Body Buried Under Buried Coffin in Cemetery

[nostonepa]

Would radar or dogs or anything else pick this up or would exhuming the body in the coffin and looking ubderneath it be the only way?

 

[FromGermany1]

Would radar or dogs or anything else pick this up or would exhuming the body in the coffin and looking ubderneath it be the only way?

I don't know, but it was my thinking also re cases, where a body wasn't found: buried in an existing grave perhaps. Once, I heard of the fact, that a dog was buried on top of someone, who got buried. Why shouldn't it have happened to a human in a criminal process?

 

[BreadnLumpit]

Dogs certainly wouldn't pick it up - ground penetrating radar might if there was only one coffin burial above it, and if the coffin was just normal wood/veneer.

If the body was under several coffins because a lot of time had passed, or the coffin on top was lead or zinc lined, then no.

I'm a funeral director and my colleagues and I are agreed that the safest and most fool proof way to dispose of a body, would be just this scenario. It's not as simple as it sounds though because these days most graves are dug by machine and, because this is so much quicker than hand digging, they are usually dug in daylight on the day of the funeral, so a clandestine burial in the bottom of the pre-dug grave would not be possible.

 

[nostonepa]

If this happened it would have been in the mid to late 70s.

 

[BreadnLumpit]

If this happened it would have been in the mid to late 70s.

Definitely possible back then - graves were always hand dug and usually dug the day before and covered with boards overnight (to stop people accidentally falling down them).