Murder conviction without a body

It is possible to convict someone of murder without the purported victim's body in evidence. However, cases of this type have historically been hard to prove, often forcing the prosecution to rely on circumstantial evidence, and in England there was for centuries a mistaken view that in the absence of a body a killer could not be tried for murder. Developments in forensic science in recent decades have made it more likely that a murder conviction can be obtained even if a body has not been found.

History

For centuries in England there was a mistaken view that without a body there could be no trial for murder, a misconception that arose following the Campden Wonder case of 1660. A local man had vanished, and after an investigation three individuals were hanged for his murder. Two years later, the supposed victim appeared alive and well, telling a story of having been abducted and enslaved in Turkey. The mistaken view of "no body, no murder" persisted into the 20th century; in the case of Mamie Stuart, who disappeared in late 1919, her husband George Shotton was not charged despite significant circumstantial evidence because her body had not been found.

The English murderer John George Haigh believed that dissolving a body in acid would make a murder conviction impossible. He had misinterpreted the Latin legal phrase ''corpus delicti'' (referring to the body of evidence which establishes a crime) to mean an actual human body. But evidence of a body was presented at his 1949 trial: part of the dentures from his last victim. Her dentist was able to identify them; Haigh was found guilty and hanged.

In 1951, New Zealand criminal George Cecil Horry was convicted of the murder of his wife, although her body was never found. The Horry case helped to overturn in other common law jurisdictions the long-standing expectation that such cases would fail.

In the UK, the misapprehension that a killer could not be convicted solely on circumstantial evidence was directly addressed in the 1954 case of Michail Onufrejczyk. He and a fellow Pole, Stanislaw Sykut, had stayed in the United Kingdom after the Second World War and ran a farm together in Wales. Sykut disappeared and Onufrejczyk claimed that he had returned to Poland. Bone fragments and blood spatters were found in the farm kitchen, although forensic technology was then insufficiently advanced to identify them. Charged with Sykut's murder, Onufrejczyk claimed that the remains were those of rabbits he had killed, but the jury disbelieved him and he was sentenced to death, but reprieved. He appealed, but this was dismissed by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard, saying that "things had moved on since the days of the Campden Wonder", and

The 1960 United States case of '' People v. Scott'' held that "circumstantial evidence, when sufficient to exclude every other reasonable hypothesis, may prove the death of a missing person, the existence of a homicide and the guilt of the accused".

In Australia, circumstantial evidence was originally deemed sufficient to obtain a murder conviction in the murder of Louis Carron, and in others such as the " dingo baby case" and Bradley John Murdoch.

In Singapore, law student Sunny Ang was hanged in Changi Prison on 6 February 1967 for the alleged murder of his girlfriend during a scuba diving trip near Sisters' Islands. He was convicted purely based on circumstantial evidence and without a body, as his girlfriend's corpse was lost at sea and never found. Francis Seow, prosecuting, said in his opening statement, "''This is an unusual case insofar as Singapore, or for that matter Malaysia, is concerned. This is the first case of its kind to be tried in our courts that there is no body.''" But he said that it would not mean that crafty killers would get away with murder and escape the brunt of the law. It would only mean that the burden of proof of the prosecution was higher, a burden which was eventually met and led to Ang's conviction.

Other modern cases

1980s

In 1984, Mark Tildesley, a seven-year-old schoolboy, disappeared after leaving his home to go to the fairground in Wokingham, England. In 1990, it emerged that on the night he disappeared, Tildesley had been abducted, drugged, tortured, raped and murdered by a London-based paedophile gang led by Sidney Cooke. Leslie Bailey was charged with murder in 1991 and the following year was given two life sentences. Bailey was murdered in prison by other inmates shortly afterwards.Operation Orchid (Aug '89 – Oct '92)
/ref> The case remains officially unsolved despite being featured heavily in the national press and on BBC
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