"I was told there would be amontillado."
"You are among the weak who will become the foundation of our country. Literally."
— Major General Olivier Mira Armstrong, Fullmetal Alchemist, to Lt. General Raven after cutting him down and knocking him into a newly poured concrete floor
When Disposing of a Body, you need a place where the body is unlikely to come to light again. One method is to find a site where a building or road is being constructed and bury the body in the foundations. Some murderers find a hiding place for their body where it will soon be covered up as construction progresses; others prefer to get hands-on and pour cement over the body personally.
This is particularly likely to be the case if the murderer in question either works in construction or owns the company, giving them special access to dispose of the body. It is likewise (at least in fiction) historically quite popular with The Mafia.
If finding a suitable spot and dealing with all that cement is too much hassle, then a simpler alternative is for the murderer to just hide the body under the floorboards, quite often either the ones at the site of the murder or their own. However, this particular method usually carries the danger that, as the body rots, the horrible smell will draw unwanted attention. As such, this is more often used as a temporary hiding place as opposed to outright disposal.
An alternative version that doesn't always involve murder is when the body in question was originally a worker on the project who died during construction and ended up being buried within it. Examples of this type usually fall into two categories: either it was a genuine accident (and at worst a case of negligence); or the corpse was deliberately hidden by their employers, either because they were just that apathetic to the death, or in an attempt to deliberately cover up the accident.
One danger of this method, if you get away with it, is that you may live long enough for renovations or rebuilding works to uncover the body.
For other cement-related methods of body disposal, see Cement Shoes, in which cement is used to weigh down a body that's dropped into a lake or sea.
Compare with Buried Alive, when sealing up the body is used as the method of murder rather than disposal (although there can be overlap between the two), and with Blood for Mortar, where the body parts are not concealed.
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Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Fullmetal Alchemist: Major General Olivier Mira Armstrong, a Lady of War and Four-Star Badass in charge of Fort Briggs (home of the toughest troops in Amestris), plays along with Smug Snake Lt. General Raven from Central Command to find out about the Ancient Conspiracy that the Elric brothers are up against, having already seen some rather shady behavior from him. She learns that the Central leaders have been offered immortality in exchange for furthering Father's plans, and Raven offers her the opportunity to gain immortality as well. As she leads him down to a construction site, Raven rants about how the weak of Amestris will become the foundation for the strong. Having finally heard enough, Olivier stabs Raven in the hand, retorts that he is the weak one, having become a shell of his former self, and cuts him down before knocking him into the newly-poured cement floor. As Raven drowns, she comments that the weak will indeed become the foundation for the strong — in this case, Raven becoming the foundation for Briggs.
- Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro: Early in the series, Neuro and Yako solve a case involving some yakuza guys and the budding detective couple inherit the office that belonged to them. In one room, Yako finds a braid of hair sticking from a walled-up corpse. It somehow gains sentience thanks to Neuro's demonic power. Akane seems to know what happened to her but refused to say anything about it and Neuro claims he's going to solve her mystery later as he's not interested at that moment. He never did.
Comic Books
- Cosa Nostra: Used as a Running Gag in the Sicilian-Mafia-centric gag series, where bodies stick out of the concrete due to the henchmen's bungling, or in the spectacularly inept Vincenze Abruto's case, managing to encase more than 100 people in a public swimming pool due to an overzealous interpretation of "Leave No Witnesses".
- ElfQuest: Lady Winnowill, posing as a human, has an interesting way of laying the floors for her lord's castle. Slaves dig a trench, after which they are knocked unconscious and cement is poured over them, filling the trench. After it hardens, repeat for the next section. The Djun is apparently fully aware and approves of this method of keeping secrets.
- House of Secrets: In this Vertigo comic, the Juris are a group of ghosts who all somehow became 'part of a house' in their death. The most recent member is a black woman named Ruby from 1960s Alabama who was murdered by whites who were appalled at her relationship with a white man. She was Buried Alive by being dumped in the foundation of a housing project and having concrete poured on top of her to form the slab.
- Marvels: A doctor named Phineas Horton creates a synthetic being known as the Human Torch (later known as Jim Hammond). Horton shows off Hammond to the public, but the crowd says he is too dangerous, so Horton drops the Human Torch, still in his vacuum-sealed glass tube, into the wet concrete at a nearby construction site.
Films — Animation
- Monster House: During the construction of their house, Constance and Mr. Nebbercracker started being antagonized by a couple of boys on Halloween when they didn't have any candy to give (why the boys attempted to go trick-or-treating at a half-finished house is a completely separate matter). When Constance attempts to threaten them with an axe, she accidentally ends up losing her footing and falls into the dug-out basement, burying herself in cement at the same time.
Films — Live-Action
- In 300, Leonidas and his Spartan army use the corpses of the dead Persians from the first battle to fortify their position at Thermopylae. It also serves as a warning to the herald who tries to dictate terms to the Spartans following said first battle.
- In the 1986 Italian movie Il Camorrista, the naked girlfriend of a gangster is tied up by her hands and lowered by a crane, fully conscious and screaming, into the wet concrete of a construction site.
- Diamonds Are Forever: After confronting Blofeld in Willard Whyte's penthouse, Bond is then knocked out by gas, picked up by Wint and Kidd, taken out to Las Vegas Valley, placed in a pipeline that is under construction and left to die. Exactly why they didn't kill him before placing him in the pipe instead of hoping he would be killed by the pipe welding robot is unclear.
- The Gate: Played with. In an attempt to scare him, Terry tells Glen that a workman died while building his house years before he and his family moved in and that he was still stuck in the walls. Later, when a zombie busts through the wall of their house, Glen whispers, "It's the workman" but Terry quickly informs him that he made it all up. The demons of the titular gate being able to take the form of human fears.
- How to Murder Your Wife: Bash Brannigan carries out a "dry run" for disposing of his wife by dumping a shop-window mannequin, dressed in his wife's clothes, in a pile-hole on a construction site; when his (still living) wife finds out, she leaves him and disappears, leaving him to convince the court that he has not murdered her for real.
- Jo: Antoine Brisebard (Louis de Funès thinks it's a clever idea to build a gazebo to hide the corpse in the foundation. However, since the man in charge of building the foundations did a very shoddy job, cracks begin to appear...
- In Lethal Weapon 3, the Big Bad kills a mook who has failed him while he's standing in front of a form that's going to be turned into a foundation of one of the houses the Big Bad is making in his civilian identity. In a difference from the norm, said mook is still alive when he's being buried. No gunshot, no stabbing, just whacked in the head, held down by shovels, and buried in cement.
- Robin and the 7 Hoods: At the end, it is strongly implied that the crooked sheriff's body is in the foundation of a new building, just like his predecessor and their boss ended up.
- Sexy Beast: At the beginning, Gal's retirement is disrupted first by a loose boulder ruining his pool and then by his mobster ex-coworker Don Logan arriving to demand that he does One Last Job. At the end, Don's body is hidden under the rebuilt pool.
- Snake Eyes: The Big Bad kills a man and woman who are part of the conspiracy, and at the end of the movie, the woman's ring is shown embedded in one of the concrete pillars of the newly constructed sports arena.
- Stir of Echoes: Tom Witzky moves to a house in a Chicagoan suburb, and begins to be haunted by visions of a ghost girl. The girl was a mentally handicapped teenager who was almost raped by two neighbourhood male teens, one of them the son of the man who is leasing the house for Tom, and is a house renovator. The man, his son, and the son's friend wrapped the girl's body in plastic and immured it behind a wall in the basement.
- Walled In:
- The movie opens with a little girl named Julie being Buried Alive in cement through a combination of Human Sacrifice and Drowning Pit.
- In the climax, Joseph Malestrazza, who murdered Julie (and 15 other people by the aforementioned method), has Sam fatally stab him, then he falls into an open grave and his body is buried in cement.
Literature
- In Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher, Gereon Rath commits an Accidental Murder next to a construction site, so he drags the body inside, digs a hole in the still wet concrete foundation and buries it. Unfortunately the foreman notices the previously smooth surface has been disturbed and orders the workers to dig up the concrete and lay the foundation again, causing the body to be found.
- In "The Cobblestones of Saratoga Street" by Avram Davidson, two elderly women campaign against a move to have a cobblestone street in their neighborhood resurfaced with modern materials. It turns out that the real reason they want the street left alone is that when they were much younger and the cobblestones were first being laid they used the construction to hide the body of a man who'd seduced them both.
- Codex Seraphinianus: Though they don't bother to hide it. One illustration shows a cemetery with walls and buildings all made out of glass coffins, with people inside.
- In Aidan Chambers' short story "Dead Trouble", the protagonist died by falling into a load of cement that ended up being used for a motorway bridge.
- In "Dolan's Cadillac" by Stephen King (from Nightmares & Dreamscapes), Robinson gets his revenge on Dolan by burying him alive (inside his car) underneath a highway that's being repaved.
- Implied in "The Copper Beech" by Maeve Binchy. Leonora's life revolves around concealing the fact that her mother killed her Romani lover and her father buried him on the family property. After her parents' deaths, she finally confesses the situation to her schoolmate and eventual husband, "Foxy" Dunne. Foxy, who works in construction, responds, "A load of concrete will take care of that."
- The Killer Question: Two bodies are discovered in the concrete foundation of a bike rack outside the bar.
- In "A Look at Organized Crime" by Woody Allen, New York racketeer Irish Larry Doyle "was killed when the Squillante Construction Company decided to erect their new offices on the bridge of his nose."
- Lady Meng Jiang
: A traditional Chinese tale about the construction of The Great Wall of China. Her husband Wan Xiliang was Press-Ganged into a crew on the wall, died, and was buried inside it. No Man of Woman Born is sometimes added to the tale — a cruel Emperor is told "ten thousand must die for the wall to stand" — and Wan can also mean ten thousand. The tale has the Emperor meet her, be taken by her beauty, and marry her — only to have her get revenge and denounce his cruelty for entombing her late husband in the wall.
- Modesty Blaise: In the novel The Night of Morningstar, Willie Garvin has to defeat two killers sent by the villains, and wants to leave their employer guessing about what happened to them. He lures them to a construction site he knows about and buries the bodies in a patch of ground that's due to have concrete laid over it the following day.
- Shadows of the Empire: A former mistress of Xizor who annoyed him by trying to reconcile with him was "accidentally mixed with a vat of duracrete" and is now part of a building foundation.
- Edgar Allan Poe:
- The Tell-Tale Heart: The narrator tells you nothing about themselves, not even their name or gender, except for the fact that they are not mad! The narrator lives with an old man. The narrator professes to love the old man but is fixated on the old man's "vulture-like evil eye", to the point that the narrator is driven crazy. The narrator kills the old man and buries him under the floorboard of the house. All seems to go well until the narrator has a Villainous Breakdown out of paranoia and guilt and reveals their crime to some visiting police officers.
- The Black Cat: The narrator, becoming a violent alcoholic, kills his pet cat, Pluto. After some time, he brings home another, similar-looking, cat, and begins to hate it. When it nearly trips him as he goes into the cellar, he tries to kill it with an axe, and his wife gets the axe in her head when she tries to stop him. To keep anyone from finding out, he buries her body behind a brick wall. As in The Tell-Tale Heart, some police come to visit, and the narrator is at first sure he's home free. Then he knocks on the wall while rambling about how well-built the house is, and a wail from behind the wall causes the police to tear it down — he had accidentally entombed the cat while burying his wife's body.
- The Cask of Amontillado (starting to see a pattern?): A man named Montresor tricks another man named Fortunato into the cellar underneath his house to taste a cask of wine he has acquired, but in reality he chains and buries Fortunato behind a wall, as vengeance for "Numerous incidents" and an unspecified insult.
- Wilt: Henpecked college lecturer Henry Wilt, victim of an obscene practical joke involving an inflatable sex doll, dresses it in his wife's clothes and throws it down a pile hole on a construction site (due to be filled with concrete); when his wife goes away on an impromptu holiday, Wilt must convince the police he has not disposed of her for real.
- The plot Concrete Evidence by Malcolm Rose kicks off with the discovery of a woman's body encased in concrete in the wall of a video factory. The woman's teenage children end up solving the case.
Music
- The Highwayman: In this song about the many reincarnations of the narrator, he states that his life as a construction worker working on Hoover Dam came to an end when he slipped and fell off of a scaffold into a form full of wet concrete and that the brick was added to the dam regardless. It being a popular Urban Legend this was the fate of several workers.
Manhua
- An Old Master Q strip has the titular character leaning against a wall, and seeing what appears to be a single human hair sticking out of its surface. Realizing the wall to be somewhat soft on the other side, Master Q then pokes a hole in it... and drags out a corpse, to his horror.
Theatre
- A favoured method of the gangster Gioli in Christmas Can Be Murder. She notes that sites with convenient concrete pours are harder to come by than she'd like, but much easier than other options.
Gioli: Sometimes you get lucky and they're pouring concrete foundations. You just tip 'em in and there's still time to catch a movie! [...] That's how I saw Aladdin. The new one.
Video Games
- Batman: Arkham City: Whilst exploring the Cyrus Pinkney Museum, which The Penguin has transformed into his base within Arkham City, at several points if you turn on Detective Vision it will reveal a number of corpses within the walls of the building. This is unremarked upon in the narrative, but considering the other horrors on display throughout the modified museum and brutal acts you witness at the hands of Cobblepot, it doesn't require much explanation.
- A case in Criminal Case: The Conspiracy has the team investigating the murder of a lawyer who disappeared. It is shown that her killer walled her up in an apartment, and the body was only discovered due to a recent earthquake.
- Fallout 4: In the Far Harbor DLC, if the player opts to kill High Confessor Tektus in order to resolve the main questline, they must hide the body in a fissure in a damaged wall, brick it up and move a shelving unit in front of it.
- Frostpunk: The DLC The Last Autumn has two cases of this, both as a result of siding with engineers over workers.
- After using Strike Busting to break a strike, you can get an event in which a worker disappears, and you are given the option to allow people to search for them. Regardless of what you choose, the worker won't be found. After this, one of your engineers will later confess to you in person about having a lethal altercation with the worker (a strike organizer) and disposing of his body by dumping it and covering it with cement at the generator construction site and asks if he has your blessing. You can choose to praise the overseer for a good job (which makes strikes less likely in the future but leads to workers occasionally "disappearing") or to punish the engineer.
- Convicts who die working on the generator construction site do not get kept in morgues for repatriation to England. One of the laws, Rationalised Healthcare, notes that the bodies of convicts who die are disposed of in the foundations of the generator.
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: One mission has CJ, using a cement truck, pushing a construction foreman into a rectangular pit while the foreman is locked inside a portable bathroom stall. CJ then proceeds to dump cement from the truck inside the pit.
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City: Promotional work for the game implies this about Ricardo Diaz, saying he's contributed to foundations across the city.
- Silent Hill 3: a walled-up corpse along with a silencer can be found on the construction site earlier in the game by striking a newly plastered wall on the fifth floor. This is supposed to be a cameo of Solid Snake from Metal Gear fame. It seems that in the Silent Hill universe, Snake failed his mission and met a most Undignified Death.
- Shows up as a background gag in The Simpsons Hit & Run: One interactive joke has Bart or Apu turning on a cement mixer. Fully-formed cement will fall out...in the shape of a human body...which breaks in two.
- The Testament of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes finds the corpse of a magician walled up in a mill.
Web Animation
- Happy Tree Friends: In "Concrete Solution", Lumpy accidentally shoots Handy in the back of the head with a nail gun, causing him to get stuck in a block of wet cement. Lumpy tries to hide the deed by pushing Handy further into the cement. He eventually gets crushed to death by said cement block.
Webcomics
- In Genocide Man, Peter Pup committed suicide via swan-dive into cement for pragmatic reasons: as one of the titular agents, his equipment had a Dead Man's Switch and enough Synthetic Plagues to depopulate a country. Even so, enough bioweapons seeped out of the cement to require the evacuation of two States.
Western Animation
- The Cleveland Show: The episode "Lika a Boss" has a Cutaway Gag that shows what Bob the Builder is like before his morning coffee; he kills a guy that makes him angry with a hammer and hides his body by covering it with concrete and building a house over it. Since the cutaway was presented as security camera footage, Bob likely got punished for it.
- Family Guy: In "Emission: Impossible", Stewie's Imagine Spot Montage of what life with his prospective little brother Bertram would be like revolves around them teaming up to take down Lois, with the last one depicting them burying her in cement.
- Robot Chicken: One segment has Bob the Builder dealing with a gang of thugs telling him he doesn't have the right equipment for the job and proceed to beat him up. Bob and his crew retaliate by killing all of them and burying them and covering the hole with concrete.
- The Simpsons: In "Last Exit to Springfield", when Mr. Burns asks Smithers where the leader of the union is so they can discuss the new union contract, Smithers mentions that he hasn't been seen since he declared his intent to clean up the union — cue Cutaway Gag of a football player tripping over a body-shaped mound in the end zone of a football stadium. (Referencing a popular urban legend that famous missing labor leader Jimmy Hoffa was buried underneath Giants Stadium)
- The Spectacular Spider-Man: Spidey attempts to dispose of the Venom symbiote after tricking it into leaving Eddie Brock by putting it in a bag and dropping it into a patch of fresh-poured cement. In season two, Eddie tricks Spidey into revealing where he buried the symbiote, smashes the cement, and frees it. The symbiote is none the worse for wear after being trapped for what was at least weeks, which is not terribly surprising for an alien Blob Monster that can survive the vacuum of space.
Real Life
- If somebody were to be unlucky enough to have any part of their body trapped in setting cement or concrete, two additional things happen to enhance the experience. Setting cement generates heat. Setting cement also expands slightly, which would constrict, even crush, anything within it. During the Marcos years in the Philippines, the delightful ruling couple ordered the construction of a prestige theatre and cinema complex so as to host an Asian film festival. To get it completed before the deadline, a lot of corners were cut and safety rules disregarded. The inevitable accident occurred when up to fifty building workers were trapped under pouring concrete which began setting. Many were smothered and killed, but others endured both the crushing and burning effects, said to be excruciatingly painful. Rumour has it that Imelda Marcos ordered rescue and recovery attempts to cease so that construction would not be delayed, and that the men set in concrete were buried where they had been trapped so as to leave no trace.
- A popular theory about the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa is that the mob hid his body in the foundation of Giants Stadium in New Jersey, which was under construction at the time. Busted by the MythBusters episode "Buried in Concrete", where they examined rumored burial spots in the stadium with ground-penetrating radar and found no proof. Busted again for good in 2010, when the stadium was demolished and no human remains were found.
- The ancient Longshan culture (3000-1900 BC) of China is known to have buried human sacrifices in the foundations of temples, walls, and the homes of the elites.
- The Japanese used to practice a tradition called Hitobashira, or human pillar, a form of human sacrifice that would involve the victim being buried alive under or near large-scale buildings like bridges or castles, which was intended to protect the building from both natural and man-made calamity. The term can also refer to construction workers who are accidentally buried alive during construction, due to poor work conditions. Because of this, there are more than a few folk tales and urban legends surrounding the practice, such as Jomon Tunnel in Hokkaido, and the story of Maruoka Castle in Fukui Prefecture.
- There was a similar practice with bridges in Europe.
- The Trope Namer for The Great Wall, The Great Wall Of China, used a lot of labor in the construction of the various walls. Due to the number of deaths associated with it and the possibility that graves are under the wall for the sake of expediency, The Smithsonian Magazine calls it the "longest grave on Earth"
- Infamous London Serial Killer John Reginald "Reg" Christie was finally exposed when, on the 24th of March 1953, the new tenant at his former flat, 10 Rillington Place, accidentally discovered a wallpaper-covered alcove when attempting to insert brackets. Peeling it back, he found three bodies. The resulting search likewise turned up Christie's missing wife buried under the floorboards of the front room.
- There are funeral homes that will take the ashes after cremation from either relatives or pets and will make garden stepping stones out of them. One company even makes artificial reefs with the ashes.
- There is a persistent Urban Legend that the Hoover Dam has several corpses in its structure of workers who fell in during pouring. This is actually false. The dam was built by "compartments"; with the concrete being poured rather slowly and several workers being present, it would be virtually impossible for a worker to fall in the concrete and not be noticed or rescued. The sections of concrete only rose a few feet per day, so the wet concrete at any point wouldn't be deep enough for a man to sink in. Even if they had died, the body would have been recovered, so as to not risk the structural integrity of the dam by having pockets of air in it where bodies decomposed.
- The R504 Kolyma Highway in Russia is also known as the Road of Bones because all the prisoners shipped from the nearest Gulag camps who perished during the construction were buried underneath the road. It was deemed easier than digging new holes for the dead.
- At the Texas summer camp El Tesoro, a dead horse was interred underneath the camp pool while it was being constructed. Whether this was an accident or intentional is a subject of camp legend.
- Another famous but discredited urban legend said that the Great Eastern, an early steam ocean liner and the largest ship in the world at its launch, had had a worker accidentally trapped between the walls of its double-layered hull. The legend claimed that for years afterward, passengers and crew could hear his ghostly knocking within the walls, and that his skeleton was discovered when the ship was scrapped. Many people did die during the ship's construction, but there's no proof of the trapped worker or skeleton.
- In 2000, Turkish police raided the safehouses of a group known as "Turkish Hezbollah"note and found the bodies of some 200 individuals who had been murdered by the group and buried within the foundations or walls of the safehouses. Notably, the group had sold some of their former safehouses to legitimate buyers over the years, with these new owners forced to face the fact that they had been living atop the bodies of murder victims all along.