All that Remains by Sue Black

Author:Sue Black
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2019-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

The body mutilated

‘Let fire and cross, flocks o’ beasts, broken bones and dismemberment come upon me’

Ignatius of Antioch bishop and martyr (circa 35–107)

The position of the dismemberment cuts on Gemma McCluskie.

The act of separating a body into parts as a sacrifice or punishment is present to some extent in almost all cultures. Wood etchings depicting the Spanish atrocities in the New World or the eighteenth-century satirical engravings of the Day of Judgement made by anatomist William Hunter all convey a human acceptance of the practice of deconstructing the corporeal whole. And indeed it has been performed in assorted ways in almost all societies at some stage of their history for a variety of cultural, religious and ritualistic reasons. It is only in relatively recent times that desecration of the human form by dismemberment has come to be seen as repugnant and synonymous with criminality, usually murder.

Of course, not all dismemberments are criminal. An accident at work or a sporting misadventure may lead to the loss of a limb, and suicide by jumping in front of a train can cause extensive corporeal dismemberment and wide dispersal, as can violent mass fatalities such as plane crashes, resulting in detached body parts being found or having to be searched for.

Of the 500 to 600 murders a year that take place in the UK – fewer than 1 in every 100,000 members of the population – approximately three are recorded as involving criminal dismemberment, so it is certainly not common. But when it does happen, it fires the imagination of the public and the media and tends to garner more column inches than almost any other kind of crime, providing a rich seam of inspiration for novels, television dramas and horror films.

In the real world, how do you dispose of a body so that no one will ever find it? Everyone thinks they have an answer to that question (many of them informed by watching Dexter on TV) and a theory on what constitutes the perfect murder. But of course, if a murder is perfect, no body will ever be found and no perpetrator punished – the only crimes we hear about are those that are imperfect. If a killer has got away with it, which has certainly happened, we remain in blissful ignorance of how they did it. Even when no body comes to light, prosecutions do, of course, take place, though such cases are more difficult to prove.

A body is a very unwieldy object to handle at the best of times and its size, weight and inability to co-operate can make its disposal somewhat troublesome for anyone trying to conceal a death. Unless the remains are going to stay within the premises where the death has occurred (and bodies do get found under beds, in cupboards and wardrobes, behind bath panels, in attics, basements, gardens, sheds, garages, up chimneys and under new patios and driveways), it will need to be transported elsewhere. Indeed, there is often an urgent requirement to remove it from the scene and for the murderer to literally distance him or herself from the evidence.

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