When it comes to vanishing a corpse—whether you’re dropping it into a bubbling vat of acid or coercing a victim to dig his own shallow pit—Hollywood has dreamed up more disposal tricks than it has written decent scripts. But do any of these cinematic tricks actually hold up? Here are the top 10 ways get a body out of sight, examined with a healthy dose of reality.
10 ways get: The Grim Realities
10 Dissolving A Body In A Vat Of Acid
Breaking Bad makes the whole affair look as easy as pouring a drink. Walter White tells us that you simply toss a corpse into a container and drown it in hydrofluoric acid, turning the victim into a murky slurry. The show paints the process as instant and foolproof.
In the real world, hydrofluoric acid is actually a weak acid, and it’s notoriously poor at breaking down flesh and bone. Its chemical properties simply aren’t strong enough to liquefy a human body in any reasonable timeframe.
That’s a lesson a few French criminals learned the hard way.
Three murderers in France tried to emulate Walter’s method, only to discover that after ten days the body was still recognizably intact, emitting a stench that drew unwanted attention. The acid didn’t dissolve anything; it merely turned the corpse into a smelly, stubborn mass.
A group of German chemists later published a paper dissecting White’s theory, suggesting alternative chemicals might improve the outcome. Nonetheless, anyone attempting this would still have to contend with horrendous odors and an excruciatingly slow process.
9 Pulling A ‘Weekend At Bernie’s’
Believe it or not, a pair of Colorado friends tried to reenact the 1980s comedy Weekend at Bernie’s after stumbling upon a dead buddy. Their plan? Load the corpse into the backseat of a car and parade it through three nightclubs, blowing $400 of the deceased’s cash on a strip club extravaganza.
Unlike the film’s slap‑stick chaos, the duo never actually hauled the body inside any venue; it stayed glued to the backseat the entire night. The motive for dragging the corpse around remains murky, but they certainly made a spectacle of it.
When the night finally ended, they called the police to report the death. The authorities, unsurprisingly, didn’t find the situation funny. Both men were arrested on multiple charges, including abuse of a corpse, proving that reality rarely mirrors the film’s carefree tone.
8 Stuffing A Body Into A Wood Chipper
The most iconic scene from the Coen brothers’ Fargo shows a killer feeding a victim to a wood chipper. This macabre moment isn’t pure fantasy; it’s based on the true‑crime case of Richard Crafts, who murdered his wife and attempted the same grisly technique.
Wood chippers are indeed powerful enough to pulverize human tissue, even bones. Crafts managed to shred enough of his wife’s remains that the majority of her body still hasn’t been recovered, effectively hiding a large portion of the evidence.
Despite the success in obscuring the corpse, the crime scene was littered with hair, fingernails, teeth, and bone fragments. Blood seeped into the carpet and furniture, leaving a forensic trail. Moreover, the deafening roar of the chipper alerted neighbors, prompting police to investigate the property.
7 Making Them Dig Their Own Graves
The classic Western trope of forcing a captive to exhume his own grave might sound like a Hollywood exaggeration, but real‑world accounts show it can actually happen. Victims, when faced with a shovel and a gun, often resign themselves to the grim task rather than fight back.
However, the logistics are brutal. Professional gravediggers need roughly an hour with a backhoe, or an entire day with a hand shovel, to carve a standard six‑foot grave under ideal conditions. Hard soil, bad weather, or a deliberately slow perpetrator can stretch the process to several days.
Even a shallow grave isn’t safe from detection. Cadaver dogs are trained to sniff out buried bodies, and investigators can spot subtle surface disturbances. Consequently, a hastily dug shallow pit is likely to be uncovered fairly quickly.
6 The Norman Bates Approach
In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Norman Bates keeps his mother’s corpse hidden in the family house, pretending she’s still alive. A real‑life counterpart, Timothy Fattig, tried a remarkably similar ruse after his mother died of natural causes.
Fattig, overwhelmed with grief, let his mother’s body decompose in their home while telling friends and relatives she was in the hospital. The deception held for almost a year before a curious police officer finally knocked on the door, suspecting something amiss.
When the officer confronted him, Fattig confessed. An autopsy revealed the mother hadn’t been murdered, so no homicide charges were filed. He later served time for an unrelated theft, illustrating that pretending a dead loved one is still alive is a precarious, mentally taxing strategy.
5 Fitting Them For Cement Shoes
Movies love the image of mafia goons slipping concrete‑filled shoes onto a victim’s feet before dumping them in a river. In reality, concrete takes hours to set, meaning the victim would have to stay perfectly still for a lengthy period—something hardly feasible in a violent crime.
In 2016, a member of the Crips named Peter Martinez fell victim to a modern‑day cement‑shoe attempt. After being fitted with concrete‑filled shoes, he was thrown into Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay.
Air bubbles trapped in the concrete caused his body to rise almost immediately. The tide carried him to Manhattan Beach, where families enjoying a sunny day discovered the floating corpse, exposing the method’s glaring flaws.
4 Calling The Cleanup Crew
Hollywood often features a slick “cleanup crew”—think the Wolf in Pulp Fiction—ready to erase any trace of a crime with a phone call. In truth, there appears to be no dedicated professional market for erasing murders before police arrive.
Crime‑scene cleaning is a painstaking process, typically consuming nine to twelve hours. As Scott Vogel, a veteran cleaner, explains, it’s far more than gloves and Lysol. Blood, bodily fluids, and organic matter seep into carpets, upholstery, and even walls, often requiring demolition of entire rooms.
The most stubborn obstacle is the lingering odor of death. Even with industrial‑strength machines and specialized chemicals, many cleaners report that the stench can persist. Phyllis Simmons, for example, spent days scrubbing floors after stabbing a man, yet investigators still found residual evidence when the police arrived.
3 Feeding The Body To Pigs
The 2000 film Snatch boasts the line, “They’ll go through bone like butter,” describing how quickly pigs can devour a human body. Pigs are omnivorous scavengers and will indeed eat flesh, even attacking and consuming a farmer who was feeding them.
Scientific speculation suggests that a group of fourteen lactating sows could theoretically finish an adult male within two hours, thanks to their heightened appetite. However, using non‑lactating pigs can stretch the process to several weeks.
Even the most infamous modern example—serial killer Robert Pickton—left behind a wealth of evidence in his pig pens. The animals never fully consumed the bodies, and investigators recovered bone fragments and other forensic material, proving the method isn’t a flawless eraser.
2 Burning The House Down
Television dramas love the dramatic image of a whole house ignited to obliterate evidence. In reality, a typical wood‑fire reaches only 800‑900 °C (1,500‑1,700 °F), far below the 1,100‑1,500 °C (2,000‑2,700 °F) required in crematoriums to reduce a body to ash.
Even at those extreme temperatures, cremation leaves behind small bone fragments that must be manually ground. Those remnants are enough for forensic experts to identify a victim, and investigators can also sniff out accelerants, indicating arson.
Several murderers who tried to burn bodies multiple times still ended up with bone fragments that led to their capture. The flames, it seems, rarely provide a clean slate.
1 Burying A Body Beneath A Coffin
In a memorable Dexter episode, the titular killer advises a fellow murderer to hide a corpse beneath a funeral home’s coffin, assuming no one will ever dig there. The DeCavalcante crime family actually employed this tactic for decades.
During the 1920s, the mob owned a funeral home and fabricated “double‑deck” coffins with a secret compartment under the main burial space. They would slip a victim’s body into this hidden layer, then seal it beneath a grieving family’s loved one.
Pallbearers often remarked on the unusual weight of the coffins, exchanging puzzled glances, yet no one questioned the arrangement. The scheme remained undetected until 2003, when a mob informant testified in court, revealing an 80‑year‑long burial subterfuge.