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Bodies Entombed In Concrete (Buildings, Roadways & Other Structures)

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Anonymous

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Anyone hear the UL about how a favourite method of shady underworld characters getting rid of a body would be to dump it into the concrete ready-mix being used in motorway bridges? I first heard this as a kid, and another thread stirred the memory. I even recall a statistic, the exact numbers escape me, but went something like there's one encased dead body every mile of motorway on average.

Did FT cover this UL in recent years or am I hallucinating again? Anyone heard any embellishments of this story?
 
Heard this one before in Portsmouth the differnce is the body(s) are in the concrete of the Clarence Pier. Its not much of a pier but it has a fun fair on top of it.So when your riding the atrractions or playing the slots there could be someone under your feet.


Never believed it myself but it was a good story when we where teenagers.
 
I once saw Australian criminal Mark"Chopper"Read claim in an interview that he killed a guy by throwing him into a cement truck.He even wrote a little poem about it in one of his books.
He was having a good old laugh on the tele about it as the guy kept trying to climb out and he had to keep pushing him back in.Nice fellow is our Uncle Chop-Chop.
 
Being buried in a concrete bridge is often rumoured to have been the fate of American union leader Jimmy Hoffa.

There is also an urban legend that during the building of Hoover Dam near Las Vegas, one or more workers fell into the concrete and were entombed there. This is not true as the concrete was only poured in a few inches at a time.

http://www.hooverdam.com/History/fatalities/fatal.html

The website tells another odd story (this one true) about Hoover Dam:

"On December 20, 1922, J.G. Tierney, a Bureau of Reclamation employee engaged in a geological survey from a barge in the Colorado River fell in the river and drowned. Thirteen years to the day, on December 20, 1935, Patrick W. Tierney, a Bureau of Reclamation employee and son of J.G. Tierney, fell from one of the intake towers."
 
In London, Ginger Marks, a small time 1960's criminal, is supposed to be entombed in the Chiswick flyover, now part of the M4.
 
Don't know about criminals but I worked with a man once who said that the piles of the Humber bridge had 9 workers entombed. The difficulty was that once the concrete was being poured it was very difficut to stop, once you were in you were dead and it would have been too expensive to recover the corpse. Dunno if its true tho'.
 
What about the cement shoes then, are they real?

These are probably done more for effect than anything else, it is much simpler to use cheavy gague chains - one padalock and it is easy to tie up the poor victim solid.

The time it takes even quick setting concrete to harden could be a problem for executions of this kind. And there is the pain the victim would feel from the lime burns from the concrete - something I know plenty of and have the scars to prove...

The horror of feeling the concrete slowly set, all the time knowing you are going to die sometime soon must have been aweful. Any volunteers to try it out? I thought not - chicken!

thanks

Uncle Bulgaria
 
Another vague memory has just jarred loose. Wasn't there a recent movie where a suggested method of disposing of a body was to pay a couple of Irish road workers to dump it into the hole left by motorway roadworks at night and tarmac over the top of it?
Was it Shallow Grave?
 
Don't know about people buried under concrete but it is said that not a motorway embankment exists that doesn't have a car beneath it.
 
There's a bridge in Glasgow that started falling down as soon as it was up (sorry, I can't remember the name of it). The locals believe that this is because it was built during a period of violent gang warfare and that the combination of poor quality concrete and corpses is not a particually good material for building bridges out of.

Cujo
 
Dark Detective said:
Wasn't there a recent movie where a suggested method of disposing of a body was to pay a couple of Irish road workers to dump it into the hole left by motorway roadworks at night and tarmac over the top of it?
Click to expand...

Stephen King wrote a story called 'Dolan's Cadillac' about a man who takes revenge on a gangster by burying him alive, car and all, in a road construction site, and leaving him to be paved over.
 
I know what you mean UncleBulgaria.

I once had to treat a bloke who was working a contract in which their bonuses depended on the time of completion. (Don't they always)!!!

He got drunk halfway through the contract & his mates filled his wellies with cement!!!!

I learnt a lot about cement burns that day!!!:rolleyes:
 
I remember a Two Ronnies gangster sketch from the early 80s, I think, where the camera pans to follow a car as it passes beneath a motorway bridge, sticking out of which is a pair of legs.

:D
 
And, there was an AA report (in the now defunct Drive Magazine) on the state of the UK's roads (what's new) illustrated by a drawing of a crumbling flyover with a skeleton popping out of the crumbling cement.

All of which shows, how the body in the cement &/or bridge had entered the UK folklaw in the 1960's & 70's.
 
A few years ago there was a sad story in the paper of a man who had killed a child and buried her under the hardcore of a half made road , her body was only found because he admitted what he had done before it was tar mac'd over . It must happen .
Marion
 
Not as grisly, but I read somewhere about a tactic used by militant labor union activists in the US. They would pour a sack of mustard seed into the wet mortar when building a brick wall.. the foreman would see a job well done, but the seeds would germinate within a few days and destroy the wall... pretty crafty.
 
"In a tunnel underground,
A young Limerick man was found.
He was built into the new victoria line.
When the ganger man McGuerk
Sent big Pat to check the work
He saw the face of little Charlie Joe Devine.
And I saw old Baws McCall
from the big flyover fall,
Into a concrete mixer spinning round.
Tho it wasnt his intent
He got a fine head of cement
While he was building up and tearing England down."


Ok the fact it rhymes probably means it isnt true, but my Grandad wouldnt lie to me, would he?
 
Don't forget as well, the lines from McAlpine's Fusiliers:

And I mind the day when the Bear O'Shay, fell into a concrete stair,
What Horseface said when he saw him dead, isn't what the rich call prayers.

"I'm a navy short" was the one retort that came unto my ears....


Though, the lines give no indication as to if the cement was still wet!!!!!
 
MacAlpines Fusiliers is class
It takes a literary genius to rhyme "Shuddering rams" with "hydro dams". Good work Brendan lad.
 
I have a vague memory about a sitcom character who gets into a run in with a local gangster and jokes that he'll 'end up supporting a flyover on the M6'. Not much but...
 
This has come up in the current Mythchaser (FT200:17) - now I'm sure I read in the "Real-Life Crimes" partwork that the Krays used the expansion of teh motorways around London during that period to sump any bodies they had. However, my brother's girlfriend threw them out so I only have a couple I was reading at the time.

Anyone got any more info?
 
I can't for the life of me remember the source but I read somewhere an interview with a Kray era gangster who claimed to have bumping someone off and to get rid of the body he wrapped it in chicken wire with some bricks, drove to the coast, took a boat out a way and chucked it over the side. Would this have been something that was a backup option if there were no building works going on or would it have been down to the personal preference of the hitmen?
 
There are supposed to be the bodies of workmen trapped inside some of the Marcos families mad building schemes in the Phillippines:

While she was first lady, Imelda thought it her job to bring beauty to the masses, to which end she had built -- at huge public expense -- a cultural center, a folk art center and a convention center. The pièce de résistance was the Manila Film Center, literally completed over the dead bodies of 36 workmen who were trapped when a section of concrete poured over an incompletely dried one collapsed.
Click to expand...

http://metro.sandiegometro.com/reel/ind ... reelID=699
 
Johnny Molten~ said:
I can't for the life of me remember the source but I read somewhere an interview with a Kray era gangster who claimed to have bumping someone off and to get rid of the body he wrapped it in chicken wire with some bricks, drove to the coast, took a boat out a way and chucked it over the side. Would this have been something that was a backup option if there were no building works going on or would it have been down to the personal preference of the hitmen?
Click to expand...

I think that was Frankie Mitchell (the one who went swimming, that is).
 
we have a bridge up here in the north which is completely made from gangsters... there are rumours going about that late one moonless night some renegade builders poured some concrete in there. Very hush hush about it. I guess we'll never know the truth as the cost of tearing down gangsters has gone through the roof recently.

the roof incidently was made from slates held together by car thieves and gypsy fighters
 
it is highly unlikely that a body could be disposed of in any load carrying structure because when you pour concrete you are pouring it into a mould (called shuttering) which contains steel rods formed into a lattice (or a skeleton if you will).
this leaves very little room to dispose of your average nonce.
 
Yeah I think if someone died in concrete you would still have to remove the body, otherwise it would be like having a great big person-shaped bubble in whatever you were making. Also the coroner would probably insist on determining a cause of death, and the victim's family would want the body, their might even be issues with the Health Department, you know, with septic fluids from a rotting corpse potentially seeping out.
You might remember the tragic case of an escape artist, who was going to do the "escape while buried alive" trick, he had done it before with dry topsoil, so they tried filling the grave with wet cement for a change, but wet cement being much heavier than dry dirt, his stunt plexiglass coffin collapsed and he was basically crushed into the ground.
 
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