Personal essays
Getting rid of the body
The body
It turns out that I know less about murder than I thought I did.
I read and watch a lot of mysteries and been present for the commission and solving of more than a thousand murders.
Not all of them can be solved in an hour. Some shows are ninety minutes and sometimes it takes a good two hour movie to get to the bottom of them.
There are episodes where we know who the murderer is and the detectives know who the murderer is - but they still get away with it. Somehow that makes us feel as if it is more realistic and now we have a clearer view into what’s wrong with the system.
I thought I knew a lot about murder from all of this time I’d invested into the topic.
Not - and let me be clear about this - not that I have any plans of committing one.
I did learn on a recent episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast, that most murders aren’t planned at all.
They arise in a moment or argument and are often alcohol or drug fueled.
Although most crime shows have a carefully planned murder with some subtle flaw that the detective must discover, in real life the murder happens without much thought and then the murderer looks down to realize there’s a dead body and wonders, “how do I get rid of that?”
Entertainment not instruction
I texted Maggie after I listened to the podcast and her answer was, “good to know. I’ll premeditate so I don’t get caught.”
Not - and let me be extra clear about this - not that she has any plans of committing one.
According to the podcast episode, Maggie has a better chance of getting away with murder than I do. Men are more likely to commit murder and are therefore more likely to be suspected. In addition, the murderer is less likely to be caught if they don’t live near the victim or have any obvious interaction with the victim. It’s also helpful to use an untraceable weapon and to, perhaps, be a psychopath - though it’s not clear that that’s helpful.
See what you can learn from a podcast.
Speaking of which, I’ve been listening to Matt Gemmell’s great podcast Trouble with Writing.
The latest episode was on research.
Writers often need to do some research so that you believe that the character is really in the location being described doing the activity using some particular item.
But writers famously do research to avoid writing.
Writers do pretty much anything to avoid writing.
Matt says that you do hours or days of research to generate paragraphs of notes to end up with a sentence or a passing comment in your book.
The result that the research enables is important to your book because it helps paint a picture and lend verisimilitude. But the point of the teaching is not to actually teach the readers. It’s to move the story along in a believable way.
So it turns out, I’ve not been reading handbooks on how to commit or detect a murder.
Getting rid of the body
The problem with murder isn’t the murder itself, it’s with getting rid of the body.
As with everything in my life, it seems that there are metaphors everywhere.
For me, the best way to connect to a metaphor is to go deeper into it.
So there I am standing over a body. I suppose one option is for me to leave it there and get away quickly without being seen.
But we now live in a world where we’re being seen even when we don’t know we’re being seen. Security cameras, traffic cameras, doorbells, and passers-by.
Besides, we leave traces of ourselves everywhere. As sneeze guards in salad bars and living in the time of COVID have taught us, we spread bits of our DNA around even when just talking and breathing.
In general, murders are much easier to solve when the body can be found.
So we can’t leave it where it is.
Perhaps we can take it and dump it somewhere.
It turns out that bodies are bulky and heavy. The Infinite Monkey Cage episode explains that this limits our ability to take the body from the scene. We likely have to put it in the trunk of a car and then we need to take it out of the trunk and leave it.
This means that most bodies are found within a short distance of a road.
Hmmm. What if we don’t transport the body as a whole.
Any time we cut into a body we are back to that thing about leaving DNA evidence everywhere.
The overly clever criminal who cuts the body parts into pieces and buries different pieces in different places is actually making things harder on themselves as they’ve now created multiple crime scenes any one of which can be discovered.
The podcast episode ended with a story of a criminal who was convicted because he tried to save money. He was part of an operation where one person would perform the murder, he would dismember the body, and a third person would dispose of the body. He thought he’d save money and dispose of the body himself.
I suppose I need to do more “research” by reading and watching many more murder mysteries.
Not - and again, let me be clear on this - not that I have any intention of actually committing one.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 166. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe