Disposing of a Body: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

Following a death, either [[Accidental Murder|accidental]] or [[Always Murder|deliberate]], no matter how skilfully the responsible party covers it up, there remains the problem of disposing of the most obvious and most damning piece of evidence for the crime: the body itself. (There have been jurisdictions where no corpse means no murder.)

* [[Cleanup Crew]], if they call a professional to get rid of it for them;

* [[Hollywood Acid]], if they dissolve the body or parts thereof in some kind of corrosive chemical;

* [[Viking Funeral]] if they burn it on a pyre

 

Pretty much any action movie with a significant body count won't ever bother with this trope.

 

 

{{deathtrope}}

== Anime & Manga ==

 

** "Friends help you move. ''Real'' friends help you move bodies."

 

 

== Film ==

* Casino gives a very insightful lecture on the subject (straight hole/ground burial)

'''Nicky''' Got a lot of holes in the desert... and a lot of problems are buried in those holes. Except you gotta do it right. I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half hour or 45 minutes of diggin'. And who knows who`s gonna be comin' along in that time? Before you know it, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all fuckin' night. }}

** In the end, Nicky provides {{spoiler|a graphical self-demonstration too}}

* In the [[After the End|post-apocalyptic]] black comedy ''[[Delicatessen]]'', tenants of Clapet's apartment building can buy cheap meat if they lay off the questions.

* Subverted in the film ''Shattered'' where the killers dumped a body in a chemical vat but [[Did Not Do the Research]] - if they'd not been in such a hurry they might have seen the sign saying Formaldehyde.

* In the Spanish film ''[[Volver]]'', a woman hides her husband's corpse in the freezer of a restaurant while the owner is away, after her daughter kills him in self defense when he tried to molest her.

* In every version of ''[[Sweeney Todd]]'', Todd disposes of his victims by delivering them to his butcher neighbour to grind into [[I'm a Humanitarian|meat pies]].

* The German [[Black Comedy]] ''Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass'' has the protagonist and his friends with the body of his fiancee which he isn't sure whether he killed her or not. {{spoiler|He didn't.}} So they cut the body up and borrow a grain mill from the [[Granola Girl]] next door to shred the bones.

* In noir film ''Rider on the Storm'', the heroine kills a rapist in her house, and then calmly proceeds to dump his corpse in the ocean. The lack of a body drives most of the plot. It's never discussed why she doesn't, say, call the police.

* In ''Lethal Weapon 2'' the South African baddie invites one of his hapless henchmen into his office which is covered in plastic. His other, not-so-hapless henchman shoots him in the head and he [[Crazy Prepared|conveniently drops onto the plastic]].

* [[Nicolas Winding Refn]]'s ''[[Pusher]] 3'' includes a particularly long and gruesome example when Milo and his old comrade Radovan dispose of two bodies by butchering them in his restaurant.

 

== Literature ==

 

* In ''[[Weather Wardens]]'', an amnesiac Jo has to help Eamon bury the body of a guy she doesn't know. But a couple of other bodies vanish without a trace due to weather related issues.

* ''Eight Skilled Gentlemen''.

* [http://www.bartleby.com/246/234.html The Dream of Eugene Aram] (1831)

* There's a short story out there somewhere about a guy who killed an old man and tried to get rid of his body in the ocean. However, he's carrying the body over his shoulders, and rigor mortis sets in, locking the corpse's arms around his neck. He ends up drowning when the tide comes up and he can't outrun it.

* In [[R Austin Freeman]]'s Dr Thorndyke mystery ''[http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700811h.html The Stoneware Monkey]'', the victim's body is incinerated in a potter's kiln.

* ''[[Vorkosigan Saga|Ethan of Athos]]:'' Elli Quinn spends an entire chapter disposing of a body. "Have you ever given thought to the difficulty of getting rid of a body on a space station?"

 

== Live Action TV ==

 

* On ''[[Misfits]]'', the main characters often end up having to covertly dispose of the many corpses that result from their adventures; being young offenders on probation, they firmly believe that they'd be blamed for the deaths even in cases when it honestly wasn't their fault- and given the state of the police in the neighbourhood, they're probably right.

** In the first episode, they bury the bodies of Gary and Tony under a flyover. A few episodes later, it turns out that an environmental monitoring station is due to be built there, so they have to hide the bodies in their local community centre; eventually, the corpses are returned to the flyover and dumped in the wet concrete foundations of the building site.

* In ''[[Dollhouse]]'', {{spoiler|Boyd}} makes {{spoiler|Topher}} do this (hacking the body up and dissolving it) with a death that he technically allowed to learn that "actions have consequences".

* In ''[[Wire in The Blood]]'', a hospital nurse has access to the perfect way of disposing of her victims: they go into the hospital's cremation furnace.

** Jessica buried bodies in the desert.

** Sylar didn't bother with disposal.

** The Company had [[Cleanup Crew|cleanup crews]].

** Angela burned the body of {{spoiler|the original Nathan Petrelli}}.

** Apparently, the Savoy Hotel in London has some sort of special allure for gentlemen who would check in, order the finest room service, then down an entire bottle of sleeping pills.

** Mostly averted throughout the series, as vampires tend to ash upon destruction due to the fact that the writers didn't want a good chunk of the episode to involve teenagers trying to dispose of bodies. The episode "The Wish" lampshaded it when Buffy kills a demon in the opening act and has to figure out how to get rid of the body.

* In ''[[The Wire]]'', Marlo's hit squad Chris and Snoop have a genius system that allows them to off a huge number of rival dealers before the police start to notice (22 bodies are eventually recovered, but their actual hit count is unknown). They take them at gunpoint into one of hundreds of derelict row-houses, kill them and cover the body in lime, then wrap them in a plastic sheet and board the house back up.

** In another, a body is found buried 18" underground prompting a discussion between Gibbs and Ducky as to why humans are buried six feet down. According to the writers, that's how deep they have to be so animals don't smell them and dig them up.

* In the ''[[Bottom]]'' episode "Gas", Richie and Eddie believe they've managed to kill the Gas inspector when they knocked him out with a frying pan (and hit him a few more times after he hit the floor for good measure). They decide to add an extra entry to his diary ("Left in high spirits, to indulge in my hobby of Bus surfing.") and post his body out of the window onto the roof of a double decker bus.

* ''[[Dexter]]'' can't really be excluded from this trope considering his thoughtfully planned and executed methods of disposing of bodies. Not only does he completely cover a small room in plastic sheeting and prepare the scene, has everything he needs to both torture his victim (a villainous criminal implied to have no chance for redemption) with pictures of his victims, collect blood for his blood slide collection, then stab the victim in the chest, chop up the body, wrap it up in garbage bags, and deposit them at sea with his boat in the dead of night. All the while posing as the upbeat forensic blood spatter analyst for the police. Trope mastered.

* In the first season of ''[[Downton Abbey]]'', Mary has to get rid of the body of a Turkish diplomat who dies in her bedroom, where he's emphatically not supposed to have been in the first place. The trope is [[Downplayed]], as she doesn't mind the body being found; it's just necessary that it be found somewhere that won't lead to a massive life-ruining scandal for her.

 

== Webcomics ==

 

 

== Western Animation ==

 

* One episode of ''[[Family Guy]]'' had Lois attempting to dump a body in the river in order to protect her son Chris (who she thought killed the man, but in reality he didn't). Things got complicated when a policeman came by, but Stewie handled the situation by sliding himself into the collar of the man's shirt and acting like it was his body.

* This has happened enough times on ''[[Archer]]'' that "I shall fetch a rug" has become a [[Running Joke]]. "Training Day" had Archer and Cyril planning to bury a dead hooker ( {{spoiler|who was just paralyzed}}) after smuggling her body out in a rug, and "Killing Utne" had Malory taking care of a dead UN official and his high-class call girl companion by breaking into her hated neighbor's apartment, staging the scene to look like a murder-suicide, then burning the bodies. Probably reached its peak with the episode "Lo Scandalo", in which Mallory roping in Archer, Lana and Dr Krieger to help her dispose of the body of the Italian Prime Minister who's been assassinated in her apartment. Krieger's solution is to hack the body up in a bathtub and use the rest of the agents to dispose of the pieces in separate trashcans spread out across the city. At the end, {{spoiler|we're left wondering whether it was actually Mallory who killed him.}}

== Real Life ==

 

 

{{reflist}}