From CNN.com:
http://tinyurl.com/4bfb8n
Chemist gets Life for Husband's Acid Vat Murder
A biochemist was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole Friday for killing her estranged husband by knocking him out and stuffing him into a vat of acid, possibly while he was still alive.
(snip)
Prosecutors said Schuster and her former lab assistant, James Fagone, first immobilized Timothy Schuster with a stun gun and a chloroform-soaked rag. Then they bound his hands and feet, dumped his body headfirst into a barrel while he was still breathing and poured hydrochloric acid on him.
At work, my colleagues and I have been watching this story unfold. If you are into grisly details, you can google this lady's name and read the blogs of local reporters covering her trial. It is truly horrific what she was convicted of doing. It is hard to fathom that someone could do this to another living being.
I don't know which is worse: (1) that a biochemist used her powers for evil instead of good or (2) that she didn't know that there are better things one can use to dissolve a body than concentrated HCl. She was trained in the chemistry of biological systems and that was the best she could come up with?**
**I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek but in my lab at work, we were able to come up with a dozen things off the top of our heads that would have worked better. Just sayin'.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Wow, that's pretty awful!
What would YOU use to dissolve a body?
Yes, I'm curious now too.
It might have just come down to whatever she happened to have a barrel worth of... The tinyurl doesn't seem to be working so I cannot see if they mention.
Thanks for the heads up about the link. It seems to be working in my browser. Is anyone else having problems with it?
If so, here is the full link:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/05/16/acid.slaying.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
As for what is best to use for dissolving bodies, I have to ask: do you have a body that needs dissolving? ;-)
Concentrated HCl is a 36% solution in water. That means the majority of what she put in the vat was water.
Now, if done appropriately, the acid would have eventually worked. It had apparently dissolved half his body. Had she weighted the body so it couldn't float, it could have completed the job.
It is just that there are concentrated acids that are more concentrated that would have done the job quicker. Some acids will target the calcium in bones thereby making it easier to dissolve them.
(Bases have also been used in the past to quickly strip flesh from bones of cadavers.)
Maybe, as someone suggested it was a case of just what she had on hand. But if you read the details of the case, she worked at a pharma/biotech start-up so you would think they would have some of the better (and common) alternatives on hand too.
Post a Comment