Bodies in the Back Garden — Nigel Cawthorne

There is one problem which every killer must face: how to get rid of the body

Murderer Dennis Nilsen famously cooked the corpses of his victims and flushed them down the toilet, only to be caught when the sewers blocked up. But his first 12 victims were disposed of in the back garden of his previous home. Fred and Rosemary West buried the bodies of three of their victims in the back garden. Milwaukee cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer began his murderous career scattering human remains in the backyard of his parents' home in Bath, Ohio. Convicted killer Peter Tobin went back on trial after two more bodies were found in the back garden of his former home. And grisly granny Dorothea Puente murdered lodgers at her boarding house in Sacramento, California, dispatching them to the backyard while continuing to cash their Social Security checks. This book explores these and many other cases that suggest that, whatever the motive for murder, the back garden is a convenient place to dump the corpse.