Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Killing a Dead Body

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

If you try to kill someone who was already dead is that a bad thing? Yeah? How bad?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to the latest with Lauren the Rosa from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the, the iHeartRadio app. You can get it at Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast. Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. It's Josh. It's Chuck. And we're both alive for now.

Well, I'll tell you what, buddy. If I was ever dead, I would want you to make sure of it by killing me again. Yeah, but you'd be setting me up for a real legal quagmire that probably would not break in my favorite, Chuck. So I don't know if I can guarantee that. I wish I could do a good impression of the late actor slash magician slash kind of comedian, Ricky Jay, because anyone who's ever seen, to my mind, great P.T. Anderson movie from 1999 Magnolia. It is great. We'll recall, and if you're interested, by the way, our friend of the show, Josh's boyfriend, Adam Pranica, was on my P.T. Anderson series on movie crush.

So we covered Magnolia and all the P.T. Anderson movies before the show ended, that is. I've got one even better than you. What's that? Another friend of the show, Paul F. Tompkins, P.F. Tompkins, not P.T. Anderson. He did a script reading for Magnolia at the table with all the actors, and apparently was not doing well enough for Tom Cruise not to say something. Like, can we keep getting this right or something?

It's a hilarious story. Wow. I've never heard that. Tom Cruise is essentially like being mean to P.F. Tompkins for not doing good job script reading. Well, I sort of like Tom Cruise until then because Paul of Tompkins is a national treasure and he was actually in the movie, there will be blood, because I don't know, maybe he did such a good job at that table reading. Yeah, that's another P.T. Anderson film, right? Yeah. Where he goes, I'm done with drinking milkshakes or something. That's it. I don't want any more milkshake. Thank you. I think it's the line.

Why are we talking about Magnolia, Chuck? Because, once again, at the beginning of that movie, there's a series of vignettes. Ricky J. narrates them. And the first, I think it's the first one, I don't recall, but it's a very kind of cool sequence where this story is told where a guy named Sidney Beringer attempted suicide, but it became a suicide. The long and short of it is he jumped out of a window. His parents lived in an apartment below him, and as he jumped and was falling to what he thought would be his death, his mom and dad got into an argument, his mom aims a shotgun at the dad, the gun goes off, it goes through the window missing the father and kills the son on his way down to land. The guy didn't know this when he went to jump off the building, but there was a net down there that would have caught him and saved his life. Yeah. So it went from him taking his own life to his mom murdering him, to his suicide being ruled an attempted one. He couldn't have completed it because of that net. But it gets even crazier because when the police show up, the mom and dad say, we have no idea how the shotgun was loaded. We use it to threaten one another all the time, so we know not to load it.

And upon more investigation, they found that Sidney had loaded it. So he loaded the gun. that killed him. And so the medical examiner ruled a suicide after all. That's right. This story is not true, as it turns out. It was based on the story of Ronald Opus, which came from an oral story of the president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Don Harper Mills. In 1987, he told this story at a banquet, eventually found its way to the internet. But Mills maintains that he made it up to illustrate how turning up new evidence can completely alter the outcome of a coroner's ruling. Right.

And it's a really good example of just how strange turns of events in evidence collection can completely alter a medical examiner's ruling on the cause of death. And that also applies to an entirely, like, niche, I guess, area of legal scholarship, which is, can you murder a... someone who's already dead. And it turns out it's not nearly as straightforward as you would think. All right. Let's take a break.

What a tease. And we'll come back with more talk of boogie nights and hard eight right after this. Hey, Siss, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to make a, manage your money again. Welcome to Brown and Vision. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online

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have had to sort this out. And one of the best known ones came in France in 1986. That's right, with the death of Monsieur Wilkins. Monsher Wilkins got in a bra with Monsieur Chauro. Is that right? Mm-hmm. Okay.

Well, I mean, it's Monsieur Chouro. What did I say? Monsieur. How do you pronounce it? Monsieur. Really? Why is it M-O-N? Is that all silent?

It's just the French doing their French thing. So, Monsieur, isn't a thing at all? No, it's Missier. I've heard of Monsieur. I just thought this is a more formal title or something. No, no, that's it. Spelled M-O-N. That's weird. That's the famous Monsieur.

All right. So, Monsieur Charo. All right, so Monsieur Charo was in this brawl with Monsieur Wilkins. Wilkins was knocked unconscious by an iron bar by Monsieur Charo. Very nice. And then, Monsieur Charot, use that same iron bar to strangle Monsieur Wilkins. The next day, another dude, Monsieur, Peterot

Came along And it was like, hey, this Wilkins guy's still alive And so I'm going to beat him to death With a glass bottle and strangle him Just to make sure that he's dead The medical examiner found that Chero had actually killed him So he was dead

So then the question remains What happens to Pedro When he commits this seeming active murder On a dead body? Right. So there's an actual answer for this. And before we get to the answer, we have to talk about a couple of legal things and another case. Okay? So the people who are arguing against Pertorot's guilt, so say his defense team, said he cannot be charged with murder or even attempted murder because murdering Monsieur Wilkins was a legal impossibility. It was impossible for him to complete this accident. act, which means that he can't possibly be guilty of it. And that was apparently a longstanding idea in law, this idea of a legal impossibility and guilt, right? And so some people said, okay, that's actually a pretty good explanation. I think he might not be guilty. And other people

said, wait, wait, wait, forget this legal impossibility mumbo-jumbo. What we think is more important is intent. What did he intend to do? He thought, that Willikins was still alive when he tried to murder him. So his intent was to murder this man. Therefore, he's guilty of attempted murder. And everybody said, what to do, what to do, sacroble. That's right. I thought that was sacred blow.

So they said, we must look to see if there's any precedent. That was in the 80s. And I don't know if they actually looked at the American case or not, because you can't really set precedent on someone else's country, right? No, no, it's not precedent necessarily, but I think like it's out there. Sure, yeah. Okay. So New York City, 1975, 11 years before the French incident, as it's known by me only, there were some dudes drinking and an apartment, three guys drinking. The guy's apartment was Michael Geller, and another guy, Joe Bush, had been staying there, kind of freeloading, staying with the guy,

and they were sitting there getting a little more drunk. Obviously, some high. Hotheads kind of guys. And Geller started saying like, hey, dude, you've been crashing here. I need some rent. Why don't you start chipping in on rent? This thing escalated such that Bush eventually shot him three times in the chest. And the guy falls to the floor. And then the third guy comes in, Melvin Dlugash, and stands over Geller and fires five more shots into his head.

Both of these guys are charged, obviously, with murder. But once again, DeLugash, his defense was, hey, this guy was already dead, or at least you can't prove that he was alive when I shot him five times in the head. He was initially convicted of murder, but it was overturned saying that you can't prove that he was dead, so you can't charge me with murder. Right. And I just want to say, this seems like a fairly shocking crime, but this took place while there was still lead in America's gasoline. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, like you said, Lugash, that's the best way you could say that horrible name.

He got off because, yeah, the prosecution couldn't prove that Geller was still alive. And New York Supreme Court said, no, not so fast. It doesn't matter whether Geller was still alive. You thought he might have still been alive, which is why you shot him five times in the head. And we're going to throw out this idea of legal impossibility and adopt basically, a new framework, or at least we're going to take an existing framework and basically make it the framework, which is intent. Yeah.

That is that. Like, what you intended to do determines your guilt or innocence, not the actual fact or possibility of whether you could have done what you were trying to do. Right. Specifically, the charge is attempted murder. What you can't do is charge somebody with murder because you can't murder a corpse. It's just not scientifically. forget legally. It's not scientifically possible.

So kill something that is already dead. But attempted murder, you certainly can. So the French High Court weighs in on the Père de Rue case with Monsieur. Man, what a dope. No, this is an instant classic because of that. And they came to the same conclusion, and they said, all right, you're guilty of attempted murder then because our friend, the Yanks, across the pond. and they informed our opinion on this, perhaps.

Yeah, perhaps. So there's at least one more that we want to call out. This actually happens with surprising frequency. I would not think that there would be more than one or two cases, but there are some here there. One that I saw was that it sometimes used to prosecute cops who shoot people a bunch of times. There was a cop in Toronto who a guy came out with a knife

and he shot him three times, and the guy dropped. And then he went up and shot him a bunch more times when the guy was on the ground. And the jury said, nope, that was a legal murder. We can't convict you of murder because this is in the line of duty. And it was the bullets after, the shots after, that we can now convict you of attempted murder. Yeah. It also happened to our dear friends in Australia in the case of what looks like a mercy killing. In 2014, near one of our favorite cities, Melbourne, two guys, Daniel Darrington, and Rocky Spartacus, Matt Scassie.

What a name. They got in a fight. We're struggling over a gun. The gun went off. Well, I was about to say killed. It struck Matt Scassie in the head. His body's on the ground twitching around and stuff. And Darrington shoots him.

hey, I don't want this guy, and the quote was, didn't want the bloke suffering, and killed him for sure, then went back, got more bullets, and then shot him again, and he was charged with murder, and the jury said, you know, we can't find him guilty because the prosecution didn't kill that you intended to kill him when the gun went off to begin with. Right, but they did find him guilty of attempted murder because he demonstrated quite clearly that he thought Matskassi was still alive, and shot him to kill him, however merciful the act was supposed to be. Right.

And he got convicted of attempted murder for that one. Wow. Had he not tried to be merciful and put Matt's Cassie out of his misery and just the initial shot had killed him, he wouldn't have been convicted of anything at all. Yeah. It would have been, I guess, a struggle, maybe even self-defense. Who knows how they would have framed it? Yeah, for sure.

So I guess that's the takeaway here. If somebody is potentially already dead, call an ambulance. Yeah, this kind of thing I feel like is in movies a lot. I feel like it often comes up as like to prove your loyalty to the organization. Like someone's in there. Like I killed most of them. You've got to finish them off. So we're both liable or whatever.

Oh, yeah. I see that a lot of movies, I feel like. Sure. Short stuff. I guess it's out. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.