Hiding the Bodies

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Andreas

It of course depends greatly on the circumstance. More so than on the skill levels of the people on both sides.

For example, even an untrained person could, if possessing some common sense, reliably dispose of a body given an abundance of time and privacy. On the other hand, even an extremely skilled person might stand next to no chance if for example, the body is in a frequently used public bathroom.

That depends on how easy it is to close off access in such a way that the public (and cameras) can't see an exit to it, and how nosy/present any security and cleaners responsible for the toilet are.

The public are easy to get rid of - put someone in something like a cleaners' or security uniform out the front, close the doors, and have that person just tell everyone "Sorry, the toilets are closed for cleaning, the nearest alternative is just over there." [pointing to them].

As long as they can't see blood and/or body parts that's the public solved.

As far as such things go, I'm not even sure that putting a corpse through a wood chipper would be that bad. You could after all do so without looking directly at the corpse. Something like butchering the corpse with a knife seems like it would be worse.

Starting would be the hard part, I think. Once you get going it's just meat. The thing with running a body through a wood chipper is that you need the wood chipper, then you need to clean the chipper, then you still need to dispose of the bits.

If you've done the killing right (so there's nothing of you on the body), weighting it and dumping it off a bridge a good distance from the scene of the murder on a quiet night is still good.

But the big thing is making sure the cops don't look at you in the first place.

[Kax]

Contact: Ex-adventurer crematorium manager, Absolutely reliable, 15-. Not that expensive given the alternative.

In a secret magic campaign, I'd get the ashes and scatter them on the victim's yard or carpet for divinations to find, and wear a mask while doing so.

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

So, in your modern games, how difficult do you make it for characters to hide the bodies of the people that they unlawfully kill?

My answer is generally the same as johndallman's. Though in the games I've played where we played special ops as I recall we didn't bother trying to hide the bodies since we'd already gone in with with lots of noise and explosions that made it readily apparent that lots of violence had just occurred.

[Dalillama]

Last time I was in a modern game and the party generated corpses, I had access to miracles to dispose of them. On one occasion I made one into flower seeds and grew a silhouette of the body in daffodils, on another I arranged it as ~180 lbs of guano on a car that irritated me.

[Anthony]

Realistically, it's not that hard to dispose of a body and not get caught; it happens moderately often, particularly if they aren't the sort of people whose disappearance gets a lot of public attention. However, if you keep doing it, eventually you get caught.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by mr beer

... I certainly wouldn't chop up and conceal a murder victim without coercion or other extreme motivation.

There's the rub. I suspect that if someone had sufficient motivation to illegally kill someone and then need to hide the body, they'd have sufficient motivation to do what was necessary.


For instance I've butchered animals. i didn't like it, I'm really fond of animals (even soulless abominations like fish). But it was necessary if I wanted to eat, so i got over it. I never grew to like it or have the initial "I don't like this" go away, but i did become proficient at the skill.

[Icelander]

Obviously, whether or not it's practical or necessary to hide or dispose of bodies depends heavily on what links the PCs to the victims. If the victims are their wives, parents, other family, lovers, known associates or people with whom they have a well known violent history, well, then yes, it might make sense to prolong their time around the crime scene and their chance of immediate exposure in return for making the crime harder to discover at all, delaying investigation and minimising any potential evidence from the remains.

On the other hand, if there is no preexisting relationship between the PCs and victim and the method used for the killing does not seem likely to have splattered biological evidence from the PCs over the victim, it may be safer overall to simply walk away immediately and dispose of the murder weapon. Assuming, of course, that the crime scene has no connection to the PCs either.

CSI to the contrary, there really isn't much investigators can do with a gunshot victim dead at the scene unless there was a witness. Any forensic evidence gathered from a bullet is pretty much moot if the weapon is never found and was never used in a crime before. And whatever the body can tell investigators is irrelevant to the PCs if they have no connection to the person that the authorities can uncover.

[Andreas]

Originally Posted by Rupert

The public are easy to get rid of - put someone in something like a cleaners' or security uniform out the front, close the doors, and have that person just tell everyone "Sorry, the toilets are closed for cleaning, the nearest alternative is just over there." [pointing to them].

It gets much easier if you have people to help you, or if you are prepared. I meant a scenario where someone unexpectedly killed someone else in a frequently used public bathroom, without convinent access to ways to get rid of the public.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Andreas

It gets much easier if you have people to help you, or if you are prepared. I meant a scenario where someone unexpectedly killed someone else in a frequently used public bathroom, without convinent access to ways to get rid of the public.

Just walk away. For trace evidence to matter, you must become a suspect in other ways for someone to get a warrant to take a sample from you to compare, and in any case, a frequently used public restroom will be literally overflowing with biological evidence, and not just in trace amounts.

Any attempt to dispose of the body in such a public place is much more likely to get you arrested with the body than help in any way. If you need to do anything beyond walking away, it's worry about surveillance video, but that's something you need to keep in mind coming and going at all times and it may not be practical to just erase it as in the old days (because there is no guarantee that the 'tape', actually digital recordings, will be on site or accessible to anyone other than employees of a third party security company).

[AlexanderHowl]

The reliability and admissibility of video evidence is a constantly evolving topic in the field of criminal justice. While the general consensus is that video evidence helps support physical forensics evidence, the problem is that contemporary technology can allow people to alter video data in a fashion that leaves traces that are quite difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from normal recording errors. If the system used to record the digital video was connected to the Internet on any level, a good defense attorney can create reasonable doubt about its authenticity by suggesting that the video file could have been altered/planted by third parties to incriminate their client in order to hide the identity of the 'real' killer.

Of course, even physical forensics evidence is not perfect. Familial DNA matches may incriminate the wrong relative, fingerprints have a 1:64 million chance of being being identical, and stuff like bite marks and palm prints are pretty much considered to be the pseudoscience of forensic evidence right now. This is why prosecutors usually prefer a plea deal, especially when they have suspects who have the resources for a decent defense lawyer, as they know that most criminal trials depend on a good story rather than on good evidence, and a decent defense lawyer only has to convince one juror that the story told by their side is better than the story told by the prosecution.