Homicide victims concealed in a freezer
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CASE REPORT
Homicide victims concealed in a freezer Trine Bottos Olsen 1 & Peter Mygind Leth 1 Accepted: 18 April 2018 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Freezing as a method for hiding a body is rare. We report here a homicide case in which three bodies were concealed in a freezer. This presented the pathologist with the problem of how to thaw the bodies and simultaneously avoid decomposition of the uppermost body. The problem was solved by slow thawing in a refrigerated morgue and by removing the bodies one after the other from top to bottom. The victims were a 27-year old mother and her two daughters, 7 and 9 years of age. The perpetrator was the 34-year old now-divorced husband and father. All were refugees from Syria. The perpetrator fled back to Syria. He was later arrested in Syria, confessed the crime and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The autopsy findings is discussed and compared to finding reported in the scientific literature. Keywords Forensic medicine . Homicide . Freezing . Frozen . Autopsy . Thawed body . Cryobiology
Introduction Many different methods have been used to dispose of bodies in homicide cases. Dumping the body in remote areas, burial, incineration, and cement internment are some of the ways in which people have tried to hide bodies over the years [1]. Research has shown that behavior related to body disposal is very circumstantial and can depend on variables such as the victim’s age, nature of the crime, and forensic awareness of the perpetrator [2, 3]. Various methods have been used by people attempting to obfuscate involvement in a homicide, with the general goal of removing the perpetrator from suspicion. This involves either completely eliminating the body or hiding it in some way that makes it harder to connect the crime to the offender, or that delays its discovery. In this paper, we present a case of homicide in which the victims were hidden in a freezer and not discovered until after the perpetrator had fled the country. Notably, the serial killer Richard “the Iceman” Kuklinski earned his nickname after the discovery of one of his victims, who had been frozen for over 2 years before being dumped * Peter Mygind Leth [email protected] 1
Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Southern Denmark, J.B. Winsløwsvej 17B, 5000 Odense C, Denmark
outside. In this case, Mr. Kuklinski had tried to disguise the time of death by keeping the body frozen in a warehouse [4]. There have been several previous cases of bodies hidden in a freezer [5, 6]. This may appear to the offender as a convenient method of hiding a body, as freezers are often readily available, and it eliminates the risk of detection of the body by smell. Ironically, hiding a body in a freezer can help with the investigation, as the body will be well preserved for a long time.
Case history In October 2016, three individuals were found in a chest freezer in an apartment in a small town in Jutland, Denmark. The individuals in the freezer turned out to be the inhabitant
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