The Case of the Missing Corpses

Last January, Michael Dickerson, who was already doing time in a North Carolina prison, was charged with the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Shaquita Bell. This was no ordinary bust: Police suspect Bell was killed in Washington more than a decade earlier, and her corpse has never been found. So prosecutors are facing one of the U.S. legal system's greatest challenges: a "no-body" murder case. Only two other such cases have ever been tried in the District of Columbia.

Until the 1960s, cases such as Dickerson's were considered impossible to win. But today, no-body murder arrests, indictments, guilty pleas and convictions are practically weekly occurrences. Since the end of April, corpseless murder trials have taken place in California, Maryland, Michigan and South Carolina.

Still, some police departments won't launch murder investigations until a body is discovered. Prosecutors sometimes opt not to seek indictments in these cases because they worry that they won't stand a chance at trial. But forensic advances have significantly increased the odds of catching and convicting those who kill and then dispose of the corpse, so law enforcement officers shouldn't be afraid to take on these cases -- especially because the number of people (mostly men) who commit these heinous crimes has shot up over the past 20 years.

No-body murders are hardly a recent phenomenon. After prosecuting one such case in the winter of 2006 -- cops sometimes call them "bodiless homicides" -- I got interested in the topic and began reading up. I found no-body murders in the United States dating back as far as 1843, when four men on the ship Sarah Lavinia were convicted of throwing the ship's mate overboard.

Later, murders of a different sort started popping up: cases of men killing their wives or lovers, then making the corpses disappear. Take the 1897 case of Adolph Luetgert, a well-known sausage-maker in Chicago. After family members reported Luetgert's wife missing, the police searched his sausage factory and found human bone fragments in the smokestack and her wedding ring in a potash vat. Luetgert was ultimately convicted, even though, as Robert Loerzel noted in a book on the case, the bones in Luetgert's smokestack were never conclusively proven to be his wife's.

The Luetgert case was a harbinger of the use of circumstantial evidence in bodiless homicide cases, but such prosecutions remained rare throughout the early 1900s. Forensic science was in its infancy, and it was almost impossible to determine whether a disappeared woman had simply left town or whether some harm had befallen her.

In the second half of the 20th century, the number of corpseless killings began to rise. One watershed was the Los Angeles murder trial of L. Ewing Scott in 1957, a national sensation much like the O.J. Simpson circus 50 years later. Scott, a ne'er-do-well, had married a rich divorcee named Evelyn Throsby, but he soon tired of her. One day in May 1955, Throsby disappeared and never was seen again. Scott gave various explanations for her absence and was arrested nearly two years later when he tried to enter Canada. After an 11-week trial, Scott was convicted of first-degree murder.

The number of bodiless homicide trials has increased significantly since then. I've counted more than 250 such trials in the United States since the mid-1800s, and 67 percent of them have been tried since 1990, with 38 percent taking place in the past eight years. Fewer than 10 percent of these cases have resulted in acquittals or reversals on appeal. The number of guilty pleas seems to have increased as well, which makes sense in light of the vast advances in forensic technology: Defendants who never could have been convicted 10 years ago are now pleading guilty in order to win lighter sentences or escape the death penalty. And no-body cases are coming to trial more quickly. Today, most investigators recognize that people don't simply disappear, never to use a credit card, access a bank account or call a friend again.

Consider the case I tried in 2006. In the summer of 2003, Marion Fye, a 36-year-old mother of five, started dating a newly released felon named Harold Austin. Within a month, he had moved into her home and assumed the role of father to her children. A day or two after Thanksgiving that year, Austin and Fye got into an argument, and Austin allegedly shot and killed her. Although three of her children were in the house at the time, none of them witnessed the murder. Her body has never been found.

As in so many similar cases, forensic evidence tripped up the killer. Shortly after Fye's disappearance, the police discovered a blood-soaked mattress in the room she had shared with Austin. Without a sample of Fye's DNA, they thought they couldn't prove that the blood was hers. But the relatively new science of examining mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child, came to the rescue. By collecting DNA from Fye's mother, the FBI was able to conclude that the blood on the mattress belonged to a female descendant of hers. Fye had three living sisters, all of whom testified that the blood couldn't have been theirs. That was good enough for the jury, even though an exact DNA match was not possible.

The scientific advances that helped convict Austin of second-degree murder have encouraged many other prosecutors to take their no-body cases to trial. The amount of DNA needed to create a person's profile is astonishingly small; forensic scientists can even derive DNA matches from the sweat left behind in fingerprints -- an advance that revolutionizes both the new science of DNA and the old one of fingerprinting.

As encouraging as these developments are, one fundamental aspect of the Fye case still disturbs me: Austin murdered Fye after knowing her for only a few months. How could their relationship have deteriorated so quickly and spectacularly? In the new book "Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives," Marilee Strong argues that the perpetrators of no-body murders are attempting to literally erase their victims. Unlike classic domestic murders, these are not hot-blooded, spur-of-the-moment offenses; they are carefully planned efforts to expunge a woman who is in the defendant's way.

In many of the bodiless homicide cases I've studied, the killer takes up with another woman soon after the murder. Just three days after he shot Marion Fye, Harold Austin began dating a woman who rear-ended him as he was driving his dead lover's car. L. Ewing Scott also sought out other women within months of his wife's disappearance. For these men, women are objects to be discarded and replaced, as if they had never existed at all. One no-body defendant once said that "if there is no body, there is no crime." Not anymore.

tad.dibiase@gmail.com

Tad DiBiase, an attorney with Shapiro, Lifschitz and Schram, was a deputy chief of the Homicide Section of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia.