A murder conviction without a body is an instance of a person being convicted of murder despite the absence of the victim's body. Circumstantial and forensic evidence are prominent in such convictions. Hundreds of such convictions have occurred in the past, some of which have been overturned. In all cases, unless otherwise noted, the remains of the victims were never recovered.
Conviction overturned due to the supposed victim being found alive after the conviction Conviction overturned for other reasons Partial remains recovered, or body was located after a conviction. In , her remains were found buried in a back garden in Dorset, England.
The 42 years that passed between the crime and the conviction is the longest such interval in an American bodyless murder case. In April , Ronnie Busick was arrested and charged with four accounts of first-degree homicide for the deaths of Bible and the Freeman family. It was reported that "at least a dozen" witnesses claimed all three men bragged about raping and murdering Bible and Freeman and having taken Polaroid photographs of them. An affidavit made by a female witness who had lived with Welch for a brief time asserts that "she heard conversations between the three men where they disclosed that the murder victims had owed them money".
According to the affidavit, Welch, Pennington, and Busick had claimed to have raped and tortured the two friends before disposing of their remains "in a pit" or mine shaft in Picher, Oklahoma. In , Busick pleaded guilty to being an accessory to first-degree homicide in the deaths of Ashley's parents, arson of the Freemans' home, and the abduction and presumed slayings of the two teenagers. Cal was tried four times after being indicted in The first ended in a conviction but was set aside when new witnesses emerged who claimed to have seen Michele the morning after she had last been seen; the second also resulted in a conviction that was reversed on appeal.
A third trial in a different county ended with a hung jury; Cal was ultimately acquitted after a bench trial in the same jurisdiction. Kimball pleaded guilty to killing Marcum, the first of his four known victims, as part of a plea deal that would have resulted in a shorter sentence. It was conditioned on him leading police to all of the bodies, and after several possible locations for Marcum's turned up empty, he claimed he had forgotten, thus voiding the plea deal. After her murder, Kimball had expressed some concern, without admitting to the murder, that her breast implants could be used to identify her body and asked at least one acquaintance if he would go to her body and remove them for him; police believe that he may actually know the location of the body.
