"What's the best way to dispose of a body? I think the best option is to just put them in an industrial-sized incinerator... although that's probably not the most environmentally friendly thing to do."
You've got a dead body, and just calling the police and telling them the facts won't cut it because you either killed them and it wasn't self-defense, or you killed them in self-defense, but trying to explain it is just going to get you deeper in trouble. Or a friend for similar reasons has a dead body and needs your help getting rid of it. Life insurance or a sweet inheritance may be involved. However it happened, it's there and Disposing of a Body is called for. Cramming the Coffin isn't an option and you don't have a Cleanup Crew in your list of contacts. There's no Hollywood Acid or pigs on hand, and a Viking Funeral would draw too much attention.
Solution: Put the body in a furnace. There's bound to be a handy building nearby with a furnace in the basement, with the flames roaring and sporting a conveniently accessible door that is easily large enough to admit a body. Shove the body in, close the door, and let the flames do the work. Problem solved.
Given how often this happens in fiction, you would be forgiven for thinking that practically every large building has a massive coal-burning furnace in the basement. In the past, this was the case and this trope was not as improbable. Unlikely, but not improbable. In Real Life, there are several problems with this. Most large buildings, particularly in developed countries, use natural gas for heating. While there is a furnace, it is not nearly as big as a coal-burning furnace. There is also no convenient door large enough for a body to be stuffed inside. Burning a body until it's reduced to ash requires 1400 to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit for up to two hours. A modern gas furnace designed for heating a building isn't going to reach these temperatures. In addition, it's not going to run continuously except maybe during the coldest of winter months. Once the building reaches whatever temperature the thermostat is set at, the furnace will shut down and not start up again until the building temperature drops low enough for it to come on automatically. This cycle will drastically increase the amount of time needed to reduce the body to ash.
Another issue that is rarely addressed in fiction is that a burning body creates a stench. It is not a pleasant smell. Everyone in the area is going to smell it, and it's going to linger long after the body is reduced to ash.
As mentioned above, this is definitely one of the Disposing of a Body tropes. Sister trope to Murder by Cremation, whereas this trope deals with disposing of the body, not using the furnace itself as the instrument of murder. Also see Fiery Cover-Up, where fires are set in order to destroy evidence. Compare Smokestack Drop where the plunge into the furnace is more accidental.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Astro Boy: The classic story The Blast Furnace Mystery involves Astro and a young police detective investigating the detective's father after he's spotted dropping what appears to be a man's body into a blast furnace. As it turns out, the detective is actually a robot who was raised to believe he was human. His creator had been periodically transplanting his AI into older-looking bodies while he slept and discarding the previous ones in the furnace so he would appear to age normally.
- Maria no Danzai: Maria disposes of Kowase's corpse by chopping him up into smaller pieces, and then burning them in a barrel.
Comic Books
- Batman: In a Golden Age story, a businessman is killing his rivals and using the furnace in his factory to get rid of the bodies. Batman quickly learns the truth and confronts him one night. Batman even tells him that he knows he's disposing of a body right now. When the businessman asks how he could know that, Batman points out that it's late at night, the factory is shut down...but the furnace in the basement is roaring.
- Spider-Man: In The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #151, Spider-Man disposes of the body of the first clone of Peter Parker (created by the Jackal) by dumping it down a smokestack into an industrial incinerator.
Fan Works
- This Bites!: Impel Down apparently has an incinerator for this purpose; the jailers plan to use it to dispose of Luffy's corpse once he finally succumbs to Magellan's poison.
Films — Live-Action
- The Art of Self-Defense: Sensei uses the crematorium in his office to dispose of Henry's corpse.
- Grosse Pointe Blank: Blank is attacked by an assassin while at his high school reunion. He manages to kill the guy right before an old friend shows up. Convincing his friend to help him, they get the body to the school's basement and load it into the furnace. Points for realism when it's plain the door to the furnace is so hot they can barely touch it.
- I Am Mother: When Daughter finds a mouse has someone got into their underground bunker, her robot Mother declares a risk of infection and has it incinerated over her protests. Later Daughter takes a close look at the incinerator and finds the jawbone of a young girl like herself, telling her she's not the first 'Daughter' that Mother has tried to raise.
- The Irishman: Jimmy Hoffa's body is disposed of in this way.
- Looper: The mob disposes of Old Joe's wife after killing her by shoving her body into a furnace, and attempts to do the same on Old Joe. But Old Joe turns out to be Not Quite Dead and quickly breaks out.
- Young Joe also uses this method to dispose of bodies. He's shown hauling bodies to the foundry and dropping them in the furnace.
- Night of the Creeps: Played with when JC is infected by the zombie slugs and figures out they're vulnerable to heat. He tries to get to the school's basement furnace and lure as many of the slugs as he can down there after him, intending to put himself in the furnace after they infect him so he can wipe them out and avoid becoming a zombie himself. His attempt at a Heroic Sacrifice fails, but he earns an A for effort.
- The Orphanage: We are told that Benigna, the old caretaker of the orphanage, poisoned the five children who were unwittingly responsible for her son's death, cremated the bodies and stored the remains in sacks in a shed by the house.
- In Pathology, the residents use the incinerator in the abandoned basement level of the hospital to dispose of the bodies of their victims.
- The Return of the Living Dead: The heroes realize the zombies cannot be killed and decide the only way to truly get rid of them is through cremation. This backfires, since the fumes spread the Trioxin (the chemical that created the zombies) into the clouds, resulting in a rain that causes more zombies to rise. Frank also cremates himself after realizing his infection is almost complete.
- Schindler's List: Horrifically displayed when Oskar Schindler is talking with a Nazi officer near the Buchenwald furnaces. The officer offers to drive Schindler to his destination but first must sweep three or more inches of ashes off of his vehicle. The ashes are a by-product of incinerating hundreds of bodies all day, every day under Hitler's "Final Solution."
- During the climax of Single White Female, having apparently strangled Allie to death, Hedy is preparing to throw her into the incinerator. Fortunately, Allie was Faking the Dead and manages to kill her first.
Literature
- The Cat Who... Series: In book #4 (The Cat Who Saw Red), Qwill's ex-girlfriend Joy disappears, and her artist husband figures she ran off with the check Qwill gave her (which, admittedly, was so she could run off). It's ultimately discovered that the husband poisoned Joy, then put her body in the kiln where he fired his works of clay; it's what created the red "living glaze" on the pots.
- Honor Harrington: Anton Zilwicki in the short story From the Highlands in the titular anthology "Changer of Worlds" does this. First, he hacks into his apartment building's garbage disintegrator logs to make sure that the kidnappers who took his daughter didn't just... dispose of her. Then, he disables the logs (and attached alarms) because he knows he'll be needing to use the system for this very purpose shortly...
- The Locked Tomb: Gideon the Ninth: Soon after two participants in the Lyctor trials are murdered, the survivors find more human cremains in an incinerator. Being Necromancers, they can easily tell that the ashes are of two people who died before the trials began — apparently impossibly, since the participants are completely isolated. One of the pairs had been ambushed in orbit; the perpetrator pulled a Kill and Replace on the necromancer, then animated the cavalier as a zombie and had been puppeteering him ever since.
- Native Son: Bigger Thomas is not the smartest apple in the bunch (given that he's had no education), unfortunately, he's also black and living in 1930s Chicago. When he's hired as a chauffeur by a wealthy family, their daughter, Mary Dalton, and her boyfriend decide to have some fun, including buying a bottle of rum and making out in the backseat of the car, with Bigger driving them around Washington Park. When they're finished, Mary is passed out drunk, and Bigger has to carry her up to her bedroom. Mrs. Dalton, her blind mother, comes into the room. In the darkness, afraid that he's a man who's black carrying an unconscious white woman, he tries to keep Mary Dalton from speaking, accidentally suffocating her with a pillow. Thinking of a plan, he forms an excuse to tell everyone, because Mary was set to leave on a trip in the morning. He then takes Mary's body and stuffs it in the mansion's furnace, and starts the coal burning. Unfortunately, in trying to keep the evidence hidden much later in the story, he chokes the flame with many witnesses present, and they find some of her uncremated bones sitting in the ashes, forcing him to flee somewhere in the city.
- A Prayer For The Dying by Jack Higgins. Ex-IRA terrorist Martin Fallon is hired by Jack Meehan who runs a funeral business as his legitimate cover. At one point he demonstrates the crematorium to Fallon, which is a mistake as the latter uses it to dispose of the body of Jack's psychotic brother Billy. And then he gives the urn holding Billy's ashes to Jack at the climax of the novel.
- Sherlock Holmes: "Shoscombe Old Place" has the Impoverished Patrician Sir Robert spied putting a body in a furnace (and Watson confirms that a bone fragment found inside belongs to a human). However, it's not a murder as the body in question was taken from the family crypt and had been dead for centuries. The mummy was taken from the family crypt to leave a space so that Sir Robert could hide his sister's body inside: the sister had all the money and reporting her death would have led to Sir Robert's ruin. Waiting a few days allowed Sir Robert's horse to win a race that let him pay off his creditors.
Live-Action TV
- Bones: The aptly named episode "The Intern in the Incinerator" has this, just like the title says. An intern at the lab was killed and ended up discovered in the lab's incinerator.
- Columbo: The episode "Ashes to Ashes" portrays this trope realistically thanks to the murderer Eric Prince being the owner of the major funeral home with a cremation oven that is naturally designed to turn bodies into ashes. After Prince's former lover Verity Chandler shows up at his morgue to boast about exposing him on television for pilfering valuables from bodies to fund his operations, she is bludgeoned in the head as she tries to leave with nobody witnessing the deed. Chandler's body is stored away to be cremated later in the episode.
- Criminal Minds: "Moseley Lane" has this, but there is also a definite overlap with Murder by Cremation. The child abductors are shown to want to kill their most recent, troublesome victim by putting her in their furnace (while still alive). However, they are also shown to place all their victims' bodies, regardless of how they died, in the furnace and spread their ashes in their garden.
- Interview with the Vampire (2022): In Season 1, Lestat de Lioncourt, Louis de Pointe du Lac and Claudia routinely dispose of their victims by tossing the corpses into the incinerator, which cremates the remains, and the resulting ash makes it easy for the vampire family to get rid of the evidence of their crimes.
- iZombie: In one episode, a Coyote has been taking people's money, killing them, and then disposing of the bodies in a furnace.
- Law & Order: In a composite story of both the Susan Smith and John List cases, "Angel" has a pious young woman claim her infant daughter was abducted while she was in confession. Although she lead the detectives on a wild goose chase with several dead ends, with Curtis encouraging her to confess owing to her strong faith, she eventually admitted to smothering her daughter and disposing of her body in her apartment building's furnace to save her from a dangerous world.
- Slasher: The Druid from season three uses the apartment buildings furnace to dispose of their victims' bodies. Deconstructed, as it ends up proving to be their undoing. Their regular use means the building's heating systems are still on in the middle of summer, tipping off the protagonists that something's wrong, and the fact that burning corpses has such a distinctive smell causes Saadia to realise what's happening. In the end one half of the Druid is pushed into the furnace and killed by one of their would-be victims.
- Vera: In "Blood and Bone", after killing DC Harry Fenton, the killer attempts to dispose of his body by sneaking it into a local abattoir's incinerator, whose owner was known for Cutting Corners. However, a power outage leads to the workers discovering it before the body is reduced to ash. As such, whilst most of it was severely damaged beyond recognition, Fenton's internal organs and fingerprints were still intact, allowing them to get a quick identification.
- Wire in the Blood: In the book (The Wire in the Blood) it's mentioned that after torturing, raping, and killing his victims, Jacko Vance put their bodies and anything else that linked them to him into the furnace at the hospital where he volunteered.
- The X-Files. In "Never Again", Ed Jerse is being driven insane by an evil tattoo. He murders a woman in his apartment building and uses the furnace in the basement to dispose of the body. Agent Scully is lucky to escape a similar fate, but Ed instead thrusts his own arm into the furnace to destroy the tattoo.
Video Games
- Death Stranding: the game strongly encourages Non-Lethal Warfare against human enemies, but if you do happen to kill someone, you had better get that body to an Incinerator facility pronto. This is because corpses will turn into BT's and possibly cause a Voidout (gigantic explosion) if not incinerated within a certain timeframe.
- Dishonored 2: In one level there is a furnace you can use to dispose of bodies.
- Evil Genius 2: The bodies of dead agents are disposed of in incinerators so that they don't lower the morale of the minions or become incriminating evidence for other snooping agents to find.
- Hitman 2: In the level "Whittleton Creek", 47 is able to use the furnace under Helen West's house to get rid of a target, whether dead or alive.
- Max Payne 3: When Max goes into the dilapidated Imperial Palace Hotel, he sees mercenaries shoving body parts into the hotel's reactivated furnaces. As Max fights his way up the hotel he discovers that those are remains of people rounded up by an aggressive SWAT team that then sold them to the mercenaries so that a renowned surgeon can harvest their organs to sell on the Black Market. This horrific discovery gets Max the angriest he has been in a long time.
- Yandere Simulator: One of the main ways to dispose of the bodies of your victims is to toss them in the trash incinerator behind the school. This comes with the added benefit of being much less messy than the alternative methods of body disposal, and the incinerator can also dispose of any other evidence you need to destroy.
Webcomics
- Niels: Niels uses his waste disposal business' garbage incinerator to dispose of the bodies from his "other business". And then he sells the ash as discount fertilizer.
- Schlock Mercenary: Shufgar's men try to dispose of Kevyn's corpse by dumping him in an incinerator. Unfortunately for them
, Kevyn is not all the way dead yet.
Western Animation
- In the first season of Harley Quinn, when Ivy's landlord Sy Borgman walks in on Harley and crew passed out in Ivy's living room while wearing Suicide Squad t-shirts, he mistakenly thinks they've all committed suicide and decides to dispose of the bodies (they're actually doing a Journey to the Center of the Mind). Played with in that he doesn't use a furnace for the disposal attempt but a pizza restaurant's oven in an abandoned mall that he also owns. They wake up before he can actually shove any of them into the oven.
