coroner to investigate. Nobody had reported any human remains in rubbish. He told them there were no charges that could be made.

Pigs. You need some pet pigs.

This presupposes a very confident serial killer who lives by himself, or with conveniently oblivious family members or housemates, plenty of space and privacy for dismembering, storing and disposal of victims’ body parts (that is, if he killed them in his house — if he killed them elsewhere, then he’s possibly under pressure to get rid of evidence, weapons, bodies etc much more quickly).

There’s a PD James novel where the key piece of evidence that identifies he murderer is a bloodied hooded cloak put into a washing machine to get rid of evidence, but foiled by a noise-averse member of the community with a fanatical enforcement of the rules about washing machines running after 10 at night, who turns off the machine mid-cycle, thereby preserving traces of blood in the water.

Many rural murders would have been solved if someone had thought to X-ray the pigs in time.

@MerryChristmas23

Most serial killers don't do things properly

Look at Denis Nilsen! I reckon he wanted to be caught.

Ok so to explain away the blood - if I take decongestants I get a bloody nose. And I'm talking about the real gusher types. So that would explain the bloody clothes/shoes in the bin.

And the body - I'm thinking Sweeney Todd. Not quite what to suggest if someone was vegan....

The alternative is to have a turkey farm. I know you've all just finished off your big birds but they do have a bit of a rep for eating almost anything. I went to an agricultural college for a couple of years and someone mentioned what happened when his grandfather had a fatal heart attack in the field where the turkeys were kept..... fyi - pigs aren't much better - ask that serial killer that was caught near Vancouver...

I watched an interesting movie - there was a "mass shooting" - a sniper just randomly killed a lot of people. The idea was that it was supposed to be random.

Except it was a planned killing.
The rest were just innocent civillians,

I wonder how many people were murdered in WW2 and were made to look like they had been killed by bombs.

Note to self.. plan any future murders for bin day 🤔

I suppose best method might also hinge on why you need to dispose of your murder outfit. Is it because it is bloodied? Or because you fear other contamination if forensically examined (transferred hair, fibres, pollen, distinctive dust, mud/earth in treads of shoes)? Or simply because if seen, you want to be able to demonstrate you have no clothing of that type in your house?

Could you break your washing machine (and post about the breakage copiously on MN) and take clothes to a launderette where you can start off a load yourself, and then staff do the rest so you pick up a bag of clean, folded stuff? Maybe 3 loads (in different machines) over the course of a week/10 days? Wash your "guilty" stuff with your DP's, but the rest of your stuff and your DC's separately.

That would wash blood/residue in to someone else's machines/drains, and even though investigators would know you'd been there, so would scores of other people.

Then you would have clean enough clothing to recycle, and I think those kerbside "charity" bags would be the best way, ie the ones that aren't from a real charity but some sort of accumulator who makes a v vague claim about a proportion of proceeds going to charity) as they get taken to centres and redistributed (rags, bulk by weight/type overseas, some of the better stuff for resale). But you can never be sure when one of those bags will turn up. (I would say leave it outside someone else's house, but you might get picked up by someone's home CCTV).

OTOH, perhaps you can get too screwed up by fear of CCTV. If you suspect a long interval between act and it being noticed at all, then how easy is it going to be to trawl all the possible CCTV around you for several weeks. Especially if you go to visit someone you see frequently, who lives in an area with no ANPR and little CCTV outside their town centre?

"Tales of the Unexpected" Lamb to the Slaughter

That is the ideal murder weapon and means of disposal, for sure.

The various posts suggesting distributing parts of the body and/or clothing etc over an area and/or time seems to me like more chances for something to be discovered.

@LoobyDop There was a carnival house of horrors attraction in the US in the 1970s that was found to have a real mummified corpse among its props. It had been bought in the 1920s from a funeral parlour who had embalmed it and kept it as no one claimed the body, and was bought and sold several times over the years until no one remembered that it was real 😯

@cakeorwine A man called Harry Dobson murdered his wife in 1941 and hid her body in the ruins of a bombed church so that if she was found it would be thought that she was a bomb victim. But when she was eventually found it was clear from the post mortem that she’d been strangled and hadn’t died from blast injuries.

Dobkin, not Dobson.

If you have carried out a murder that has involved a lot of blood then you will not be thinking rationally afterwards. Hence not carefully discarding of things.

I watch some of the forensic shows on CBS reality, the things they can discover, even years later, is amazing. One man almost got away with it, he poisoned his wife with a very short lasting poison, so by the time she died from the effects all trace was gone. It was only solved because a nurse (colleague of the deceased) had taken some blood and hid it in a fridge (previous suspicions) and when it was discovered and tested, traces were found.

Never given any thought of jow to dispose of incriminating evidence. 🙄🤣

Yes but your mobile phone would lead the police straight to that hole.

Yes but your mobile phone would lead the police straight to that hole.

Only if you'd been stupid enough to take it with you.

The launderette scenario is genius. I'm gonna use this when I next murder someone.

Ha! This is something I have thought about too but I've seen crime and discovery shows whereby someone threw the murder weapon in the bin and it was found a few days after the murder. I always thought "how fcking stupid" to not get rid of it properly (the stupidity annoyed me almost more than the crime lol).

Murder victims are usually found fairly quickly (unless the person has gone missing) therefore, there isn't enough time for the bin men to collect.

But the blood won’t be your blood if it’s tested..?

Another thing PD James killers seem to do, or to consider, quite often, is doing to actual murder naked, so you can do a quick wash afterwards before getting into clean clothes.

It is, of course possible that the less body-confident might be put off murder entirely by the idea of having to perform it unclad.

I heard of a man who went to Liverpool police 30 years after the war saying he couldn't live with himself. He'd been on leave from his merchant ship during the Blitz and had gone with a sex worker to a bomb damaged building and strangled her there. He told them where it was, and it turned out the area had been bombed again and cleared after the war and redeveloped. The police said they couldn't charge him and sent him away.