Cement Shoes

He could really use a hammerhead-shark right now.

"Just stand still", he says! "I'll turn your boots to gold", he says!

— Hunter, Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!

When gangsters are punishing someone for crossing them, they often have the victim tied up to a chair with his feet in a barrel, into which they pour quick-drying concrete. Once the concrete is dry, the victim is then dropped into a body of water, simultaneously killing the target and disposing of the body in a supposedly untraceable manner.

Depending on the exact methods used, overlap with some form of Death Trap can occur.

This is largely a Discredited Trope, as gangland murders are not actually performed in this manner as frequently as all that — in fact, according to Wikipedia's page on the subject, there's just one single solitary case documented from real life. Most real gangland murders are simple bullet/tire iron to the head affairs that generally lack the torture (or opportunity to escape or be rescued Just in Time, if you're a main character) that fiction demands. What is more common, though, is for gangsters to kill someone in a more prosaic way, then weigh the body down and toss it over, making this a way of Disposing of a Body. It may also be related to a similar method of execution supposedly once used by the Freemasons against oath-breakers.^note "Never to reveal our secrets under no less a penalty than my throat be cut across, my tongue be torn out by its root, and that I be buried in sand a cable's length from shore.”

See also Constructive Body Disposal, for when the victim is left (alive or dead) at the bottom of a construction site while the basement is being poured. Also compare Drowning Pit.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• Parodied in a Red Bull commercial where a Mafia victim asks for a last request. Too bad the gangster forgot that Red Bull Gives You Wings.
• Happens in this commercial for Tombstone pizza; the victim is told it's Nothing Personal before being asked what he wants on his Tombstone.

Anime & Manga

• Mentioned in The Anthem of the Heart by the magical egg as a possible punishment for Jun if she ever talked again.
• Beastars The lion yakuza attempts to kill Legosi by tying him to a weighted chair and dropping him off a cliff into the ocean. He escapes by getting a shark to rescue him using phrases in sea speak that a seal taught him.
• Case Closed: Discussed when the Detective Boys get captured by Italian gangsters and fear they'll be subjected to this.
  • Actually used in a case from the DC Special manga ^note (aka short stories drawn by Gosho Aoyama's assistants rather than Aoyama himself) and the anime, where a cute girl appeared drowned by the seaside with a heavy rock tied to her feet. Her ex-boyfriend was a Dr. Jerk who was offered a very good Arranged Marriage by his boss and feared that the girl would get in between him and this wonderful "union" by interest... so, after drugging her, he used a trick with said heavy rock, some rope and a floating ring with a hole to murder his poor ex and make it look like she had gone the Spurned into Suicide way. Too bad Ran and Conan were the ones who found the girl's corpse, which led the victim's best friend to tell them about the Dr. Jerk...
• Parodied in Excel♡Saga: an attempt on Pedro's life is made by encasing his entire body in pudding, which somehow works even though he's a ghost.
• In Fairy Tail, when a negotiation with the Twilight Ogre guild gets heated, their master threatens Makarov, saying, "You want to wear cement shoes, old man?!" (Makarov, Erza, and Mirajane make him regret it soon afterwards.)
• GTO: The Early Years: Kishi Yokokawa, a Yakuza heir, threatens Eikichi and Ryuji with this (even encasing them up to their necks in barrels) for stealing and wrecking his car.
• A variant was used in the backstory of one case in The Kindaichi Casefiles, although the result is the same. The victim's lifevest was tampered with by a group of pranksters, causing the vest to get heavier when in the water, causing his death.
• A person-shaped object in a bag with weights tied to it is seen being dumped into the ocean in the first episode of Odd Taxi. The police don't discover it until the show is more than halfway over.
• In One Piece, Luffy almost died this way when his feet got stuck in the ground and Arlong threw him in the water, complete with a huge chunk of said ground. For worse, Luffy (like all the Devil Fruit users) has Super Drowning Skills, meaning that his body is paralyzed and his powers are all but useless while he's under. He was saved by Nojiko and Genzo, who grabbed his head and brought it out of the water (his neck stretched because his particular Devil Fruit gave him Rubber Man powers).
• During the battle against Metal Robotnik in Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie, Sonic gets stuck in glue as the ground below him breaks and sinks while being filled by rain. Knuckles comes to help Tails save Sonic while he distracts Metal Robotnik.

Comic Books

• Batman: A three-part story arc from the nineties ends with the Ventriloquist and Scarface inflicting this on a traitorous lieutenant, to go along with the whole The Bad Guy Wins (sorta) ending.
• Batman: Black and White: In "The Devil's Children", Batman investigates a man whose legitimate business is as a cement contractor but who used to work for the mob disposing of bodies. Early in the story, while being questioned by a police officer, he states that he's "in concrete" and doesn't know anything about mob business. At the end, after Batman uncovers a scam the man has been running that manipulates his old mob connections, the same police officer remarks that when the mob bosses find out, the man's going to be in concrete in a whole new way.
• Black Orchid: Lex Luthor's henchmen do this to Carl Thorne in the miniseries. He's saved by the two surviving Orchids.
• The Cartoon History of the Universe: The prelude to the first volume on Rome has the Professor discussing their famous concrete and cutthroat politics... and promptly gets his foot caught in a bucket of concrete, as Cicero (in his only appearance) teleports in and calls for a swim.
• The French comic L'Effaceur is a comedic series about a hitman who performs contract killings, such as the "Last Chance" where the victim is, well, given a last chance to save his life. The one who got cement shoes is given a hacksaw.
• Hellblazer: One comic has John dispose of a gangster this way, by getting the victims of such murders to rise out of the water and drag the mobster down with them.
• In a The Inspector comic book story, criminals decide to give the Inspector's new police car the "cement tires" treatment in the hopes of getting rid of him, only for the car to open up the roof and eject him before he drowns with the car.
• The Jessica Blandy spin-off The Path of Jessica has Anita Royola aka Red Pigment as the main danger in the second issue. She has her victims drowned this way at a private beach. Whenever the weather is good and she's in the mood, she goes for a swim in her "garden". Naked.
• The Spectre: The Spectre was originally the ghost of murdered police detective Jim Corrigan, who was tied up in a large, cement-filled barrel that was dropped into the Gotham River.
• Spider-Man: The villain Iceberg tries this on a henchman that he caught stealing from him by encasing his feet in ice with his freeze ray.
• Spirou & Fantasio: Bad guys attempted this at least four times on heroes, but always failed for some reason.
  • In the short story Spirou et les hommes-grenouilles (Spirou and the frogmen), Spirou, by the seashore, watches a diver busy to search for sunken merchandise. But he's caught by criminals, after the same merchandise, who decide to throw him in the sea with a stone tied to his neck. But only the stone, and the broken rope, fell into water when tossed. Spip managed to gnaw it away from prying eyes. The criminals proceed to do it again with a new rope and stone, but they are interrupted by Fantasio who order everyone to hands up.
  • In La ceinture du grand froid (The big cold ring), Fantasio is captured by sailors who stole him his special shoes, designed to walk on water. Then he's tossed into sea with a stone tied to his neck. However, Fantasio managed to discretely exchange his shoes with the ones of a sailor, and he still wear the special pair. Then he walk back to safety on water, but with a quite handicapping weight tied to him.
  • In Vito la déveine (Vito Misfortune) Vito Cortizone crashes his seaplane along with its freight off the coast of a Polynesian atoll. After he spent weeks on a deserted island, along come Spirou and Fantasio with their boat near this island. Vito forces Fantasio to bring back to the surface the crates from the freight for a few days. Once he have them all, Vito try to get rid of the two heroes. He makes them go into their inflatable boat, with rope and two crates. Then he demand, under the threat of a weapon ^note  A fake one, but Spirou and Fantasio don't know, that Fantasio tie up Spirou 's hands. After that Vito planned to tie Fantasio's hands as well, attach each of them to a crate, and toss them into the sea. However, Fantasio is still in the middle of the task of tying up Spirou's hands when a Chinese mafia's boat arrives, and they are after Vito. The latter panics, and finally cut Spirou's bonds, while begging the two heroes to help him against the Triad instead.
  • In the end of Le groom de Sniper Alley (Sniper alley's bellboy), Spirou and Fantasio, back from the treasure 's hunt Vito Cortizone forced them to do, explain that they found a parchment. Cue to Spirou, Fantasio and Spip chained to concrete blocks and ready to be tossed by mafiosi into the Hudson river, as Vito is not happy with a Worthless Treasure Twist. However, Spirou and Fantasio have time to explain that the parchment lead to about thirty treasures's hideouts, and Vito finally let them go.
• Superman:
  • In Who Took the Super out of Superman?, Clark Kent is called as a witness at the trial of an Intergang boss. When Clark Kent fails to attend a hearing and can't be found anywhere, several reporters speculate that Intergang has provided him with "cement shoes". When he reappears, a reporter is shocked that Clark isn't wearing a "cement overcoat".
  • In Who is Superwoman? the titular villain attempts to dispose of Supergirl by freezing her unconscious body into a block of super-hard ice and dropping her in the middle of the ocean.
  • The Strange Revenge of Lena Luthor: After becoming heavily indebted with a mobster, Greg Gilbert fears he will be wearing cement shoes very soon.
    Greg Gilbert: Oh, man... Now I've got two hoodlums who'll be waiting to take my shoe-size— in cement!
• Tintin: In "Tintin in America", the titular character runs afoul of gangsters, so he is thrown into the river tied to a dumbbell. Fortunately the dumbbell was stolen from a fake World's Strongest Man and is actually made of wood, so he floats.
• Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Hypnota tried to kill Wonder Woman by having her feet and wrists chained to heavy weights and then dropping her in a pit of water. It was not effective.

Comic Strips

• Dick Tracy once had some post-war gangsters try a variant; it entailed tying a victim between two steel i-beams and drop him into the river so weighted. Fortunately, Tracy and Sam Catchem stop this murder in time.
• Frequently spoofed in The Far Side.
  • Fish gangsters encase a victim's fins in styrofoam, sending him on a deadly trip to the surface to "sleep with the humans".
  • Another had the sandwich mafia dropping their victim into a school cafeteria to sleep with the fourth graders.
  • There is another cartoon with a man trapped inside a trash can and dropped off in a forest to "sleep with the bears"
  • And then, when gangsters in The Far Side are feeling especially vicious, they'll paint a victim's face with mime makeup and trap him in a soundproof glass box on the street, where he slowly and painfully dehydrates to death. The cartoon shows one of these victims desperately screaming to be let out — and a tourist, thinking he's just witnessing a harmless bit of street theatre, simply snaps a picture with his camera.
  • And another one where two mobsters were dropping a dog with all four paws encased in cement off a bridge, and explaining to a passer-by that "he bit the Godfather".
• Garfield: Played for Laughs in one strip, in which the cat filled a birdbath with quick-drying cement to trap a bird. It worked, but the bird was able to fly away — to Garfield's amazement — only for the stone to fall back down and hit him in the head.
• Krazy Kat: Ignatz, in a power-crazed moment, puts Krazy in a pair of Cement Shoes, gets her to sign her "luck" away to him, then pushes her underwater... only to suddenly have a My God, What Have I Done? reaction and make a frantic dive to save her.
• Modesty Blaise: In "The Murder Frame", two underworld friends of Willie's grab a makeup artist who was part of a Frame-Up aimed at Willie. They tie him up, tie his feet to a concrete block, and toss him off the side of a boat into the Thames. This is part of a plan to allow Modesty to rescue him and convince him that his partner has decided he has outlived his usefulness.
• Nero: Adhemar is deposed off this way by a group of Mafiosi in De Gladde Figaro. It makes him look like the comic strip artists award that is named after him: The Bronze Adhemar.
• Pearls Before Swine: The January 8th, 2012 strip is a typical Stephen Pastis pun strip used to set up a pun on the typical mafia phrase "An Offer You Can't Refuse". Rat, who always assaults Stephen's Author Avatar in response to such strips, sticks to the theme by tying him up, fitting him with a block of cement up to his calves, and pushing him off of a dock.
• One adventure of The Phantom revolves around the discovery of a whole "graveyard" of cement shoe victims.
• Broom Hilda is put in cement shoes by a pair of mobsters, only for her to collapse the pier underneath them with her magic. "Mob, shmob."

Fan Works

• In the Doctor Who fic Ten Moments, the Eighth Doctor is nearly given this treatment while in the middle of foiling some unspecified evil plot. After failing to convince the mobsters that it's in their best interests to let him go, he simply turns the concrete to dust with his sonic screwdriver. The only thing that really annoys him is that they've ruined his shoes.
• Parodied in Later, Traitor. The mental version of Maloof is seen ordering one of his goons to have his feet incased in cement because of a minor mistake he made, but later on the goon is seen struggling to walk around the cement while his comrades laugh at him, making it more of a humiliation ritual than a murder attempt.
• The main premise of the Lackadaisy fic Ivy and Freckle in Watered Daisies revolves around this trope, with Ivy and Freckle being cast into the Mississippi with concrete boots and left to drown.

Films — Animated

• Jafar attempts to kill Aladdin in this manner. Thankfully for our hero, he has a little help to get out of the predicament.
• Discussed in Oliver & Company when Fagin peeks on Sykes instructing someone on the phone on how to do the cement shoes killing method.
• In ParaNorman, during Norman's morning walk to school, he greets all the various ghosts still hanging around, one of which is a mobster with a cement block around his feet, and several fish orbiting around him.

Films — Live-Action

• Billy Bathgate has a lengthy scene inter-cut with the rest of the movie in which Bruce Willis' character Bo Weinberg is being taken out in a boat to be disposed of with his feet in a bucket of cement. Bo begs a mook to shoot him to Get It Over With, but he refuses.
• An interesting variation in Borgman, where the heads of the bodies are stuck into cement buckets which lets them sink head-on.
• Bullshot. The villainous Otto von Bruno tries to dispose of Bullshot by sealing his feet in a giant concrete eggcup, then flooding the room he's in. Fortunately, the 'concrete' turns out to be Miss Fenton's scone mixture, so it softens in water.
• Cabin by the Lake featured a serial killer who killed his victims by tying their feet to a concrete block and dropping them off in the middle of a lake which he lived nearby. Then he wrote a script about it.
• In Cold Pursuit, Nels wraps the bodies of his victims in chicken wire and dumps them into the river where they are washed over a waterfall into the gorge. When his brother asks why chicken wire, Nels explains that it weighs them down so they sink, but it allows the fish in to nibble at the body so the gasses won't build and cause the body to bloat at float to the surface. Brock asks him where he learned all of this, and Nels says he watches a lot of crime shows.
• Diamonds Are Forever. Co-Dragons Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint kill Bond Girl Plenty O'Toole in a swimming pool; Fridge Horror suggests this is a particularly sadistic method, as the concrete block would inch down the slope of the pool as she struggled, slowly pulling her underwater.
• Dick Tracy: "Big Boy" Caprice disposes of "Lips" Manliss via "the bath", which involves a large box, a cement mixer, and a warehouse on a pier with a trapdoor. He tries it on someone else later on, only to have Tracy save the would-be victim and use the box for an ambush. (Unfortunately, he absent-mindedly gets cement in his gun, causing it to jam. Luckily though, "The Blank" is there to save him.)
• The Drop has a piecemeal approach. To get rid of a severed arm someone left in a bag, Bob wraps and weighs it down and throws it in the river.
• In The Godfather, after hitman Luca Brasi is strangled with garrotte wire, his killers send the bulletproof vest he was wearing to his employers, wrapped around a fish, implying that they disposed of his body via this trope.
  Santino: What the hell is this?
  Clemenza: That's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.
• In Hollow Triumph, Johnny dumps Victor's body off a bridge into the river, but not before almost being sprung by a helpful passing motorist.
• Human Cargo (1936): The smugglers have a tendency to throw the humans they are smuggling overboard if the police get too close.
• In The Jerky Boys, the villains are preparing to do this to Johnny's mother.
• In Johnny Dangerously, when Tommy joins the District Attorney's office and starts attacking crime on the radio, Vermin briefly mentions the idea of "making cement loafers for him."
• The title character in Lady in Cement.
• In Lethal Weapon 2, the bad guys kill the love interest this way and try to do the same to Riggs, who used his Chekhov's Skill of dislocating his shoulder to cut himself loose.
• A self-inflicted version in Master and Commander. Midshipman Hollom picks up a cannonball before jumping over the side, to ensure he'll go straight to the bottom and no-one can dive in and save him.
• Midway: The fate of Bruno Gaido after his capture by the Japanese: An anchor is tied to his ankles as he's dumped overboard. Very much Truth in Television. Not only is this how Gaido actually died in Real Life, (although it was using a water-filled kerosene can after two weeks of torture and interrogation) but the Japanese Navy frequently executed captured enemy sailors and airmen in this fashion.
• In The Night of the Hunter, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) uses a variation on this method to dispose of the body of his wife Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) after he slits her throat: he ties her body to the front seat of a car and pushes it (the car) into a river.
• In OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, the main character gets tossed into the Nile to drown. He escapes after seeing dozens of corpses that suffered a similar fate, including Larmina's father.
• Laurel and Hardy have a hilarious cement shoes routine at the end of their 1936 movie Our Relations, when some gangsters who think they have a valuable ring (they don't) decide to do this to make them talk.
• Piggy (2022): Sara goes to the pool. A group of mean girls start taunting her, calling her "Piggy" and nearly drowning her with a pool skimmer. Hoping to escape them, Sara goes underwater—and fails to notice the lifeguard's corpse, hands ties behind his back.
• A rather horrific variation occurs in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl: Captain Barbossa's crew, angered at Bootstrap Bill's refusal to help end the curse, tied a cannon to his feet and pushed him overboard. As he was undead and immortal like the rest of them, this insured that he'd simply be trapped on the bottom of the sea forever. His desperation to escape this fate led to him signing on with Davy Jones.
  Pintel: Course, it was only after that that we learned we needed his blood to lift the curse.
  Ragetti: That's what you'd call ironic.
• In the film adaptation of The Shadow, a bunch of gangsters tries it on an academic who accidentally discovered their murder of a policeman. Of course, the Shadow saves the day/night and sends them packing. He also shoots off said "shoes" with his pair of pistols.
• This is done to Finn and Jack in Tell It To The Fishes. With the added twist of being dropped onto a beach at low tide.
• In Two Hands, the car thief who steals Acko's beloved Ford Falcon gets sent to the bottom of the harbpur with an engine block chained to his feet.
• Vaincre ou Mourir: The film features the infamous drownings at Nantes during the Reign of Terror phase of The French Revolution.
• When Eight Bells Toll. British secret agent Phillip Calvert shocks his Armchair Military boss by necksnapping a mook who tried to board his boat, wrapping his legs in chain and throwing the corpse overboard. Later they're pulling up the anchor on the boat and find Calvert's fellow agent has been tied to it.

Literature

• A sadistic variant is mentioned in The Alchemist, a 1985 thriller by Ken Goddard — the victim is thrown over the side in scuba gear, and so has several hours at the bottom to contemplate his sins before running out of air.
• Baccano! has a particularly disturbing example of this: because Dallas Genoard turns out to be unkillable by any normal means, the Gandor brothers cement him into an oil drum and drop it in the Hudson River, leaving him to drown continuously for the next seventy years or so until old age finally gets him. Fortunately for Dallas, someone else fishes him out well before that.
• E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate opens with Dutch Schultz executing someone this way.
• In the first Diamond Brothers book, Nick gets forced to let the bad guys trap his feet in a bathtub full of concrete, and nearly dumped in the Thames. Since this series spoofs the crime genre, it's hardly surprising this shows up.
• Discworld:
  • Played with in Hogfather. A character has the nickname "Chickenwire" because he figured out you can use chicken wire to prevent people who've had this treatment and have been dumped in the very polluted river Ankh from having pieces float to the surface as they decompose. The other problem is breaking through the crust on the river...
  • Also from the Discworld, the grim Guild of Clowns has a special punishment for members who try to get away with innovation, ad-lib gags, or unauthorised funny material. It's called the Concrete Down The Trousers gag.
• In Stephen King's novel Firestarter the head of the fictional secret U.S. government intelligence agency "The Shop" idly reminisces about the godfather of a victim of one of the agency's experiments, who had been determined to find out the truth of what had happened to his godson. Rather than getting to the bottom of what happened, the only place he wound up getting to was "the bottom of the Baltimore Trench, where he presumably still was, with two cement blocks tied around whatever remained of his legs."
• In Gone, the villains trap several kids' hands in cement, but they don't intend for it to kill them. It's to keep them prisoner and prevent them from using their powers, which focus through their hands. Might be a villainous example of Cruel Mercy, or maybe just plain sadism/sociopathy.
• The Long Ships: King Harald decrees that the punishment for violating the Christmas Peace in his hall is to have a stone tied around one's neck and be sunk in deep water.
• Calamity Mary tries to do this to Hardgore Alice in Magical Girl Raising Project. She blows Alice to bits with explosives, pours acid over the remains, mixes them with concrete in a barrel, and throws the barrel into a river. Unfortunately for her, Alice has an incredibly powerful Healing Factor and makes it out alive by essentially seeping out of the barrel. She turns up later, in one piece, and Weiss Winterprison wonders what the salty smell is.
• In Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red the narrator imagines Istanbul with the Bosphorus drained. As well as the remains of shipwrecks, suicides, and traffic accidents are a number of harem women sewn up in sacks - a standard execution method for women under the Ottoman Sultans.
• A couple of different villains in the Redwall series are fond of inflicting this, albeit usually off-page. The corsair captain Vilu Daskar in The Legend of Luke is mentioned to have killed some hedgehogs by sewing them into weighted sacks and throwing them off his ship after promising to "free" them, while warlord Damug Warfang in The Long Patrol executes some of his own troops after an attempted mutiny by tying rocks around their necks and throwing them in a river.
• In the Shadowrun novel 'Wolf and Raven', it is mentioned that this happened to Kid Stealth. He ran afoul of the mob, got fitted with a pair of cement shoes, and dropped into the Puget Sound. He survived, because of an implanted air tank and because he blew off his own legs with plastic explosive he had hidden on his person. Afterwards, he replaced his legs with the iconic Kid Stealth cyber legs, modelled after those of a Velociraptor.
• In A Sorceress In New York, a mafia gang attempts to kill Zara this way. Unluckily for them though, water is Zara's source of power; which naturally heals her and augments her power. Thus, she is able to teleport safely out of the water. (Though getting the cement block off her feet proves a bit of a challenge.)
• In the Space Precinct novel The Deity Father, a rival mobster to the Big Bad is found floating in space in cement shoes. It's pointed out that there's no reason for the concrete, except tradition.
• In The Syrena Legacy, the Syrena Galen met his human assistant Rachel after she was thrown into the Gulf of Mexico tied to a cement block. She has no problem being his Secret-Keeper because she used to work for the Mafia and kept secrets for a living.
• Referenced in "A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor" by Ogden Nash, in which the unnamed protagonist visits an Ironic Hell in which murderers are forced to dance forever while bound to the corpses of their victims.
  Here's Legs and Dutch, and a dozen such
  Of braggart bullies and brutes;
  Each back now bends 'neath the weight of friends
  Who are wearing concrete suits.
• In Terry Pratchett's non-fiction guide to cat ownership^note non-cat-people get the relationship between "owner" and "owned" completely wrong, The Unadulterated Cat, he speculates that one way of disposing of an unwanted cat after all other methods have failed (the little buggers keep on coming back) is to hire the Mafia, although he adds the caveat that four little concrete shoes will cost a lot more than one big one, like the thing where children's shoes cost more than adult sizes.
• In Without Remorse by Tom Clancy, the body of small-time drug dealer Angelo Vorano was weighed down with cinder blocks and dumped into the Chesapeake Bay, where it was consumed by crabs. By the time the police found it (while searching the area for a totally different reason), it was just a skeleton.

Live-Action TV

• Played for Laughs on the British game show 101 Ways to Leave a Gameshow. In one round, the contestants are suspended over a swimming pool with concrete blocks strapped to their ankles. One is eliminated by being dropped into the pool, but can easily undo the straps and swim back up.
• Bones: A body is discovered after this method of disposal failed. Turns out, once the connective tissue in the ankles and knees rot underwater, there really is nothing keeping the body from floating to the surface.
• Cannon: In "Pilot", a killer is disposing of a body by tying cinder blocks to its feet prior to dropping it off the side of a boat when he is shot and killed by a cop.
• In "Hedwig and the Angry Enchilada" from Cutthroat Kitchen, the final challenge was to make a type of frozen custard known as a "concrete." The mid-round sabotage was to make your opponent wear "concrete shoes" for the remainder of the challenge.
• An old skit from The Electric Company (1971) involves two Stupid Crooks holding a tied up and gagged hostage and threatening to apply this trope unless he spills "what we want to know". Unfortunately - for them - they get into a heated argument about whether the material is actually cement or concrete until the captive manages to get loose and find a cop. (And to add insult to injury, after said cop hauls them away - still arguing over it - the would-be victim says to the viewer that he had no idea what they wanted him to tell them in the first place.)
• In the Australian series Embassy, someone tries to smuggle himself out of the country via the crate method. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake of paying the smugglers in advance and has to be rescued by one of the embassy staff, who points out the holes in the crate stashed on the boat. "I don't think they're for letting the air in."
• An episode of The Golden Girls has Sophia mentioning how the mafia will offer someone "Free swimming lessons with a cement kickboard."
• As a method of Public Execution in the Crapsack World of The Handmaid's Tale. In the second season, Eden and Isaac are punished for their infidelity by being chained to kettlebells and thrown into a swimming pool.
• Harrow:
  • The first episode opens with a hooded figure in a dinghy wrapping a dead body in a sleeping bag. He then fills the sleeping bag with cement, ties the entire bundle tightly with rope, and dumps it into the river. At the end of the episode, it is revealed that the figure was Harrow.
  • "Tarde Venientibus Ossa" ("For Those Who Come Late, Only the Bones") opens with the Victim of the Week drowning in the river, her feet tied to a cinder block. At the end of the episode, the murderer attempts to dispose of Harrow in the same fashion.
• In the Here Come the Brides episode "The Crimpers," the eponymous kidnappers plan to murder Jason and Stempel by tying bags of rocks to their feet and throwing them off a ship.
• The Highlander episode, "Vendetta" opens with some baddies gearing up to do this to small-time crook (and Immortal) Benny Carbassa.
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent: A young boy (mistakenly thought to be the mark) is chained to some cement blocks and tossed off the back of a speeding boat, but his body is found anyway.
• The Magician: In "Lady in a Trap", a crook attempts to dispose of his girlfriend by chaining her feet to a heavy weight and throwing her off the side of his boat. Fortunately for her, he is over the point where Tony and Jerry are scuba diving and they are able to rescue her.
• Mama's Family: In order to convince Iola to share a winning lottery ticket with her, Mama makes up a story about what happened to a woman who won $50 million: "Ten days later, they found her at the bottom of Lake Erie wearing concrete undies."
• Midsomer Murders: In "With Baited Breath", the killer attempts to dispose of his final intended victim by tying her to a large rock, rowing her into the middle of the lake, and dumping her out of the boat, but is thwarted by the arrival of Barnaby and Winter.
• In The Munsters episode "Herman Picks A Winner", when a mob running a bookie joint thinks that Herman has a knack for picking winners (thanks to Grandpa using magic to make the horses win), they abduct him and make him pick a winner for them...followed by telling him he'll be wearing a cement overcoat if the horse loses.
• The Night Agent: Dale and Ellen are shown drowning a Serbian politician in a lake who they tied onto a cender block during a flashback.
• Referenced in a "Simon" sketch on Saturday Night Live, when Simon has on a guest playmate (a mobbed-up tyke played by Danny Devito):
  Simon: Just like me, Vinnie doesn't have a mummy. My mummy's with the angels!
  Vinny: My "mummy" is sleepin' with the fishes. My daddy says she had a BIG mouth!
• Saved by the Bell episode "All in the Mall" has the gang finding a shoebox with $5,000 in it and then believing that they are being pursued by killers after their money. When trying to get help from a security guard who dismisses them since he's on his break and to come back in five minutes, Kelly cries out "In five minutes, we'll be wearing cement boots, sleeping in the ocean with the fishies!"
• The Sopranos:
  • In "The Second Coming", AJ tries to commit suicide in a manner similar to this.
  • Also Subverted: In "I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano", you are led to believe that, since Tony plans to have Chucky Signore whacked on or around a boat, cement shoes or something like it are in the offing; it turns out that no, Tony shoots him in port and then takes him out to sea to dispose of the body.
• Referenced in the Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action", in which Scotty, playing the Malaproper, refers to "concrete galoshes" while trying to threaten a thirties-styled mobster.
• In Ultraseven, aliens chained up a scuba-diving Dan Moroboshi to a buoy or mine at the bottom of a lake. He got better.
• Underbelly: Brian Alexander, a criminal lawyer who loses everything, is portrayed to have gone to the corrupt NSW police for help, knowing they would probably just kill him so he doesn't talk. Which they do by tying him to a stove then throwing it off their rented boat, ignoring his pleas for a quick death on the account they didn't want to use a police weapon. The same incident is also portrayed in the 1995 mini-series Blue Murder.

Music

• One of the things listed in the lyrics near the end of AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap."
• The music video for "La Fidanzata" ("The Girlfriend") by Italian hip hop group Articolo 31 features a Mafia-inspired 1920s-type storyline, where, at the end, two henchmen are seen standing in a cement bucket with the cement coming up all the way to their ankles. The henchmen are seen repeatedly apologizing (in English) to their boss for screwing up the caper, to which the boss replies, "apology accepted" before being sent off into the water to drown.
• Long Island band Brand New refers to this in the aptly-titled song "Luca," singing 'So we've fixed you with cement galoshes / And no one can save you now / Unless you have friends among fish / There'll still be no air to breathe'.
• Played With in "Styrofoam Boots" by Modest Mouse, where the lyrics refer to wearing very buoyant styrofoam boots instead of being weighed down by heavy ones, still drowning you, but upside down.
  Well all's not well, but I'm told that it'll all be quite nice.
  You'll be drowned in boots like mafia, but your feet'll still float like Christ.
• The song "Zip Gun Bop" by Royal Crown Revue has these spoken lines:
  Hey spinach chin,
  Why don't you try on these cement shoes.
  Look like they fit you pretty freakin' good.
  Now see if you can walk on water puppy, you jackass
• Mentioned in Shrieback's "New Home"
  How much can one body take?/ The concrete shoes, the hungry lake.

Mythology & Religion

• In three of The Four Gospels from The Bible, Jesus tells His disciples that if any of them were to cause one of the children who believed in Him to sin, it would be better for that man to hang a millstone around his neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Pinballs

• In Capcom's unreleased Kingpin, mob lieutenant Rocco is eliminated by being tied up, having his feet placed in a tub of cement, and then kicked off a pier.

Theatre

• The 1954 Blitztein translation of The Threepenny Opera has Macheath doing this in the opening song:
  From a tugboat by the river,
  A cement bag is dropping down.
  The cement's just for the weight, dear,
  Bet you Mackie's back in town.

Video Games

• City of Heroes: This trope is occasionally played out by mobs. If you kill the mobs before they throw their intended victim into the water, they hop away, Cement Shoes and all.
• In Cyberpunk 2077, at the start of the game Militech executive Meredith Stout is desperate to figure out the location of their convoy stolen by the Maelstrom gang so she doesn't take the fall for it. To make matters worse, she abducts another executive (accurately) suspecting him to be The Mole. And for strike three, she gives a random merc (V) €10,000 in company funds. If you don't ensure her investment pays off, you later discover her corpse having been given this treatment and a Traumatic Haircut at the Ebunike Docks. It should be mentioned that Militech's founder was an Italian immigrant.
• During a loading screen in The Darkness, Jackie muses that sometimes, people that cross The Mafia get a new pair of shoes out of the bargain, but "people tend to not swim so well with shoes on."
• In Eternal Darkness, the sacrifices for the Pillar of Flesh are stacked high in a tower and then buried in concrete, their images are shown on the outside of the stone tower.
• Lake Mead Cave in Fallout: New Vegas features a pre-war skeleton with its feet in cinder blocks, surrounded by casino chips and briefcases full of pre-war money, suggesting the poor bastard ran afoul of a casino mob before the apocalypse. Interestingly, the body is found in an underwater... well, cave, making it a mystery how he actually got there.
  • The good ending of the quest "How Little We Know" has new mob boss Cachino giving a radio interview explaining that the previous mob bosses killed by the player, Nero and Big Sal, always wanted to go visit Lake Mead and "sleep with the Lakelurks", suggesting this tradition is still in effect centuries after the bombs fell.
• Vaas in Far Cry 3 attempts to kill Jason Brody by kicking a cement brick that he is tied to into a pool of water, dragging Jason with it.
• In Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko, the prohibiton-themed level Gangster TV has enemies who can be found underwater. Despite getting dragged down with cement shoes, they can attack you if you get close.
• Goose Goose Duck: On the murder-mystery themed Mallard Manor and Goosechapel maps, this is how players who are voted out of the game are killed, as opposed to the sci-fi themed maps where voted out players are Thrown Out the Airlock.
• One of the Easter Eggs in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a guy in the water with cement shoes on. He's not far from Diaz's mansion unsurprisingly.
• In Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, the Warrior spell Sleep With the Fishes invokes this in its artwork... which victim is a Murloc. Which are aquatic anyways. Fittingly, its expression is a confused shrug.
• Joked about in JumpStart Adventures 5th Grade: Jo Hammet, Kid Detective. A dialogue tree option with junkyard owner Jimmy D'Shadow has Jo mention she just saw a shoebox marked "Cement: One Size Fits All". Jimmy nervously confirms that Cement is his favorite shoe brand.
• Referenced in Kingdom of Loathing with the penguin mafia's cement sandals, which "aren't quite heavy enough to make you sleep with the fishes, but they're heavy enough so that you get a workout just by walking around". They reduce your combat initiative but let you level up your muscle stat faster.
• In Kingpin: Life of Crime, one level in the shipyard episode features a dead man in cement shoes underwater.
• Almost literal example with the Iron Boots from multiple The Legend of Zelda games. Wearing them causes Link to sink to the bottom of bodies of water, but they're apparently weightless when stored in the hero's Hyperspace Arsenal.
• Done as a joke in Maneater: one o the underwater locations you can find is the "Snitch Parking Lot," which is full of corpses that have been tied to heavy weights.
• Mentioned in the first mission of the second act of Max Payne, in Max's distinctive style:
  Max Payne: The Brooklyn riverfront was a maze of rusty containers, sharp-boned cranes looming up from the snowstorm. On a night like this, you couldn't help but to think of the dark army of dead men sleeping with the fishes, cement shoes in line.
• In Poker Night at the Inventory, one of Max's anecdotes about the various unfortunate run-ins that Artie Flopshark had with Flint Paper had Flint misinterpret Artie's claim that he owed his credit union money and that his mortgage was underwater to mean this.
  Max: Artie said he owed the credit union a heck of a lot of bread.
  Tycho: Did he say why?
  Max: Just that they were gonna put him in a bunch of water; y'know, give him the ol' cement shoes, drop him in the bay. It doesn't matter, though, because Flint Paper got to him first. Hoo-ee, did he make him pay!
  Tycho: Maybe his mortgage was underwater, and your friend injured a man trying to keep his home!
• Mocked in The Secret of Monkey Island, when Guybrush is thrown off a pier tied to an idol. He cannot reach any of the sharp objects in view to free himself. He can pick up the idol itself and put it in his pocket.
• In Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, the gangster Muggshot threatens Sly with a pair of "cement bunny slippers".
• If you never jump during a match in Super Smash Bros. Melee, you'll earn the "Cement Shoes" bonus.
• A variant in one of the endings of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. If you side with Kuei-Jin, its leader Ming Xiao decides that You Have Outlived Your Usefullness, and so she ties up your player character onto the game's central MacGuffin (a huge mysterious coffin) that she has no use for and dumps them into the sea.
• In Yakuza 4, Taiga Saejima discovers his Essence of Super Heavy Weapons Revelation when he witnesses two yakuza attempting to dispose of a victim in a cement filled barrel off a pier. They try to pick up the barrel, but it's so heavy, sending one yakuza into the water while the barrel falls onto the other. Just when the victim thinks he's safe, he rolls into a mooring, knocking him out.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner. In the updated cartoon of "Where My Hat Is At?", Homestar looks for his hat at the bottom of the pool, and all he finds is Strong Sad with a concrete weight around his neck.
  Strong Sad: "Thanks for saving me, Mister! Can I obsess over you now?"
  Strong Bad: "Of all the dumb luck in the woild!"

Webcomics

• In one strip of Broken Plot Device Inix is shown chipping a cement block off her foot after getting caught cheating at a casino.
• Chopping Block also uses the stock "your shoes are untied" gag.
• In MegaTokyo, Chief Sonoda threatens his daughter's would-be boyfriend by implication.
  Sonda:'' Do you have any idea how much concrete I buy every month?
• Spoofed in Sluggy Freelance, where Mr. Middleman gives his wife Cement shoes to help her tone her calves.

Western Animation

• In Alpha Teens on Machines, a guy who got this treatment was tossed into a river... which had barrels of toxic waste at the bottom. He mutated into a beast made of living cement. And still talked in rhyme.
  Vinny "The Mass" Rossi: "You knocked me underwater, left me to rot, and I forgive you not!"
• Batman: The Animated Series: In "Read My Lips", Scarface, the dummy of a stereotypical American gangster, tells the Ventriloquist his intention to put Batman in ''concrete boots". Later we discover that Scarface was invoking this In-Universe stereotypical gangster trope because he has discovered the Incredibly Obvious Bug Batman has planted in the Ventriloquist's suit and plans to have Batman Lured into a Trap.
  Scarface: Batman's so hot, let's see him swim Gotham Bay in concrete boots.
  The Ventriloquist: A good idea, Mr. Scarface.
  Scarface: Bet your bow tie I'm right, dummy. Say, who dresses you anyway?
  The Ventriloquist: You're such a kidder, Mr. Scarface.
• Played straight in Captain Planet, in which three of the "proto-Planeteers" from the 1940s actually get captured and tied up, with their feet in cement.
• In the CatDog episode "Just Say CatDog Sent Ya", Cat does this to Winslow after the latter squeals to the police about Cat's black market burger bone business. Winslow later attaches a spring to it so he can use it to get around.
• Another Played for Laughs example came from The Critic had Alice's Southern Belle Country Mouse older sister, Miranda, decide to leave and make it on her own in the city...only for her to come back a short while later with her hands tied behind her back, her dress covered in garbage and graffiti and hopping on a cement block and crying "Never insult a cheesecake at Lindy's!"
• Disenchantment: At the start of Season 2, Oona manages to sneak on board of Queen Dagmar's ship, but is caught in the act and thrown overboard with an anchor attached to her legs. She attempts to drag Dagmar with her, but only succeeds in stealing the Eternity Pendant from her. Fortunately for Oona, her species can breathe underwater, and she's agile enough to free herself. In fact, she uses her time on the ocean floor to have some peace and quiet.
• Spoofed in Futurama, where one of the Robot Mafia members says, "So I gave him the cement shoes. Which he liked because they were lighter than his lead ones."
• In Goof Troop episode "Goof Fellas", Goofy and Pete stumble upon a couple of mobsters fitting a guy for a cement overcoat. After they thwart the crime, the pair is forced to go into the Witness Protection Program and go through a manner of hijinks until they inadvertently bring the mob down. At the end of the episode, another pair of mobsters is seen chiseling out a cement overcoat, resulting in Pete jumping off the pier and swimming after the cruise ship he missed.
• Happens to Goofy as "Johnny Eyeball" in the Classic Disney Short "How to Be a Detective". He manages to escape his situation with a fisherman's hook.
  Goofy: Looks like I'm getting to the bottom of this case!
• The Mask referenced this in the episode "The Terrible Two." A series of gags in the episode involved Kellaway and Stanley handcuffed together, but on the other side of an elevator. The Mask had to keep switching between Stanley and the Mask, and at one point he observed, "This would be so much easier if I could just put concrete boots on Kellaway and throw him in the river! BUT since I can't..."
  • This was also referenced in the episode "Mayor Mask," when Stanley is taken to see the Mayor.
  Stanley: You wanted to see me, Mr. Mayor?
  Mayor Tilton: That's right, I do want to see you... wearing concrete boots at the bottom of Edge City Harbor! ^note As "the Mayor" viciously chases after Stanley, he's soon revealed to be the evil villain, Pretorius, in disguise.
• Merrie Melodies: Mobsters Mugsy and Rocky try this on Bugs Bunny (referred to as "Agent Elegant Mess") in the short "The Unmentionables", with an ignorant Bugs protesting, "Look, fellas, how many times do I have to tell you? I haven't got a cold!" while the cement is being poured. Bugs later manages to hop out of the lake he was thrown into after the gangsters leave. In the Spanish dub, he protests instead that he doesn't want to hit a piñata while they blindfold him.
• Making Fiends: The aptly-named episode "Concrete Shoes" has Vendetta trick Charlotte into wearing cement shoes and take a dive off the pier. Charlotte's response when she reaches the bottom of the sea? Sing a song about the joys of concrete shoes, of course!
  Charlotte: So much to see, so much to do / You can see it all in concrete shoes! / So why don't you GET concrete shoes!
• On one Mighty Mouse cartoon, Mighty is locked inside a safe, which is then covered in cement and thrown off a bridge. Naturally, it doesn't stop him for long.
• Inverted in the first episode of Pasila. The bad guys are trying to brainstorm a fate worse than death for their former associate turned informer. One of them suggests not doing anything and leaving him to wonder for the rest of his life when and how they're going to strike. The leader of the group likes this idea, but then suddenly says they're getting too complicated and orders the others to get standard cement shoe accessories. Then they sail out to the sea, where he reveals that they're now going to use them to drown themselves so that their bodies will never be found and the snitch will be left in fear for the rest of his life. They do it, too. And it works, too.
• Problem Child: In "The Weird Olympics", Big Ben and Mr. Peabody fail to uphold their end of a deal with a mob boss who reacts by ordering his right-hand-man to drive them to a driver and stop on the way to buy some cement.
• In The Ren & Stimpy Show episode "Terminal Stimpy", the two look at photos of how Stimpy lost his many lives. Stimpy pointed one picture describing how he helped Ren with his gambling debts, the photo showing him not just with cement shoes, but also a cement coat, hat, and umbrella.
• In a "Fractured Fairytales" segment from Rocky and Bullwinkle that parodied "Sleeping Beauty", Prince Charming (who bore a striking resemblance to Walt Disney) decided not to kiss Sleeping Beauty awake, but to build a theme park around her ("Awake, she's just a princess. Asleep, she's a goldmine!"). When the evil fairy who cast the spell on Beauty showed up demanding a cut of the profits, Charming showed her a new "submarine ride" he set up as an attraction, insisting that the cement shoes were part of the ride ("It's just a safety precaution, the state makes us do it.")
• The Simpsons:
  • One episode had The Mafia selling these at a shoe convention as a background gag. They're promoted as being "the last pair you'll ever need".
  • When Bart is accused of either murdering Principal Skinner or ordering the mob to murder him (the mob just talked to him and left; he was actually trapped under a pile of newspapers in his basement), Bart imagines seeing Skinner's corpse in various places, coming to life and saying "You killed me!" One such Imagine Spot was Skinner at the bottom of a lake with his feet in cement shoes.
  • In one case, Fat Tony had to emphasize that when he said Troy McClure was "sleeping with the fishes", it wasn't in terms of dying.
• During one South Park episode, Kenny is thrown from a bridge with cement shoes on his feet, but the water beneath the bridge is too shallow, so he's left to hop around through most of the closing credits. Then he hits a deep spot and drowns.
• The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!: In "The Unzappables", King Koopa as "Al Koopone" subjected Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Princess Toadstool to this. Fortunately, all four of them could breathe underwater, and Mario eventually manages to grab a Starman that was underwater to transform into Super Mario and free them.

Real Life

• In the 1920s and 1930s, many real-life gangsters in the USA had this practice, though as mentioned above, this was used as a method of Disposing of a Body rather than execution.
• This is much older than they think. During the Protestant Reformation in Europe many unrepentant Anabaptists were punished by being sewn into sacks with bricks and thrown into rivers or lakes in a mockery of their belief in adult baptism.
• The Drownings at Nantes during The French Revolution. A series of mass executions by drowning during the Reign of Terror in Nantes, France, between November 1793 and February 1794, under the orders of National Assembly representative Jean-Baptiste Carrier. Anyone arrested and jailed for not consistently supporting the Revolution, or suspected of being a royalist sympathizer, especially Catholic priests and nuns, could be cast into the river Loire with weights and drowned (variants included "Republican marriages" with priests and nuns stripped naked, tied together and tossed into the river, or whole ships with people trapped inside being sunk). As many as 4000 or more people, including innocent families with women and children, died in what Carrier himself called "The National Bathtub". Carrier didn't get away with this though, as he fell to a sort of political coup/scapegoating by the Thermidorians (who already caused the fall of Maximilien Robespierre) and was judged then guillotined on December 16, 1794.
• This goes back at least several more centuries and is alluded to by Jesus himself (in relation to tempting children to sin) in Luke 17, making it Older Than Feudalism.
  Jesus said to his disciples: "Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble."
• Any Roman found guilty of killing their father would be sewn into a sack with a cockerel and a snake and thrown into the Tiber, which was a bit rough on the animals.
• Japanese military personnel disposed of several American POWs in more or less this same manner by tying water-filled cans to their limbs and dumping them overboard.
  • Similarly, slave ships would do this to any cargo damaged in transit that wouldn't be profitable to sell, or in the event one of the slaves showed signs of disease that might infect the rest of them.
• The Swedish name for this trope is Ståplats i Nybroviken (Standing Place at Bay Nybroviken). A corpse was found 1966 in Bay Nybroviken, Stockholm, in standing position. The corpse itself was connected to organized crime.
• In 1989, Oba Chandler offered to take the vacationing Joan Rogers and her daughters Michelle and Christie for a sunset boat ride on Tampa Bay. Then one by one, he bound them, raped them, tied a concrete block around their necks, and tossed them into the water to drown, tauntingly telling them to "swim for it". Chandler was executed in 2011.
• While investigating the disappearance of Laci Peterson, police found evidence that her husband, Scott, had recently constructed several cement anchors. While he claimed that he had built them for his new boat, they suspected a far more grim purpose—weighing Laci's body down when he dumped her into the bay.
• Some gangs are known to put people in tires or dumpsters and then immolate them, a horrific practice known as "necklacing".
• Related to this, but much less awful: when conducting burials at sea in the age of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, navies would wrap the deceased in sailcloth with a couple of cannonballs at his feet to ensure he sank.
• Osama bin Laden's corpse was weighted and sunk in the sea, in order to prevent his grave from becoming a shrine, or getting desecrated.^note It's worth noting that this is actually what Islam suggests in such situations.
• One mob informant claimed that this is how Jimmy Hoffa was killed (or at least how his body was disposed of), thrown into Lake Michigan. How truthful he was is as questionable as anyone who made a claim regarding the case.
• Chicago Outfit mobster John Roselli's body was found in a 55-gallon oil drum floating in Dumfoundling Bay near Miami in 1976 thanks to the gases oozing out of his corpse that gave the drum buoyancy and floated it back up the surface. It is rumored he was killed for either hoarding the mob's gambling monies in Las Vegas for himself or that he testified in front of Congress on the CIA's attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro.
• If somebody were to be unlucky enough to have their feet (or any other part of the body) trapped in setting cement or concrete, two additional things happen to enhance the experience. Setting cement generates heat. If somebody's feet are trapped up to the ankles in it, effectively the feet bake and burn. Setting cement also expands slightly. As well as feeling cooked, the feet will also be constricted, even crushed. This is even before the prospect of being dumped in a river raises itself.
• The Polish priest Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko was kidnapped, beaten to half death, and then subjected to this in the Vistula Water Reservoir in 1984.
• The body of Peter Martinez washed up on Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn in 2016 with his feet encased in five-gallon buckets filled with cement, gravel, sand, and water.
• In November of 2004, retired couple Tom and Jackie Hawks were abducted on their yacht while at sea by a man who had ostensibly wanted to buy it. The man, Skyler DeLeon, and his associates then subsequently tasered, bound, blindfolded, forced them to sign over their life savings, attached one of the boat's anchors to the couple, and threw them overboard. He and one of the accomplices now sit on California's death row, two other accomplices are serving lengthy prison sentences, and DeLeon's wife, who stayed behind in California and knew about what was going to transpire, is serving life without parole.
• Subverted in the murder of Leslie Mahaffy; she was kidnapped, raped, and strangled by Paul Bernando and Karla Homolka prior, but was then dismembered before being encased in cement and thrown into a river, where she was found a few weeks later.
• Back when the Natchez Trace was America's wild frontier, the bandit gangs and killers who stalked it like the Harpes or Murrell and his Mystic Clan would often dispose of their victims by eviscerating the corpse and stuffing the abdomen with stones before tossing them into the nearest body of water.
• In 1996, the wealthy and well-connected Delaware attorney Tom Capano murdered his mistress, Anne Marie Fahey, after she attempted to break off the relationship by shooting her, tying an anchor to her body, placing it in a cooler and dumping it into the Atlantic. Unfortunately, Fahey was never located, but the cooler eventually resurfaced and played a huge role in convicting him. Although originally sentenced to death, his sentence was commuted to life some years later and he died in 2011 while still serving his term.
• French actress Marie-France Pisier was found dead at the bottom of her swimming pool in 2011. Her head was stuck in a metal chair.
• Former Olympic boxer Felix Verdejo was convicted of murdering his pregnant girlfriend Keishla Rodriguez in April 2021 after she refused to have an abortion by punching her in the face, injecting her with fentanyl to knock her out, and with the help of an accomplice, tying a cement block to her limbs and throwing her off a bridge into a lagoon.
• When Lake Mead fell to historically low levels in the 2020-2022 drought, numerous bodies were found. While many were believed to be the result of drownings during swimming or boating accidents, some (including one that was sealed inside a weighted barrel) are thought to have been murder victims that were dumped in the lake to dispose of their remains.

---

Anyway, four dollars a pound.

---