Seattle1
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Bumping this post from earlier thread.
Expert: No-body murder cases can be tried successfully
“The interesting thing about no-body cases is, yes, they are very difficult to prosecute. But when they do go to trial, the conviction rate is actually quite high. Right now, it’s running at about 88 percent,” said Tad DiBiase, who successfully prosecuted a no-body murder case tried in Washington, D.C., in January 2006 when he worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. “So that seems very counter-intuitive because they’re really difficult to do.”
[...]
“There are two reasons why the conviction rate is still pretty high in these cases. No. 1, prosecutors are only going to take the tough cases to trial; they’re not going to take a shaky missing persons case to trial,” DiBiase said. “And the second thing is, about 50-51 percent of no-body cases are actually domestic cases.
“So, typically, husband kills wife, boyfriend kills girlfriend, parent kills child; there’s usually a pre-existing relationship between the two people. The suspect becomes very obvious in those cases, though it doesn’t always mean it’s that person.”
[...]
DiBiase said a body is the most critical piece of evidence in a murder case, but prosecutors can present other evidence to get a conviction.
“The body gives you how the murder happened -- Was it a poisoning? Was it a shooting? Was it a strangling? It typically gives you when it happened and it also can tell you where the murder happened,” DiBiase said.
The main way in which no-body cases are made are through what DiBiase calls the three legs of a stool.
The first leg, he said, is some type of forensic evidence such as DNA or blood.
“It can also be trace evidence. It can be hair or fiber, maybe fingerprints. Some type of scientific evidence is leg No. 1,” DiBiase said.
Leg No. 2 is a confession to friends or family. And leg No. 3 is a confession to police.
“Most no-body cases are made with that kind of evidence,” DiBiase said. “Some only have one leg. The case I tried had all three. And some have none of them and those are the toughest cases. You generally don’t have eyewitnesses. They’re not filmed or anything or that type of stuff. You generally have one of those types of things.”
Expert: No-body murder cases can be tried successfully
“The interesting thing about no-body cases is, yes, they are very difficult to prosecute. But when they do go to trial, the conviction rate is actually quite high. Right now, it’s running at about 88 percent,” said Tad DiBiase, who successfully prosecuted a no-body murder case tried in Washington, D.C., in January 2006 when he worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. “So that seems very counter-intuitive because they’re really difficult to do.”
[...]
“There are two reasons why the conviction rate is still pretty high in these cases. No. 1, prosecutors are only going to take the tough cases to trial; they’re not going to take a shaky missing persons case to trial,” DiBiase said. “And the second thing is, about 50-51 percent of no-body cases are actually domestic cases.
“So, typically, husband kills wife, boyfriend kills girlfriend, parent kills child; there’s usually a pre-existing relationship between the two people. The suspect becomes very obvious in those cases, though it doesn’t always mean it’s that person.”
[...]
DiBiase said a body is the most critical piece of evidence in a murder case, but prosecutors can present other evidence to get a conviction.
“The body gives you how the murder happened -- Was it a poisoning? Was it a shooting? Was it a strangling? It typically gives you when it happened and it also can tell you where the murder happened,” DiBiase said.
The main way in which no-body cases are made are through what DiBiase calls the three legs of a stool.
The first leg, he said, is some type of forensic evidence such as DNA or blood.
“It can also be trace evidence. It can be hair or fiber, maybe fingerprints. Some type of scientific evidence is leg No. 1,” DiBiase said.
Leg No. 2 is a confession to friends or family. And leg No. 3 is a confession to police.
“Most no-body cases are made with that kind of evidence,” DiBiase said. “Some only have one leg. The case I tried had all three. And some have none of them and those are the toughest cases. You generally don’t have eyewitnesses. They’re not filmed or anything or that type of stuff. You generally have one of those types of things.”
you 
