History Main / BodyInABreadbox

* Bodies in the ''Series/{{CSI}}'' franchise have been found nailed to trees, sealed up in walls, hanging from power lines, embedded in tar, posed like statues in a park, sealed up in an arcade video-game, and [[Recap/CSINYS07E06 sitting behind the wheel of a car]] that's parked on a rooftop. Body ''parts'' have been found in even weirder places, like a head (in Vegas) or arms (in NY) left in coin-operated newspaper dispensers or a human eyeball dropped into a cup of street-cafe coffee by a passing vulture.
** Asked about the ''un''obvious places bodies might be found, Grissom mentioned having once found a head in a bucket of paint.
** Finn, examining a body that was hidden inside a piano, remarks that it's the first one she's found in such an instrument ''[[OverlyNarrowSuperlative that had its limbs intact]]''.
** Invoked in NY's "[[Recap/CSINYS01E14 Blood, Sweat and Tears]]" by Mac and Co. investigating when a member of the polar bear club discovers the body of a nearly nude young man in a 2' x 2' x 2' wooden box on the beach. After Sheldon asks Mac to help unfold the guy, they discover that none of his bones are broken. Turns out he was a contortionist with a travelling circus.
** The winner has to be an episode that opens with several bodies in various states of decay in a forest. A man ignores most of the bodies and directs Grissom to one, and Grissom asks what's so unusual about it. The man explains it's not his. After the credits, we learn that the man is a long-time friend of Grissom's and operates a "Body Farm" (a scientific facility that takes bodies donated to science and monitors what happens as they decay). The body the man identifies as not belonging to him is not one of the bodies that he was watching decay...someone put the body there, hoping that it would go unnoticed.

* Bodies in the ''Series/{{CSI}}'' franchise have been found nailed to trees, sealed up in walls, hanging from power lines, embedded in tar, posed like statues in a park, sealed up in an arcade video-game, and sitting behind the wheel of a car that's parked on a rooftop. Body ''parts'' have been found in even weirder places, like a head (in Vegas) or arms (in NY) left in coin-operated newspaper dispensers or a human eyeball dropped into a cup of street-cafe coffee by a passing vulture.

** Invoked in [[Series/{{CSINY}} NY]] by Mac and Co. investigating when a member of the polar bear club discovers the body of a nearly nude young man in a 2' x 2' x 2' wooden box on the beach. After Sheldon asks Mac to help unfold the guy, they discover that none of his bones are broken. Turns out he was a contortionist with a travelling circus.

** In the episode "Heeeeere’s Lassie!" they find the body inside the building’s laundry dryer. No explanation is given as to why or indeed how the killer put it there, but it does make for a dramatic rebeal.

* The ''VideoGame/RuneScape'' quest "The Hand in the Sand" has the player investigate how a severed hand ended up in a sand pit. [[spoiler:The culprit turns out to be the owner of the sand selling business, who paid an apprentice wizard named Clarence to cast a mind control spell on his employee so he could trick him into working longer hours with no additional pay, but then murdered Clarence when Clarence realized that what they did was illegal and threated to tell the authorities.]] The head turns up in a different sand pit and the other hand is later found in a package that was sent through the mail but never delivered due to the address being unreadable. The rest of the body parts can be found as random drops from animals in the jade vine maze, except for one foot that is never found.

* The ''VideoGame/RuneScape'' quest "The Hand in the Sand" has the player investigate how a severed hand ended up in a sandbox. [[spoiler:The culprit turns out to be the owner of the sand selling business, who murdered a wizard to hide that he had paid the wizard to cast a mind control spell on his employee, and then scattered the body parts using teleportation magic.]]

* A wealthy woman's body on ''Series/{{Castle}}'' was found squeezed into a wall safe. Many of its bones had to be broken to cram her inside.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* SerialKiller Jeffrey Dahmer kept the body parts of his victims in various places in his apartment, including, infamously, a severed head that one of the arresting officers found in his refrigerator.
* Part of UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler's skull was allegedly found in Russia, in a box labelled "Blue ink for pens".
* The corpse of Elmer [=McCurdy=] was found as a "hanging man" prop in a funhouse. Nobody realized it was actually a corpse...
* One infamous UrbanLegend claims that a couple who'd checked into a hotel room for the night complained about a bad smell in the morning, only to have the hotel staff discover a previous guest's corpse stuffed into the mattress they'd just slept and/or had sex on. A quick look through crime report archives shows that this is not just fiction either: [[http://www.snopes.com/horrors/gruesome/bodybed.asp several cases have been reported where bodies were been stashed in rooms without the knowledge of later guests.]]
** Which was later dramatized in the film ''Film/FourRooms''.
* The infamous case of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_in_the_Box_(Philadelphia) Boy in the Box]] (later identified as Joseph Augustus Zarelli). In 1957, the body of a little boy who had been beaten to death was discovered inside a bassinet box that had been placed in the woods in Fox Chase, Philadelphia. Despite posters of the boy's corpse being handed out, no parent or guardian ever arrived to claim him. There were several theories as to the boy's identity, ranging from the him being sold to a family who regularly raped him, to being raised as a girl (partly to explain the rushed haircut he was found with). Ultimately, investigators found little to no clues as to the boy's identity, or to his killer. Thankfully, the boy was eventually identified on November 2022, owing to advances in technology that allowed investigators to locate his relatives.
* In February 2013, Elisa Lam's body was found in the rooftop water tank of Los Angeles's Cecil Hotel. It is now as good as certain she got in there herself during a manic episode, as she had bipolar disorder, was not taking her meds and was showing symptoms, and was on a trip far away from her immediate social circle that would've known how to interpret and handle her erratic behavior leading up to her final decision.
* October 2013: [[http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/09/justice/body-in-hospital-stairwell/index.html?hpt=hp_t2 a patient]] at San Francisco General Hospital dies in a very underutilized stairwell.
* In 2015, [[http://www.history.com/news/ct-scan-reveals-mummified-monk-inside-ancient-buddha-statue the thousand-year-old body of the Buddhist master Liuquan was found inside a statue of Buddha.]]
* In September of 1999, a man cleaning out his garage [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Reyna_Marroquin found a barrel stuffed well back into the crawlspace.]] In it were the remains of a young woman. 30 years prior, the house's previous owner had murdered the woman after she called his wife and blabbed about their affair and her pregnancy and stuffed her body in the barrel, intending to dispose of it at sea. However, it was too heavy for him to lift and so it was stashed in his garage and forgotten about for decades.
* On July 1991, the heavily decomposed corpse of a four-year-old girl was [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Anjelica_Castillo discovered inside a navy picnic cooler]] that had been placed alongside Henry Hudson Parkway. Investigators, who had named the girl "Baby Hope", discovered that the child had been a victim of sexual abuse shortly before her death. It wasn't until 22 years later that police would arrest the girl's cousin for her murder.
* Although her body was never found, police learned that this was Anne Marie Fahey's fate after her ex-lover Thomas Capano's brother confessed to helping him dispose of her. [[note]]Capano had stuffed her body into an ice chest and ordered his brother to take him out to sea, where he promptly dumped it overboard.[[/note]]
* The body of seventeen-year-old [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta Junko Furuta]], who died in January of 1989 after suffering forty-four days of horrendous torture at the hands of four teenage boys and their {{yakuza}} associates, was found in a 55-gallon drum filled with concrete.
* UsefulNotes/IdiAmin Dada, who was infamous for his murderous regime in Uganda, was widely rumored to be a cannibal, and while no substantive evidence exists to support those claims, he did keep the heads of a number of his victims in his refrigerator, as referenced in the 1981 exploitation epic ''Film/TheRiseAndFallOfIdiAmin'' (see above in Film).
* In 1977, [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Einhorn Holly Maddux]] disappeared after returning to her abusive ex-boyfriend's apartment to collect her things. 1.5 years later, her remains were found stuffed in a trunk which was itself stuffed in the back of his closet. [[note]] Even worse, the position of her body—-arms outstretched—-indicated that despite the severe bludgeoning he administered, she was [[BuriedAlive still alive]] when he placed her in the trunk and died trying to get out.[[/note]]
[[/folder]]

In 1977, [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Einhorn Holly Maddux]] disappeared after returning to her abusive ex-boyfriend's apartment to collect her things. 1.5 years later, her remains were found stuffed in a trunk which was itself stuffed in the back of his closet. [[note]] Even worse, the position of her body—-arms outstretched—-indicated that despite the severe bludgeoning he administered, she was [[BuriedAlive still alive]] when he placed her in the trunk and died trying to get out.[[/note]]

* The body of seventeen-year-old Junko Furuta, who died in January of 1989 after suffering forty-four days of horrendous torture at the hands of four teenage boys and their {{yakuza}} associates, was found in a 55-gallon drum filled with concrete.

->''From Number Nine Penwiper Mews,\\

There is really abominable news,\\
They've discovered a head,\\

* ''Series/{{NCIS}}'' used this trope at least twice:

* The infamous case of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_in_the_Box_(Philadelphia) Boy in the Box.]] In 1957, the body of a little boy who had been beaten to death was discovered inside a bassinet box that had been placed in the woods in Fox Chase, Philadelphia. Despite posters of the boy's corpse being handed out, no parent or guardian ever arrived to claim him. There were several theories as to the boy's identity, ranging from the him being sold to a family who regularly raped him, to being raised as a girl (partly to explain the rushed haircut he was found with). Ultimately, investigators found little to no clues as to the boy's identity, or to his killer. Sadly has become a cold case, as anyone who was involved with the case has long since died, and almost certainly the boy's killer.

* One mummified corpse on ''Series/{{NCIS}}'' turned up stuffed inside a chimney. Oddly, this is something of a TruthInTelevision example. RealLife murder victims have turned up this way, such as [[https://www.namus.gov/UnidentifiedPersons/Case#/4770 this unfortunate individual]]. Getting stuck and asphyxiating was a major occupational hazard for 19th Century chimney sweeps, and it occasionally still happens to people, though mostly to burglars.