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Every new technology from fingerprint to DNA makes it harder for a criminal to get away with murder. But is it possible to use knowledge of forensic science not to catch a killer but to commit a perfect murder? The people most likely to know are the forensic investigators themselves. There’s one method many murderers have tried in the past: leave a body somewhere where it will decompose before the authorities have had a chance to examine it.

Lee Goff has devoted his career to making sure decomposition doesn’t hinder a criminal investigation. When you look for something that is going to be a model for human decomposition, you have to find something that is very similar in metabolism to a human you also want something that if somebody happens to uncover while they are hiking around they cannot get really upset. 50 pound domestic pig simply worked beautifully.

Lee uses dead pigs to recreate murder scenes to help the police solve criminal cases. What we have here is a pig that is being used to replicate a homicide where the body was wrapped. No matter how well hidden, flies very rapidly pick up on the scent of a dead body. They are one of the main causes of decomposition. What’s going to happen with the wrapping is going to delay the access of all the insects to the pig. Insects in essence they provide you with a great deal of information if you can interpret it properly. By going to the body, collecting the most mature specimens over there, we can then work backwards and determine when the insects’ eggs were laid and this will correspond most of the time, very closely to a minimum period of time since death.

So even if a body is dumped in a remote place, insect evidence will provide important clues to solve the crime, that’s why many murderers go one step further and attempt to destroy the body altogether. Forensic scientist Eleanor Graham is investigating if there is a perfect way to dispose of a corpse. This is just normal biological washing powder, same as what you would use at home, so I just need to add some water. This uses biological enzymes ability to break some proteins and fats to get rid of tissue and fatty material. After 7 days at 60º de powder has taken effect. As you can see there’s not much meat left at all and what there is left you can naturally push off with your fingertips. So basically we have just been left mostly with the bones, it’s been all cleaned off pretty neatly. Destroying all the soft tissue will make it far more difficult to investigate.

But would it be enough to stop them catching you? An experienced forensic anthropologist can spot the tiniest bullet and knife marks simply by looking at the bones and these marks can be matched to the type of weapon that caused them. But what if those weapons have left no traces? Professor John Henry is an expert in poisons the most likely method for a perfect murder, if done well, the victim doesn’t even realised what’s happened until the poisoner is many miles away. If you can produce a mystery illness and nobody thinks of looking for the poison, well then, the poisoner’s won. You’ve got manners to assassinate somebody, they’ve got no bullets inside them, they don’t leave fingerprints nothing is seen, nothing is known and they get away with it. It’s pretty scary.

But lethal poisons are extremely hard to get hold of. So can anyone commit the perfect murder? One infamous killer got away with murder for years. He used poisons. Many of his victims were? Most importantly no one even realised that these people had been murdered. This killer’s victims appeared to die of natural causes because the GP who signed their death certificates was also the murderer. The case of Harold Shipman is very interesting: he was trusted, he had access to people, he could inject poisons into them, and the poison he chose was morphine, a very, very ordinary painkilling drug. It was as easy as that. For years Shipman was never properly investigated, because the murders were completely motiveless. The Shipman case turned into one of Britain’s biggest murder investigations but it started only when the daughter of one of his victims realised that her mother’s will had been forged: It said I want to reward him for all the care he’s given to me and the people of Hyde.

So the perfect murder is possible in real life but the killer cannot make a single mistake with even the tiniest piece of evidence and the forensic scientists only have to get lucky once. There may well be a perfect murder, and there may have been perfect murders where people have got away with it, we don’t know!