Humans are strange creatures. It's common in the animal kingdom to kill without mercy, but with humans, it's considered wrong. All animals have the instinct to kill, but only humans are punished. But you can only be punished if you get caught. The wonderful thing about humans is that we have access to resources that help us prevent getting caught. It is possible to commit the perfect murder and get away with it, you just have to know how. The process is easy to understand, but somewhat difficult to act on. These steps may not completely prevent you from getting caught but they will definitely help to lead the suspicion away from you. There are three main steps; choose your victim wisely, choose a method, and get rid of the evidence.
The first step is to pick the perfect victim. When choosing your victim there are a few things you need to look for. It's best to choose someone you don't know or really interact with. the reason behind this is when someone is murdered the first suspects are in the person's social circle. If you aren't in that circle you will likely not be a primary suspect. Another factor to think about is how many people would notice if something happened to the person. You don't want to target someone who has many responsibilities, it's better to choose someone that wouldn't really be missed. It's also important to pick someone who lives a fair distance away from you so you won't be investigated so soon. Depending on your size, you should pick someone you could overpower. The decision on whether you'd rather have a male or a female victim also depends on the strength you have to use against them if they try to fight back. If you're a small woman you wouldn't want to pick a bulky man but rather another woman or even a smaller man. If this isn't your first victim, you should choose someone with entirely different characteristics than your first victim as it would make it more difficult for the authorities to create a profile. Picking the perfect victim could mean the success or failure of your mission.
The next step would be picking how you would like to commit the crime. You need to decide how you want it to look; you can make it look like a natural death, an accident, a suicide, or just a murder. If you want it to look natural you have few options. You could choose to inject air into the flesh between their toes, which would cause the death to appear as a heart attack. Making it look natural is probably one of the hardest methods, as you would have to make sure there is nothing that could cause suspicion left at the scene. Making it look like an accident is a bit easier. If they're on certain medications you could mix them up and have them suffer from an overdose. You could also set the scene to make it appear as if they fell down the stairs. You could even make the accident something as simple as them dropping their plugged up phone into the bathtub causing them to be electrocuted. When it comes to making it look like an accident you can play off pretty much any mistake a person could make in their homes. Setting it up like a suicide can also be a bit tricky. When using this method you have to make sure the suicide would be justifiable. By that I mean you wouldn't want to take a man who just won the lottery and make it look like he killed himself, but if a woman had just lost her unborn baby it seems realistic that she would take her life. With this method, you want to make sure that a suicide wouldn't look suspicious. As for choosing how to do it, the facts are simple, men usually go for a gunshot to the head, while women usually choose to swallow pills. The final method is to just have it look like a homicide. This one is probably the easiest because you just need to go in and do your business and leave. No matter which method you choose, you need to be very careful. You need to assure that no one sees you entering, acting in, or leaving the scene. You also need to make sure you leave no trace of convicting evidence behind.
The final and most important step, get rid of or manipulate all evidence. To start with you should use evidence to your advantage. Police look for certain things when they're observing a crime scene and if you know what they're looking for you can use it to your advantage. One thing they tend to look for are shoe prints, you can easily avoid this evidence being a problem by wearing shoes that are the wrong size and a style different than what you usually wear. Another thing they look for is hair and fiber samples. For hair samples, you just need to be very cautious when navigating the scene. For fiber samples, which are usually from samples of clothing, it would be smart to wear new clothing that you've never worn that is a different style and fabric than your everyday clothing. You could also wear a perfume or cologne different than your usual scent to throw them off even more. You should also be very careful as to not leave any source of DNA at the scene; blood, sweat, tears, or saliva. Nowadays, a single eyelash can stand between you getting caught or going free. Fingerprints are also a dead give away, so be sure to wear gloves. After the murder has been committed, you need to get rid of any evidence that can be used against you. For starters, you should destroy whatever weapon you used, whether it be a knife, a gun, a needle, or a rope. Unless you're making it look like an accident or suicide, in which you would need the identifiable "killer" present. Just a quick tip, don't try to scrub everything clean because it will still be noticeable when the police spray luminol and examine it under a blacklight. If you want to really step up your game, you could get rid of the most important piece of evidence; the body. This part can get tricky, as most murders get caught trying to dispose of their victim's bodies. To begin with, don't make a rookie mistake and feel your bathtub with acid. The acid bathtub is one of the most suspicious and easy to figure out methods of disposal. If you just want to drop the body off somewhere, make sure it's in a remote location where no one goes. If you're wanting to bury the body there are ways that make it harder to discover. One way is to dig a ten-foot hole, put the body in, fill it half way, add a dead animal, then finish filling it. With this method, a smelling dog would smell the carcass and the police would dig down to the animal then pass it off as a false alarm. Another method is to bury the body vertically. This would give it a smaller horizontal area which could cause the police to skip over it as it doesn't seem large enough to be a body. If you would like to get really creative you could follow in the footsteps of Robert Pickton and feed the body to some pigs. Pigs can chew through the bones like butter and have the body gone really soon. However, they cannot digest human hair or teeth, so you'll have to deal with those first. If you decide to go with the pigs, use someone else's pigs. No matter what you do with the evidence don't tell anyone and don't take your cell phone to the disposal site.
Many people say that there is no such thing as a perfect murder, but you can get pretty close. If you take these precautions then you're that much closer to committing the perfect murder and getting away with it. When it comes to killing someone you can never be too cautious, but don't get nervous or you will make a mistake.
** This isn't a part of the essay, I would just like to say I'm not a killer. I've just looked into this kind of thing a lot and it seemed like a fun process to write about.
