Edward Rulloff was not a nice man. He started his working life as a lawyer in New Brunswick. After a bit of legal unpleasantness involving the embezzlement of clients’ money, Rulloff fled to New York in the late 1840s and trained as a doctor. He established a mostly unsuccessful medical practice, got married, and had a child.
Rulloff was abusive and insanely jealous. After he saw his wife kiss a cousin goodbye after a visit, he threatened to poison her. A few days later, Rulloff borrowed a horse and wagon. He got help loading a heavy trunk into the wagon and disappeared for a day. When he returned, he carried the trunk into his house by himself. His neighbors thought this odd. The trunk looked much lighter. When Rulloff’s wife and daughter were never seen again, thoughts of “this is odd” turned to active suspicion. Rulloff gave contradictory explanations for their absence, and then fled New York. He was later arrested in Ohio.
Everyone believed Rulloff killed his wife and daughter, but he was only charged with kidnapping is wife. The prosecutor did not believe he could get a murder conviction without a body. Rulloff was convicted and served a decade in prison. Upon his release, Rulloff was charged with the murder of his daughter. A jury convicted him, but the conviction was overturned. The appeal court judged ruled, “no body, no proof of murder.”
Rulloff turned to burglary and robbery. He and a few accomplices eventually broke into a store only to discover two clerks sleeping inside. One clerk was shot and killed. Rulloff’s partners drowned trying to escape by swimming across a nearby river, but Rulloff was caught. He was quickly convicted and sentenced to hang. Before dying, he gave a detailed confession about how he had murdered his wife and daughter. He had dumped their body in a lake. It had gone down pretty much exactly as the prosecutor claimed.
Murder in the good old days. “No body, no murder conviction”. If a murderer successfully hid or destroyed the body of their victim, they got a “keep out of jail free” card. They even got to pass go.
Something that has gotten better: our ability to obtain some measure of justice for people who have not only been murdered but were denied the right to be buried in a respectful way by friends and family.
No Body, No Murder Conviction
The legal principle of “no body, no murder conviction” dates back to 1660 in Britain. It crossed the Atlantic to what’s now Canada and the United States along with the rest of the British common law system of justice.
In 1660, a property manager named William Harrison was out collecting rents. He disappeared. Some of his clothing was found on an ocean beach. Harrison’s servant was suspected of killing Harrison and robbing him. After enhanced interrogation techniques were applied, the servant confessed – and implicated his brother and mother. He then recanted the confession. Nonetheless, all three were hanged. The mother was dispatched first on the theory that she was a witch who cast a spell on her sons to force them to remain silent. Authorities believed her death would break the spell, allow her sons to confess, and thereby save their immortal souls. That was what passed for mercy in the good old days.
A couple of years after the three were hanged, Harrison turned up. He told an implausible story about being kidnapped by pirates, sold into slavery in Turkey, and escaping. Not many believed this yarn, but one thing was inescapable. The servant, his brother, and his mother had been hanged for a crime they clearly did not commit. From this, common law jurists proposed the rule of no body, no conviction. The rule lasted about 300 years.
The problems of this rule soon became apparent. A sailor was seen bopping his captain over the head with a winch handle and throwing the body overboard. The captain was never seen again. Nonetheless, the sailor was acquitted on the grounds that another ship might have picked up the victim of his assault. Without a body, the prosecution could not prove death, and therefore could not prove murder.
The law changes
One of the features of common law is that it changes in response to new circumstances and understandings. Another feature is that change happens very slowly. The “no body, no murder conviction” rule remained in force until the middle of the 20th century. Then things began to change. Four cases were key to the transition:
In Britain, a conman and forger named John Haigh murdered at least six people, dissolved their bodies in sulfuric acid, and looted their estates. When questioned, Haigh confessed while bragging that no conviction was possible because his victims’ bodies were gone. He got convicted on the basis of the confession, a cornucopia of circumstantial evidence, and the fact that gallstones do not dissolve in sulfuric acid.
In Georgia, a rich landowner and bootlegger named John Wallace murdered a sharecropper in front of about a dozen witnesses. Wallace burned his victim’s body. He was eventually convicted on the basis of the witness testimony and a small piece of charred thigh bone. In Britain, Haigh’s case established the precedent that not much body was needed to convict. Wallace did the same for the American justice system.
In St. Catherines, Ontario a factory night-watchman named Sydney Chambers murdered a nine-year old girl and burned her body in the factory furnace. The girl’s belongings were found in his apartment and he confessed. A jury promptly convicted him. The Ontario Court of Appeal overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial (“no body, no murder”). A second jury also convicted. With that, the appeal court judges capitulated to common sense and allowed Chambers to be hanged.
The big legal breakthrough came in California when a gigolo/conman named Leonard Ewing Scott murdered his rich wife. He gave contradictory stories to explain his wife’s absence while looting her wealth and installing a younger woman in her bed. Scott was charged with fraud. He fled and hid in Canada for a year. When caught, Scott was convicted solely on the basis of circumstantial evidence. He spent three decades in prison denying his guilt. When eventually released, he confessed to an author writing a book about the case.
These cases changed the law. The new logic was that death could be proven by absence in circumstances in which no reasonable explanation was possible but that the missing person had been bumped off by the accused.
This new legal principle was slow to catch on but catch on it did. One successful prosecution would lead to another. Cold missing persons cases began to be transformed into murder convictions. New investigative techniques were developed to buttress the change in legal reasoning. For example, in Canada, the RCMP pioneered the “Mr. Big” sting operation in which a suspect would be tricked into thinking he (I use the pronoun advisedly) was being recruited into a powerful criminal gang that could “clean up” any problems with the law – but only if all details were known. Mr. Big obligingly helped a lot of killers dig up a lot of bodies. In other cases, video-taped explanations of how the bodies were permanently disposed of was enough to convince juries to convict.
The logic of a pure no-body prosecution is that in some circumstances, missing clearly means death. In some of these cases, these same circumstances mean that the accused caused the death. Let’s take a hypothetical (but typical) case. A husband and wife are seen as quarrelling. The wife disappears, never to be seen again. This is profoundly not in character. There are blood stains in the trunk of the husband’s car – along with a muddy shovel. The bloodstains have the same DNA profile of the missing wife. The day after the wife disappears, the husband moves a mistress into the family home and tells the children that they will never see their mother again.
Picture yourself as a member of a jury. How would you vote?
As the cases of Edward Rulloff and Sydney Chambers suggest, jurors seemed quite willing to convict on this kind of evidence. However, for a few centuries, prosecutors and judges convinced themselves that such convictions were impossible. Clear cut cases such as Haigh, Wallace, Scott, and Chambers slowly began to change this in the middle of the 20th century.
With this, changes in technology kicked in. Three were particularly important.
The first technological change was the rise of bureaucratic record keeping to monitor things like social security and electronic banking. In the good old days, it was easy to disappear without being dead. Sometimes this was intentional. Sometimes it was accidental. Moving to the next town could create an inexplicable disappearance. From time to time, the case of William Harrison was repeated. Someone disappeared. Someone else was suspected and charged with murdering them. Sometimes the accused were convicted and executed. When the putative murder victim reappeared, it was embarrassing to the authorities and dampened enthusiasm for subsequent prosecutions. The rise of government and corporate record keeping made it more certain that missing meant dead.
The next big change was DNA testing. Prior to that, a few drops of blood in the trunk of a car were suspicious. When it could be definitively shown to belong to a missing person, it could become dispositive. Another related technology was less sophisticated. During the Vietnam war, the American military discovered that dogs could be trained to identify trace smells of decaying human flesh. “Cadaver dogs” rivalled DNA technology in generating convictions in no-body cases.
Then came cell phones and other electronic devices such as Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras. These could be used by police to establish both a record of movement and communication. Nuff said.
Putting the changes together
As the calendar turned from the 20th to the 21st century, we saw a change in police, prosecutorial and judicial orientation. The old “no body, no conviction” rule was slowly abandoned. The attitude change was accompanied and assisted by new technologies.
Let’s put these developments together by looking at a single case. Let’s look at what happened when Cid Torrez murdered his ex-wife, Vilet, in 2011.
Vilet left her husband after he assaulted her. They separated but remained married. Vilet debated whether to reconcile or divorce. While contemplating this question, she took on a lover. (Cid) Torrez got upset. One night, Vilet spent the night with her lover. She returned home early in the morning, but, after that, was never seen again. Torrez moved back into the family home and took over parenting the children. He was then charged with murdering Vilet. Torrez’s lawyer (accurately) told a jury there was no body, no murder weapon, and no witnesses. Torrez also had a (dubious) alibi that could not be disproven.
If this crime had happened in 1971 rather than in 2011, Torrez would have gotten away with murder. It is extremely unlikely that he would have been charged. It is almost inconceivable he would have been convicted. One reason would have been the orientation of the prosecutors. In 1971, they would probably not have tried to get a conviction in the absence of a body. In 2011, they were willing to take a shot. Technological changes also helped to send Torrez to the crowbar hotel:
Vilet paid for all her purchases with a credit card. When billings stopped, the prosecutor could argue this meant she was dead.
Vilet lived in a gated community with a CCTV camera monitoring the entrance. This showed she arrived home the morning she disappeared.
Vilet’s cell phone had spyware installed by Torrez. This allowed the prosecutor to argue motive and jealous possessiveness.
Trace DNA evidence showed Vilet had bled in places in her home where it was not normal to bleed.
A cadaver dog indicated a body had rested both beside the front door of the home and in the trunk of Torrez’s car.
None of this evidence could have been collected four decades before Vilet’s disappearance. Combined with a different prosecutorial orientation to “no-body” cases, in all meant Torrez went to prison.
Better than the “Good Old Days”
I am going to be explicit about my biases.
I don’t like murderers.
I think they should be in prison. I am open to the idea of hanging some of them but am not fanatical on this point. But I really don’t like them.
I like even less murderers who hide or destroy the bodies of their victims. A desire for a respectful, ceremonial “saying goodbye” is one thing that separates humans from other animals. Killers who deny family and friends of their victims the opportunity to say goodbye are especially contemptable. Being willing to throw a body in the ocean, feed it to alligators, dissolve it in acid, burn it, or bury it without notice or ceremony should not create the ability to get away with murder.
I was born in the 1950s. In that decade there were three convictions for “no-body” homicides in all of North America. In the here and now, we are averaging about 20 per year. There is no reason to believe the number of such homicides has increased – but the conviction rate certainly has.
That’s something better than the “good old days”.
If you want to read more about the investigation and prosecution of homicides in which the killer hid or destroyed the body of their victim, some guy looked hundreds of these cases to write No-Body Homicides: The Evolution of Investigation and Prosecution. The same obsessive fool looked at over 100 “Mr. Big” cases to write The "Mr. Big" Sting: The Cases, The Killers, The Controversial Confessions. I recommend both books highly.