"B-Because of the heat, I can't estimate the time of death!"
— Mikan Tsumiki, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
Under normal circumstances, a human body will cool at a predictable rate. This makes it a useful tool for calculating time of death (if the body is found before it reaches room temperature, of course).
In fiction, murderers will sometimes attempt to keep a body warm (or cool it faster) to disguise the time of death and allow themselves to create an alibi for the apparent time of death.
Compare Clock Tampering where the time of death can be obscured by tampering with timepieces.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Case Closed: The Detective Conan is no stranger to this, with one episode having one of Kogoro's colleagues being killed and the murderer having made her play a game of ping pong to make her work up a sweat to mess with rigor mortis.
Films — Live-Action
- In the 1985 movie Blackout, the crime scene of a quadruple murder is manipulated by the air conditioner being set at the lowest temperature.
- Death Walks on High Heels: Inspector Baxter visits the coroner’s office and, after realizing that bodies being kept on ice can alter the time of death, becomes convinced that bricks of ice were used on Nicole’s body. This theory is confirmed by a visit to the other side of the cottage where a rope and anchor with room for a body and ice bricks is found in the water.
- The Iceman is a docudrama detailing the life and crimes of Richard Kuklinski: a New Jersey family man with a secret life as a hitman for the Mob in The '70s. His nickname came from both his nerves of steel and one of his kill techniques: freezing corpses for several months to disguise the time of death.
- In Operation Mincemeat, the doctor providing the body for Captain Martin tells the team that he can keep the body refrigerated to slow decomposition, but he gives them a timeline for how long they have to use it before even that won’t fool anyone.
Literature
- "The Alibi Machine", a short story by Larry Niven, uses this trope. Despite widespread teleportation machines making alibis almost impossible, a murderer fakes a convincing alibi because of a malfunctioning teleporter that raised the temperature of every atom in the corpse (due to dumping released gravitational energy into the passengers when teleporting to lower elevations).
- Something like that happens in one of Pavel Amnuel's stories about Boris Berkovich. A millionaire's will states that his son inherits everything unless he dies before the father — then, everything goes to charity. So once the guy dies in a car crash, the other relatives stuff him into a fridge, poison the father, and a couple of days later, put the son back in the car to make it appear that the father died first. Since the son left no will, that means they inherit the property as his relatives.
- Discworld: Night Watch. In the new timeline, John Keel (the young Sam Vimes' mentor in the Watch) is murdered shortly before he could join the City Watch. The History Monks tell Vimes that they can send him back, but he has to take on Keel's role up until the "proper" time of death. When that happens several days later, the monks bring Keel's body out of storage, and Vimes says he remembers Keel's body being cold despite having just died.
- A Good Girls Guide To Murder: Pip and Ravi use this method to frame Max Hastings for the death of Jason Bell. They also roofie him so he doesn't remember what he was doing during the supposed 'kill window'.
- Haruhi Suzumiya: At the remote island, Koizumi asks Yuki what temperature the corpse was when they entered the room; Yuki, being a Robot Girl Sufficiently Advanced Alien, answers instantly. Koizumi realizes that since the corpse was about normal temperature, he only died recently. This is what leads to Kyon figuring out what's going on: It's all a play set up by Koizumi. If he really wanted to solve a mystery, he could have just asked Yuki "when did he die?" But he didn't, because he knew the answer would be "he's not dead."
- The window of the victim's compartment in Murder on the Orient Express is opened to the winter weather, frustrating attempts to accurately determine the time of death and also to remove suspicion from the killers by implying the perpetrator left the train.
Live-Action TV
- Used twice in Columbo:
- In "Suitable for Framing", art critic Dale Kingston comes home to his uncle Rudy's mansion one night and shoots Rudy dead as Rudy plays piano. Right after he does the doorbell rings, but it's his girlfriend Tracy, who is his partner in crime. Together they stage an elaborate cover-up, trashing Rudy's house, stealing some paintings from Rudy's art collection, and using an electric blanket to keep Rudy's corpse warm and thus deceive the cops about his time of death.
- In "It's All in the Game", wealthy socialite Lauren Staton and her daughter Lisa Martin conspire to murder their abusive, two-timing lover Nick Franco. Lauren commits the actual murder, going to Franco's apartment and shooting him. Lisa then stays in the apartment, keeping the body warm for several hours with an electric blanket until Lauren returns with the building manager. While they're knocking on the door, Lisa fires a shot into the air, then flees through the patio.
- CSI-verse: Used across the franchise. At least one episode had a body stored in a freezer for this purpose. Specific examples include:
- CSI: A manipulative girl uses dry ice to make it look like a couple (whom she poisoned) who had hooked up in a college dorm room, died several hours sooner than they actually did and frame someone else for her crime.
- CSI: NY:
- In "Not What It Looks Like," a man kills his wife and places her corpse in front of an air conditioner in an apartment in a building scheduled for demolition in hopes that it will never be found, but that if it is, her time of death will be off, allowing him to formulate an alibi. The team eventually figure out what he did and he's arrested.
- The killer in "Prey" attends a lecture Stella gives during a college course on forensics where she uses examples from previous cases, including the woman from "Not What It Looks Like." This killer picks up on the change-the-time-of-death thing but uses dry ice instead of air conditioning to make it look like her victim (who'd been stalking her) had died earlier than he had. She does a very good job and almost gets away with it. She's arrested, but it's left up in the air if she goes to jail because she never confesses.
- Discussed in Dark: On the 5th of November 2019, the police find the corpse of a teenage boy who died around 10 hours ago. The policeman Ulrich Nielsen then begins to theorize that this might be his own brother, who has been missing since October 1986, and that the corpse was somehow conserved for 33 years. When he asks the coroner if something like that could be possible, she shoots the idea down, pointing out that long-term preservation would leave unmistakable traces in the body tissue. As it turns out, it is indeed Ulrich's brother, whose body was transported 33 years into the future via Time Travel. And as season 3 shows, the same thing happened in the alternate world too.
- Death in Paradise:
- "Dishing Up Murder": The body of obnoxious Celebrity Chef Robert Holt is found in his freezer the morning after the grand opening of his restaurant making it difficult for the police to conclude when he died, not helped by the reveal that everyone in his inner circle had a reason to want him dead. As DI Goodman eventually figures out this was deliberate to disguise the fact that Robert was already dead before the opening, following his long abused son stabbing him to death and the sympathetic others helping cover it up by holding the opening as if everything was normal, with Robert's brother posing as him.
- "Pilot of the Airwaves": Following killing the victim, the killer used their sauna to keep the body warm, thus allowing them to stage their own alibi having an accomplice pose as the victim returning from a run, before dumping the body in their swimming pool. DI Parker points out during his summation he was attracted to this, as their was no reason for the victim to use a sauna after being for a hot run on a tropical island.
- In Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Baggage" a serial killer uses a kiln in his victim's house to make it look like she died a day later than she actually did, then provides himself with an alibi for that day. Later, because the prosecution has already linked the murders as having the same perpetrator, his lawyer argues that if he has an alibi for one murder, he's not guilty of others as well.
- There was an episode of Life on Mars where Gene was a murder suspect because of the apparent time of death of the victim; however, the victim was on top of an automated heating vent, which ended up exonerating Gene.
- Midsomer Murders: "With Baited Breath": Following killing the third victim, the murderer stashes their body within a freezer to disguise the time of death. Then, using their stolen mobile phone, they make it appear as if the victim was still alive hours later whilst he was having dinner with Inspector Barnaby. It only falls apart when Doctor Fleur Perkins manages to use other methods to determine how long they were dead.
- Motherland: Fort Salem: Scylla attempts to increase the temperature of the room where Porter's body is being kept so that the ritual for post-mortem interrogating fails. She fails, but the interrogation does not yield info that would blow her cover as Porter's killer or as an agent for the Spree.
- My Life Is Murder: In "Can't Stand the Heat", the murder occurs in a commercial kitchen. The killer turns off the ventilation and turns all of the industrial ovens on full to keep the room hot and the body warm, and goes off to establish an alibi for the rest of the night. She makes sure she is the one to 'discover' the body, so she can turn off the ovens and ventilate the kitchen before calling the police.
- Vera: Late in the investigation in "The Blanket Mire", Tony contacts Vera and tells her that the breakdown of the proteins in the muscles of the Body of the Week indicate she was actually killed five weeks ago—on the night she disappeared—and that something interfered with the decomposition making it look like she had been killed later. This means that Vera's investigation has been working under a false assumption the entire time. Vera later discovers that the killer had stashed her body in a refrigerated unit used for storing vegetables before he disposed of the body.
Visual Novels
- Ace Attorney has had a few cases where this happened.
- Ace Attorney Investigations 2: The victim of the IS-7 Incident was frozen with the intention of throwing off the time of death, but a series of events beyond the culprit's control led the body to disappear for over 18 years. Later on, in case 5, the victim is frozen to throw off the time of death, which leads to parallels being drawn between the two killers.
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice: The second victim of case 3 is frozen in the snow to hide the fact that he was killed before the first victim of the case.
- The Great Ace Attorney: The final victim of the duology got frozen in the ship's storage before transporting back to London to throw off both the time of death and the true crime scene.
- In the third case of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, the killer raised the heat at the murder scene. Mikan, a nurse who performs autopsies on the bodies, is unable to figure out when the victim was killed this time because of it. Mikan herself is actually the culprit in this case, and she changed the temperature so she can claim she can't tell the time of death.
Western Animation
- In the Justice League episode "Starcrossed", Batman believes the Contrived Coincidence of the Thanagarians showing up just in time to destroy a Gordanian invading ship to be suspicious, so he examines the corpses. Wonder Woman remarks he knows nothing about Gordanian anatomy, to which Batman answers that's true, but he does know what frozen liver looks like.
Real Life
- Professional Killer Richard Kuklinski was given the moniker "Iceman" by authorities after they discovered that he had frozen the body of one of his victims in an attempt to disguise the time of death. He might have gotten away with it if he had allowed the body to thaw properly before dumping it, but the garbage bags he wrapped it in acted as insulation and The Coroner found ice crystals inside the body.
- The aforementioned movie Blackout served as inspiration for Ed Sherman in his attempt in trying to get away with murdering his wife Ellen
. The case was the focus of the Forensic Files episode "Dinner and a Movie".
