Nicola Cook, “How to Commit the Perfect Murder” (2007)
The notion that a criminal could carry out the perfect murder – as in one that can’t be traced to him or her – is the focus for this BBC Horizon documentary’s investigation into the work that forensic scientists and other experts do to determine the cause of death of murder victims, slain soldiers, suicides and others. The film is segmented into sections dealing with body evidence, body disposal, body destruction, the perfect weapon and crime scene alteration so it is a very thorough survey of how a “perfect murder” might be carried out. In each section, different experts explain how their methods of detection and investigation work and reveal aspects of a victim’s death and the context in which the death occurred, usually by employing a real-life murder case to illustrate how, no matter how cleverly a murderer tries to destroy evidence and alter the crime scene, one tiny slip-up or a small piece of evidence that the murderer overlooks or is unaware of can lead detectives to that person and give them and the prosecuting legal team enough information to produce a case in court against the murderer.
Narrated in a low, secretive and creepy voice by Simon Gregor – this is the corniest part of the documentary which detracts from it a little – the film is highly informative. The narrative begins with a city that looks somewhat familiar to me – it reminds me of the Phoenix city landscape in 1959 at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous slasher film “Psycho” – and hones in on a detective working with a group of mystery and crime authors on working out a perfect murder plot. The various unnamed writers guess at the kind of perfect murder they want to write; a few of them suggest a penetrating weapon made of frozen water! From this little scene, the film branches out into inspecting a pretend autopsy by a pathologist, checking out how fast a pig trotter can corrode in sulphuric acid and watching an oceanographer create a three-dimensional model of the city of Seattle and its sound to simulate the actions of tides and harbour water and then pour blue dye into the water to watch where the simulated waves take the dye among other things. Interestingly, the oceanographer’s work became part of a crime mystery plot which came to the attention of police investigators dealing with the body of a woman washed up on the Seattle shore; the investigators determined from where the blue dye originated on the oceanographer’s recreation of ocean tides that the woman’s body fell from a bridge into the water below which then deposited her some 50 km away. The police realised her husband had lied about her whereabouts on the night she disappeared and charged the man with murder.
It becomes obvious that the perfect murder must be carried out by someone who is meticulous and extremely well organised, who painstakingly ensures that no DNA of his or hers – not even DNA that might be ejected from the mouth when s/he speaks – is left at a crime scene and who takes care not to leave any obvious traces of the method of death or the murder weapon itself on the victim’s body. The efficient murderer also uses a weapon that can’t be traced or found by police and any clothes or equipment worn or used during the murder must be disposed of in such a way that it can’t be found (or at least not until the murderer has died and maybe admitted his/her guilt to a minister of religion at the death-bed). We return to the band of writers who suggest that poison of a non-detectable sort might be used by someone who would be least expected to commit murder yet have easy access to poisons.
Yes, you’re right – a medical professional, trusted by the victim/s, might be the perfect murderer. The film reserves the most near-perfect murderer for its climax: the infamous Dr Henry Shippen who killed several hundred victims, mostly elderly folk, in Britain in the 1990s. Now Shippen might have escaped police scrutiny had not a perspicacious relative of one of Shippen’s victims noticed that the victim’s will had been changed to favour Shippen; the will was discovered to be a forgery. In the end, murders are not perfect because the murderer, however psychopathic s/he may be, is only human and humans make mistakes or are betrayed by greed, hubris, ignorance or pride. We have to wait until scientists develop a robot, computer, cyborg or artificially enhanced organism with a superhuman intelligence that can be directed by a human to commit a perfect murder.