On Hoffa? This is like the 10th. Even the barrel and that particular landfill have come up before.
The popular assumption in the area is he was likely dumped in the Meadowlands or further south in the Pine Barrens. Both areas are popular body dumps because they’re out of the way and pretty quickly there’s not much to find.
The barrel thing, even burying anything deeper than a few feet, never made sense to me here. Since it’s just going to preserve evidence. In a place where lots of this went down specifically because evidence doesn’t stick around.
With organized crime’s (especially back in the day) control of construction (and associated enterprises), you’d think they’d have a metal plater on tap for the ol’ acid bath.
Sure, but if you know a guy in a crematorium it’s even more convenient. Heck, you could wheel a body bag into the place in broad daylight without raising suspicions.
Certainly an option. One method (written by Mario Puzo) involved locking bodies in a cage then dumping the cage far out to sea. Use of a cage is obvious.
I’m not so sure. Since there are thousands of cases that are old-and-cold at this point, it’s still probably a useful deterrent for the FBI, etc., to let it be known that they’ll follow up on tips on old cases so folks who are on the run for years and more try to keep themselves out of trouble.
Everyone quotes the old Ben Franklin saw about how “three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead,” but it’s amazing what kind of silence can be gained by everyone being implicated… especially if there’s a threat of death if they talk, too.
Many, many. I have a friend who is editor of a small town Michigan newspaper. He got contacted by a dying guy who claimed to have been the one responsible for Hoffa’s disappearance. He didn’t even go out to hear the story as he judged it non-credible.
Literally the second episode of Breaking Bad showed how relatively easy it is to destroy a corpse, assuming that you don’t have someone like Jesse Pinkman on your crew.
Not exactly a documentary; I think the Mythbusters demonstrated it is a little trickier to completely dissolve a body than the show suggested. Still, a criminal organization with sufficient resources should have been able to manage something pretty definitive.
Which requires access to a compactor/scrap yard, and the involvement of multiple other people. Or hoping like hell no one at that steel mill notices a smell or a finger.
Thing about all these clever things is we know about them, because people got caught. The more people involved in a conspiracy the easier it is to spot, and the easier it is to do the whole RICO thing.
We know the mob used crematoriums, cause they got caught doing it.
Stuff that went long unsolved or undiscovered tends to involve simpler stuff. Often enough people just keeping remains in their house, where there’s not a lot of foot traffic to stumble on anything. Or remains parked out in the open, in out of the way places. Where nature takes care of the evidence.
Even the multiple famous incidents of bodies in barrels. There’s no suspicious purchase of large amounts of acid, or complicated disposal schemes. No other people involved.
Just the barrels, maybe some kerosene or something.
Then people just parked the barrels outside their house, in the basement. Or in one case dumped them in like a ravine just outside of town. Everyone could see the barrels, just took years before anyone checked the barrels.
In every one those I’ve ever heard of. It is ultimately those barrels that resulted in the killer being caught.
Meanwhile there is no end of sadly unidentified people, just found out in the woods or in some marsh somewhere.
