Short Stuff: Killing a Dead Body

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1:09Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. It's Josh. It's Chuck. And we're both alive for now. Well, I'll tell you what, buddy. If I was ever dead, I would want you to make sure of it by killing me again. Yeah, but you'd be setting me up for a real legal quagmire that probably would not break in my favor, Chuck. So I don't know if I can guarantee that. I wish I could do a good impression of the late actor slash magician slash kind of comedian Ricky Jay. Because anyone who's ever seen the, to my mind, great P.T. Anderson movie from 1999, Magnolia. It is great. We'll recall, and if you're interested, by the way, our friend of the show, Josh's boyfriend, Adam Pranica, was on my P.T.

1:57Anderson series on Movie Crush. So we covered Magnolia and all the P.T. Anderson movies before the show ended, that is. I've got one even better than you. What's that? But another friend of the show, Paul F. Tompkins, P.F. Tompkins, not P.T. Anderson, he did a script reading for Magnolia at the table with all the actors and apparently was not doing well enough for Tom Cruise not to say something like, can we keep getting this right or something? It's a hilarious story. I've never heard that. Tom Cruise is essentially like being mean to P.F. Tompkins for not doing a good job script reading. Well, I sort of liked Tom Cruise until then because Paul Tompkins is a national treasure and he was actually in the movie There Will Be Blood because, I don't know, maybe he did such a good job at that table reading.

2:42Yeah, that's another P.T. Anderson film, right? Yeah. Where he goes, I'm done with drinking milkshakes or something. That's it. I don't want any more milkshake. Thank you, I think is the line. Why are we talking about Magnolia, Chuck? Because, once again, at the beginning of that movie, there's a series of vignettes. Ricky Jay narrates them. And the first, I think it's the first one, I don't recall. But it's a very kind of cool sequence where this story is told where a guy named Sidney Berenger attempted suicide, but it became a suicide. The long and short of it is he jumped out of a window. His parents lived in an apartment below him.

3:23and as he jumped and was falling to what he thought would be his death, his mom and dad had gotten to an argument. His mom aims a shotgun at the dad. The gun goes off. It goes through the window, missing the father, and kills the son on his way down to land. The guy didn't know this when he went to jump off the building, but there was a net down there that would have caught him and saved his life. Yeah, so it went from him taking his own life to his mom murdering him to his suicide being ruled an attempted one. He couldn't have completed it because of that net. But it gets even crazier because when the police show up, the mom and dad say, we have no idea how the shotgun was loaded.

4:08We use it to threaten one another all the time so we know not to load it. And upon more investigation, they found that Sidney had loaded it. So he loaded the gun that killed him. And so the medical examiner ruled a suicide after all. That's right. This story is not true, as it turns out. It was based on the story of Ronald Opus, which came from an oral story of the president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Don Harper Mills. In 1987, he told the story at a banquet, eventually found its way to the Internet. But Mills maintains that he made it up to illustrate how turning up new evidence can completely alter the outcome of a coroner's ruling.

4:50Right. And it's a really good example of just how how strange turns of events in evidence collection can completely alter a medical examiner's ruling on the cause of death. And that also applies to an entirely like niche, I guess, area of legal scholarship, which is, can you murder someone who's already dead? And it turns out it's not nearly as straightforward as you would think. All right. Let's take a break. What a tease. And we'll come back with more talk of Boogie Nights and Hard Eight right after this.

5:40Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hurricane DeBolu. It's a new year. And on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that. We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health.

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7:50So, Chuck, we're talking about whether it's possible legally to murder a dead body. Obviously, physically, it's not. And there's actual case law where people have done something like this. and legal scholars, prosecutors, defense teams, juries have had to sort this out. And one of the best-known ones came in France in 1986. That's right, with the death of Monsieur Wilkins. Monsieur Wilkins got in a bra with Monsieur Chareau. Is that right? Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, I mean, it's Monsieur Chareau. What did I say? Monsieur. How do you pronounce it? Monsieur. Really? Why is it M-O-N? Is that all silent?

8:32It's just the French doing their French thing. So Monsieur isn't a thing at all? No, it's Monsieur. I've heard of Monsieur. I just thought this was a more formal title or something. No, no, that's it. I didn't know it was spelled M-O-N. That's weird. That's the famous Monsieur. All right. So Monsieur Chareau. All right. So Monsieur Chareau was in this brawl with Monsieur Wilkins. Wilkins was knocked unconscious by an iron bar by Monsieur Chareau. Very nice. And then Monsieur Chareau used that same iron bar to strangle Monsieur Wilkins. The next day, another dude, Monsieur Pérez de Rau, came along and was like, hey, this Wilkins guy is still alive.

9:12And so I'm going to beat him to death with a glass bottle and strangle him just to make sure that he's dead. The medical examiner found that Chareau had actually killed him. So he was dead. So then the question remains, what happens to Pederow when he commits this seeming act of murder on a dead body? Right. So there's an actual answer for this. And before we get to the answer, we have to talk about a couple of legal things and another case. OK. So the people who are arguing against Parduro's guilt, so say his defense team, said he cannot be charged with murder or even attempted murder because murdering Monsieur Wilkins was a legal impossibility.

10:02It was impossible for him to complete this act, which means that he can't possibly be guilty of it. And that was apparently a longstanding idea in law, this idea of a legal impossibility and guilt, right? And so some people said, okay, that's actually a pretty good explanation. I think he might not be guilty. And other people said, wait, wait, wait, forget this legal impossibility mumbo jumbo. What we think is more important is intent. What did he intend to do? He thought that Willikens was still alive when he tried to murder him. So his intent was to murder this man. Therefore, he's guilty of attempted murder.

10:44And everybody said, what to do, what to do, sacro bleu. That's right. I thought that was sacred blow. So they said, we must look to see if there's any precedent. That was in the 80s. And I don't know if they actually looked at the American case or not, because you can't really set precedent on someone else's country, right? No, no, it's not precedent necessarily, but I think like it's out there. Sure. Yeah. OK. So New York City, 1975, 11 years before the French incident, as it's known by me only. There were some dudes drinking in an apartment, three guys drinking. The guy's apartment was Michael Geller and another guy, Joe Bush, had been staying there, kind of freeloading, staying with the guy.

11:29and they were sitting there getting a little more drunk, obviously some hotheads kind of guys. And Geller started saying, like, hey, dude, you've been crashing here. I need some rent. Why don't you start chipping in on rent? This thing escalated such that Bush eventually shot him three times in the chest, and the guy falls to the floor, and then the third guy comes in, Melvin Dlugash, and stands over Geller and fires five more shots into his head. Both of these guys are charged, obviously, with murder. But once again, DeLugash, his defense was, hey, this guy was already dead, or at least you can't prove that he was alive when I shot him five times in the head.

12:10He was initially convicted of murder, but it was overturned, saying that you can't prove that he was dead, so you can't charge me with murder. Right. And I just want to say this seems like a fairly shocking crime, but this took place while there was still lead in America's gasoline. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, like you said, Lugash, that's the best way you could say that horrible name. Yeah. He got off because, yeah, the prosecution couldn't prove that Geller was still alive. And New York Supreme Court said, no, no, not so fast. It doesn't matter whether Geller was still alive. You thought he might have still been alive, which is why you shot him five times in the head.

12:50and we're going to throw out this idea of legal impossibility and adopt basically a new framework or at least we're going to take an existing framework and basically make it the framework which is intent. Yeah. That is that like what you intended to do determines your guilt or innocence not the actual fact or possibility of whether you could have done what you were trying to do. Right. Specifically, the charge is attempted murder. What you can't do is charge somebody with murder. Right. Because you can't murder a corpse. It's just not scientifically, forget legally, it's not scientifically possible.

13:28Right. Kill something that is already dead. But attempted murder, you certainly can. So the French high court weighs in on the Père de Rieu case with Monsieur. And what a dope. This is a this is an instant classic because of that. And they came to the same conclusion and they said, all right, you're guilty of attempted murder then because our friend the Yanks across the pond, they informed our opinion on this, perhaps. Yeah, perhaps. So there's there's at least one more that we want to call out. This actually happens with surprising frequency. I would not think that there would be more than one or two cases, but there are some here or there.

14:10One that I saw was that it's sometimes used to prosecute cops who shoot people a bunch of times. There was a cop in Toronto who a guy came at with a knife and he shot him three times and the guy dropped. And then he went up and shot him a bunch more times when the guy was on the ground. And the jury said, nope, that was a legal murder. We can't we can't convict you of murder because this is in the line of duty. And it was the bullets after the shots after that we can now convict you of attempted murder. Yeah. It also happened to our dear friends in Australia in the case of what looks like a mercy killing in 2014 near one of our favorite cities, Melbourne.

14:51Two guys, Daniel Darrington and Rocky Spartacus, Matt Scassie. What a name. They got in a fight, were struggling over a gun. The gun went off. Well, I was about to say killed. It struck Matt Scassi in the head. His body's on the ground twitching around and stuff. And Darrington shoots him. He's like, hey, I don't want this guy. And the quote was, didn't want the bloke suffering. And killed him for sure. Then went back, got more bullets, and then shot him again. and he was charged with murder. And the jury said, you know, we can't find him guilty because the prosecution didn't kill that you intended to kill him when the gun went off to begin with.

15:38Right. But they did find him guilty of attempted murder because he demonstrated quite clearly that he thought Mascasse was still alive and shot him to kill him, however merciful the act was supposed to be. Right. And he got convicted of attempted murder for that one. Wow. Had he not tried to be merciful and put Mats Cassie out of his misery and just the initial shot had killed him, he wouldn't have been convicted of anything at all. Yeah, it would have been, I guess, a struggle, maybe even self-defense. Who knows how they would have framed it? Yeah, for sure. So I guess that's the takeaway here.

16:19If somebody is potentially already dead, call an ambulance. Yeah. This kind of thing I feel like is in movies a lot. I feel like it often comes up as like to prove your loyalty to the organization. Like someone's in there, like I killed most of them. You got to finish them off. So we're both liable or whatever. Oh, yeah. I see that a lot in movies, I feel like. Sure. Short stuff, I guess it's out.

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17:24Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.