I'm working on a very dark comedy story (novel-length) where a guy kills a LOT of people. He's a mass murderer and kills a lot of random people (one a a time). He kills them a different way for each victim. (That's not the funny part; I'm not THAT sick).
So the game is, how many ways can we think of to kill a person? It's OK to get as bizarre as you want, as long as it's still possible for an actual person to do. In fact, the more bizarre the better.
I'll go ahead and get the easy ones out of the way:
Shoot with a handgun Stab with a knife Strangle with hands Axe to the head/chest
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I spent a couple months pushing gurneys and wheelchairs in veterans wards. One for WW I & II geriatrics, one for Vietnam era amputees, mostly substance abusers pre or post amputation. The one manner of death that I found most macabre was how a person could just check out by thinking about it hard enough.
That experience and other death experiences are too vivid in my mind to contribute further.
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You might want to check out the Howdunit Series - they've got a whole bunch of books on writing crime novels, including "Murder One: A Writer's Guide to Homicide", books of poisons, weapons, police procedures, etc. Also you might want to check out "The Crime Writer's Reference Guide: 1001 Tips for Writing the Perfect Murder."
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I say hang him upside-down and see how long it takes the blood flowing to his brain to prove fatal.
Posts: 620 | Registered: Mar 2009
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Heard once that if you polish a drunk's shoes with polish that has nitrobenzene in it, that will kill them (but they have to be really drunk--the alcohol in the blood promotes absorption of the nitrobenzene which is a poison--and I think they stopped putting nitrobenzene in shoe polish because of that).
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tie them up, tape a gel-cap filled with contact poison to their forehead and tell them not to sweat.
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While I don't have anything graphic for the list, my WIP is a thriller of sorts and so villain development - which this partly seems to be - is of interest to me at the moment.
Is part of the reason you're looking into this so you have a serial killer with an always changing M.O.? Someone who makes it difficult for authorities to link together different crimes for lack of common evidence?
If that's the case you may be able to simply add plausible accidents to your villain's repertoire. A great many people pass away every day from disease, old age, motor vehicle accidents and drug abuse and apart from a cursory coroner's report may not automatically be assumed suspicious deaths.
The psychology of your villain would be important too; if there is any link in victims (at worst, the common 'they all look like his ex lover' trope seen in so many serials) then usually a serial killer character will, due to the emotional link with choosing his victims, be expected to stick to the same MO in seeking their demise as a symbol of whatever contention he has with the original person.
Should the killer simply be random in selection however - and sufficiently intelligent to avoid getting sloppy and caught - then it would increasingly plausible that they attempt to cover their tracks by making their crimes resemble accidents.
Were that to be the way they developed, I'd have to imagine the Darwin Awards would become an easily tapped source of ideas.
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My guy is actually not the villain. I mean, I guess any mass murderer is a villain, but it's a first person account that he is narrating, so of course he is the hero of his own story.
This is not a typical "criminal minds/C.S.I" type serial killer. That is, he isn't compelled to murder in any certain way. He's addicted to killing people because he gets an emotional charge out of it, and he feels a compulsion to murder, but it doesn't matter to him how he does it, so he likes to experiment and try out all sorts of different methods. He is definitely NOT (gag me) killing people because they all look like his ex-girlfriend.
So anyway, for this guy, pretty much anything goes, no matter how over-the-top. It's a form of play for him, so he will try anything for the sake of novelty. He's not really into torture, though, just the actual act of killing.
Accidental deaths and the darwin awards...great idea. I will definitely mine those things for ideas.
I also like "hang him upside-down and see how long it takes the blood flowing to his brain to prove fatal." Of course, that means I would have to find how how long that actually is.
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Stabbed with an icicle. Or a frozen banana. I have no idea if it's even possible, but I always thought that would be the coolest murder weapon.
Posts: 238 | Registered: Jul 2009
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How about this one? A lot of criminals, especially Mafia types, dispose of bodies they don't want found by sticking them in a bathtub and letting acid eat everything away. You see a humorous instance of that in the TV show "Breaking Bad".
Let's say the killer doesn't wait around for the victim to be a body.
This film 'Man Bites Dog' has a serial killer who kills in lots of different ways, but I think it is very difficult to be completely patternless.
You may go round killing people in various ways, but you may not do it on a Tuesday afternoon because that is the day you do your shopping. Even randomness is a choice, and we can't help but make repetitive choices. An investigation will focus on finding a pattern, where and whatever it may be.
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KayTi said: Put a rabid weasel in a pot, then put the pot over someone's face and bang on it with a metal spoon. You might want to duct tape it down...
--------- Great minds think alike. Have you ever read Orwell's 1984? This is very similar to a death scene near the very end of the book. In that the victim is strapped in to a chair with something like a bird cage over his head (hole cut through bottom to fit over his head). It is set up so that the only exit is blocked by his head, then a rat is put in to the bird cage.
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I should mention with the rats and pots thing, it's also in Terry Goodkind's books. Cara gets strapped down with a pot of trapped rats on her stomach, and the pot is gradually being heated up so the only way the rats can escape is to chew through her guts.
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Have you ever seen the show 1,000 ways to die? You might want to check it out. I try to avoid the show but my husband likes to watch it. Here are some that I've seen. -trap them in a helium balloon -fill the air with flour -death by bee sting or wasp sting -getting an X-ray to the head over and over
Posts: 968 | Registered: Jul 2008
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I was going to suggest 1000 ways to die also. Here is the website. Sometimes it's gross, sometimes it's stupid, and sometimes it's pretty funny.
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Sew the victim in a sack with a monkey, a dog and a venomous snake. Throw the sack in the river. This was actually done in the time of the Roman Empire.
(I guess you hope the snake bites the monkey and the dog eats the snake)