The Snug

I was chatting to a retired copper on my holidays. Nice bloke, 30 years in the Force, doing different jobs ranging from traffic, to internet paedophilia hunting.

One of the more interesting things he told me involved how to dispose of a body and not have it found. Always handy information and probably one thing Ray Mears couldn't teach you.

Bodies are quite literally a dead weight. Shifting 7-15 stone of recently murdered body apparently isn't easy. Think on that for a moment. I recently gave a friends 7 year old a ride on my shoulders for about 20 minutes. By the end, my shoulders ached and I felt knackered. She only weighs four stone.

That's why whenever the police find a body buried in a shallow grave in the woods, in 99% of the cases it's never more than 50 metres from either a main road, layby or car park. Searching 50 metres either side of a main roads in a given area is a heck of a lot easier than scouring miles of woodland isn't it? Most people in the "waste disposal" business simply cannot manage to drag or carry the body any further.

So this in a sense is the final piece in the jigsaw of how to get away with murder. Of course, the rest of the pieces are somewhat more tricky: performing the act without leaving witnesses or forensic evidence, having a cast iron alibi for the time when you were in fact carving the murderee up with a butchers knife and actually getting the body away from the crime scene to a non descript car are all matters that are substaintial to deal with.

I mean to say, do you park your car round the corner? What if the nosey neighbours twitch the curtains? Do you ambush your victim when they're out jogging? What if a dog walker stumbles across you? Obviously a fair degree of planning is required but no plan ever survives first engagement does it?

Of course all this is hypothetical, simple musings brought on by my chat with the copper on holiday. Still, it makes you think doesn't it?