A fellow who dubs himself ‘Most certainly not a serial killer’ from Brooklyn, New York has a question that is PURELY THEORETICAL:
Answer me this: what is the ideal way for a serial killer to go about his/her work?
I’ve developed a system of sorts, but it is rather lengthy [as behoves something which is 100% PURELY THEORETICAL, ALRIGHT?].
1. The Location
Ideally an area that has high traffic during the day but virtually none at night and sans CCTV cameras, for example an alleyway or side street which many traverse, allowing for any evidence left at the scene to be contaminated with the residue of hundreds of others. 2. The Means
Anything that would leave residue at the scene is not viable, such as firearms; blades are acceptable as long as slashing is kept to a minimum, reducing blood loss of the victim. Ideally a fast acting poison, ricin or cyanide, leaving virtually no evidence of the actual means at the scene.
3. The Act As quick as possible obviously, without alerting the victim so as to avoid shouts &c, have a means of travel (car) nearby but not too nearby and in a location where there are no CCTV cameras between the location of the car and the location of the murder.
4. Disposal
Multiple sacks of powdered concrete are needed for this step. First chop up limbs into segments that would fit in 25cm by 15 cm by 10cm blocks of concrete (standard cinderblock size, prepare concrete beforehand to expedite this step). The head can go whole in a block of its own not bigger than 30cm by 15cm by 15cm. The remaining torso shall go in a shallow slab, 60-70cm by 30-40cm by 20cm. These blocks, once set, can be disposed of inconspicuously at a derelict building site, or if one lives near a port, in a pile of ballast, which would allow the body to be disposed of rather efficiently as the body parts would be scattered across the world by boats, making it extremely unlikely that the body would ever be found.
It’s a very sensible method, I’ll give you that; but where’s the fun? If you pay heed to the modi operandi of some of the world’s most notorious serial killers, efficiency and/or a clean getaway weren’t necessarily trademarks.
Readers, perhaps you’d like to take this opportunity to regale everybody in the comments with your own ideal serial killer routine. Don’t be shy. I bet you’ve thought of one.
We’d like to reiterate our ceaseless gratitude to all of you who have ever bought any of our archived episodes, like Carl from Morecambe here:
After thoroughly enjoying over a hundred free episodes of your podcast I’ve just invested in the first eighty. Getting people hooked on the free stuff so they can’t resist buying the rest has been a tried and tested strategy of many a drug-pusher, I just hope that you don’t take it further and force your listeners into prostitution or petty crime to fund their habit.
Whilst I’m very happy to support your joyous enterprise, the purchase of all eighty episodes at once did give rise to a small pause for thought. Imagine my delight when I simultaneously discovered that I’d picked four correct lottery numbers the night before and won enough to pay for them all and still have change for a slap-up meal and a good bottle of wine, instant karma!
See? Lending your financial support to our feckless choice of lifestyles brings you good luck. FACT.
We’ve got a schoolboy moral dilemma to tackle, from somebody who, for his own good, had better remain nameless:
I have a confession to make.
This child – shall we call him “Fred” – he had his book of The Tempest which our teacher says we are required to bring every lesson on pain of detention, sadly I had forgotten mine.
So this boy “Fred” left his bag unattended with his copy of The Tempest in it; so I ripped it out of his bag and rubbed out his name, then I put mine in.
He returned and whilst looking through his bag he panicked and said he couldn’t find it. He received a detention and the teacher told him he needed to bring it or he would get another detention.
I felt as if I could not just laugh it off and say sorry then take the hit and get into major trouble, so I went home with the copy.
The next day our teacher told us that they were dealing with a theft and if anyone got caught with the book they would have detention for the rest of the week and the following week, so on the way home I threw his copy of The Tempest into someone’s garden.
Should I keep this as a dark secret, never to be revealed to anyone but AMT? Or do you think I will get caught as it is just a matter of time before they piece it together, as they have CCTV in our classrooms?
The Tempest is categorised amongst Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’, so it is little wonder that his epic problem has raised some questions of my own, namely:
1. What did Fred do to deserve this?
2. Depending upon the smallness of your hometown and the astuteness of the mystery garden owner, won’t the retrieval of a copy of The Tempest with your name written inside be fairly incriminating?
3. Why didn’t you just sneak it back into his bag at the end of the first day?
4. I know that schoolbook loss/theft isn’t to be encouraged, but isn’t your teacher rather overreacting? Or is your school actually run like a police state? I can’t believe your teachers would in reality be planning to frisk everybody for contraband copies of The Tempest. I also can’t quite believe your classrooms have CCTV, and that it would really be worth the school’s while, for the price of an out-of-copyright book, to plough through the footage.
5. Is it just me, or is The Tempest (whisper it) a bit rubbish?
Readers, I can’t raise a great deal of sympathy for this young fool, so please do my job for me and head for the comments to offer your advice for him. I worry that if we leave him to deal with it on his own, the situation will escalate to the point where he has to kill every member of his school and burn all books to cover his tracks.
The infernal 90s revival is gathering pace, judging by the number of questions about Friends we’ve been getting. Yes, here’s another! It’s from Conor from Ireland, who I predict will write in next week to find out whether Elastica’s second album will be worth the wait and if Monica Lewinsky is lying. He says:
How many children would Joey from Friends statistically be likely to have, bearing in mind that condoms only work like 97% of the time?
Also bearing in mind that Joey and his assorted sexual partners might not be 100% mindful of contraception. But, on the other hand, his boxy 90s jeans may have inhibited his sperm production so he’s firing LeBlanks.
I’d estimate Joey’s average procreation rate to be halfway between Lil Wayne and Mick Jagger, at maybe one child per every 4-7 years of sexual activity. However, given how hard up they were for plot over the years, I’m sure that had Joey produced any children, they would have been dredged up for at least one two-episode arc. So I think we must assume that he did not. Remember too that Joey is subtly portrayed as Reeeeally Stoopid, so his much-boasted sexual encounters might merely involve him dry-humping the windowsill then falling asleep sucking his thumb whilst the ladies watch and take notes for the biannual reviews of his community care order.
Furthermore, recent research* suggests that Joey’s promiscuity is less great than one imagines. Take a look! There’s a table and everything.
* Of the MEGA-NERDY variety! Gosh, even I expend my spare time more productively. And I once made a fully inflatable giant Boggle set.
Everybody, whatever you do, don’t tell Darcy in Chase, British Columbia about what happened in the final episode of Sex and the City, as he’s currently finding series finales from 2004 rather upsetting:
I stopped watching broadcast TV about a decade ago, so I didn’t know how Friends ended until I finished watching the DVDs today. I was so mad that Ross and Rachel got back together that I’m seriously tempted to run all 40 DVDs through the shredder. Their whole romance was unbelievable and annoying enough as it was, but Rachel not going to Paris because of her “big realization” that she loves Ross was beyond absurd!* Really!? She loves Ross? We had no idea! She had only realized it – and told Ross – about a thousand times over the course of the series!
I gather lots of people feel the same way about the way Seinfeld ended and can’t watch reruns of it. So answer me this: what shows’ endings sucked so bad that it completely ruined all your past, present, and future enjoyment of the whole show?
Evidently I am more forgiving than Darcy, able to concentrate on the tranches of series that were still good (Michelle Dessler) and excise the terrible bits from memory (Kim Bauer). That said, my second viewing of Twin Peaks was approximately 60% less good than the first because by then I knew that the thirteen episodes following the Big Reveal (the effective climax of the series) were, at best, moderately diverting, and at worst a very vortex of shittery. There, as in many other cases, it’s not the ending alone, but the lengthy inexorable decline that precedes it which ruins it for me – and, presumably, commissioners.
Readers, by all means comfort Darcy by telling him in the comments which series’ conclusions left you mentally cancelling out all their preceding credits; but better yet, advise him of completed series which he can watch without fearing that they will take a turn for the craptacular. I’d hold up Spaced, Arrested Development and My So Called Life as finite and fulfilled, and Blackadder actually manages to get even better right at the end. Then Darcy won’t break his shredder.
*Too right it was: he’s so neurotic, shrill and underwritten that he is essentially unlovable; while one-dimensional narcissist Rachel is incapable of any depth of feeling. When you look at it like that, they really are a perfect match, just like everybody thought in 1996.
Well, listeners, this is it. The last episode for a month – Answer Me This! Episode 191:
This classic episode is available to BUY NOW for just 79p at the Answer Me This! Store, through a secure server, without DRM restriction. CLICK HERE to find out more and support our podcast. (This helps keep our most recent episodes free)
In our last yaps before shutting up for a month, we speak of:
Gossip Girl‘s out-of-character choice of search engine
Tate & Lyle
Envirofone
Jon Snow’s laptop
cinder toffee Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Samson speed-dating
iPhones vs. traditional toilet reading
bio vs. non-bio
blue plastic champagne flutes vs. classiness
Rihanna’s Navy vs. Bruno Mars’s Hooligans vs. K£sha’s Animals
female magnets
and
paediatric brine.
Plus: Olly reveals the secret to his Oxford success – York Notes; Helen has worrying plans to become a major soak over the break; and Martin the Sound Man will be jetting off to space on the back of the Philips Man Iron. Brrrrm brrm!
This week’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App is about newsreader Kay Burley’s eggs, which are available exclusively to denizens of the Sky News make-up room – unlike the AMT app, which is available to any old chump with an iPhone, iPad or Android device.
Though we are off-air for a month, we’ll still be updating this site, and more importantly collecting QUESTIONS for the new series. So send them along, by leaving voicemails on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or Skype answermethis) and sending emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
We hope you have a smashing month, and we’ll you on October 13th, bright and early!
Ben from Southampton has done the research that we couldn’t do in the fields of Wales the other week:
I just listened to episode 189 where the provenance of Ferris wheels came up. You’re right that they were named after a Mr Ferris but here are some further details, as learned from the brilliant book The Devil In The White City (movie rights owned by Leonardo DiCaprio).
The Chicago World Exposition at the end of the 1800s was tasked with outdoing the previous one in Paris where the Eiffel Tower was unveiled. A contest was held for the centrepiece of the fair and while many people submitted designs for towers, Daniel Burnham, architect and director of the fair, wanted something different so as not to be seen as copying Paris. The Ferris wheel was the design he picked from the competition entries.
It’s a brilliant book following two concurrent stories – one, Burnham’s impossible task of building the amazing Exposition against seemingly impossible obstacles, and the other being the story of HH Holmes, America’s first known/documented modern psychopath who is alleged to have used the Expo as a cover for killing hundreds of young women (I think it can only be proven that he killed somewhere in the teens but there’s reason to believe it was many, many more).
I highly recommend the book if you are into either the macabre or architecture.
It sounds like a treat! I’m looking for books to read during our month off; readers, please make your recommendations in the comments. They don’t need to be about the macabre or architecture, although I do imagine these to be common enthusiasms amongst you.
They make a mockery of what you said in AMT177!!!!1!!11zomg!!
To which we say: a) yes, thankyou; b) no they bloody well don’t! To recap, we answered the following question from Richard from Dronfield:
In a world where we have amazing powerful telescopes and imaging technology that can see clearly to far corners of our universe and spy out evidence of potential life in far of galaxies, how come nobody has ever produced a half decent photograph of the moon landing sites from Earth, pointed out that we blatantly have left our junk on the moon and then waved this smoking gun evidence it in the faces of all the annoyingly persistent moon landing Conspiracy Monkeys.
You see what he says there, in that question that we answered as it was asked? ‘From Earth’. FROM EARTH. Not from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter a mere 13 miles from the moon’s surface, which gives it an advantage of approximately 221,450 miles. So you can shut your jeering taunting faces, or we will come round to your house (or workplace) and shove the Hubble telescope into YOUR lunar module.
And even when/if someone does manufacture an earthbound telescope good enough to see every crumb of soil in the imprint of Neil Armstrong’s moonboot, it still won’t disabuse those ‘Conspiracy Monkeys’ of their irrefutable notions. Even if you went to the trouble of taking them all the way to the moon on a flight simulator followed by a fake moon set in a disused TV studio, you’ll never convince them that the Apollo missions went anywhere near the Magic Space-Plate, especially not in the face of the overwhelming evidence that it’s just a large round billboard propped up near the flat earth’s rim.
I’m going to steer clear of the buses in Seattle, after this question from Joe in Seattle:
Answer me this: would you rather sit directly beside a naked man on the bus or a fully-clothed man with his wiener hanging out?
I’d go for the naked man, because I’d assume he was either a harmless naturist, or a groom from a 1980s wedding farce who’s managed to unchain himself from the lamppost and swim back to the mainland, and is now on the bus to his own wedding where he has to stop the bride saying ‘I do’ to the evil best man who has sabotaged him thus.
Whereas a man who was clothed but whose wiener was unleashed, I would assume that he was keeping it easily accessible as he finds buses sexually arousing. I don’t want to sit next to anyone who finds public transport erotically stimulating. Nor would I want to be there when he finished.
Helen in Manchester has discovered why publishers no longer accept handwritten manuscripts:
Recently, a friend of mine wrote me a story, which was sealed in an envelope. Upon opening the envelope, I quickly realised that I could not read his handwriting! I brushed this issue aside by saying that I would read it later, and quickly changed the subject.
Two weeks later, he is still asking for feedback! So far, I have assured him how good I thought it was, however the lies are starting to wear thin!
So answer me this: how can I tell him that his handwriting is illegible, without hurting his feelings? Or should I simply say nothing, and continue to lie, hoping he never calls my bluff?
Because of course, the latter approach, of a valued friend constantly lying about something clearly very important to the scrawly-handed party, would be LESS hurtful than a short, sharp, “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble reading your handwriting – any chance you could type it up for me?” Have any of you readers ever really been wounded by your handwriting receiving negative reviews? Correct me if I’m wrong, but last time I checked, Manchester was not 12th-century China and therefore your friend is unlikely to lose his position in society if his calligraphy is a bit sub-par. Therefore, Helen in Manchester, stop making a piece of paper and ink into a problem, and start being honest.
Last week our special guest Jon Ronson couldn’t hide his revulsion at the idea of having to perform a solo trumpet recital at school, although he did also acknowledge that our anonymous trumpet whiz was obligated to go ahead with it. Aidan from Bedford has the following advice for the girl to minimise the pain that he believes will be suffered by all concerned:
She could say to her head of year that she will do it, but the piece of music should be something fun like the James Bond theme tune or the Wallace and Gromit theme.
Hmm, I’m not convinced – that could be even more mortifying, no? Anyway, Luca presents the counter-argument:
I think she should do it, without any shame!
I passed grade 8 piano when I was fourteen and my headmaster also thought this was mind-blowing so he asked me to play this piece for the whole school.
I too thought my life would be over; then afterwards, a lot of boys (it was an all-boys school) came up to me and congratulated me and admitted that they were sort of impressed, even the “rough” ones.
So I don’t think she should just assume that everyone will hate it! Surely there are people who will enjoy it, and it’s a fun experience.
Look! Photographic evidence that journalist, writer, broadcaster and jolly nice chap Jon Ronson performed his special guestular duties! More importantly, here’s the audio evidence, namely Answer Me This! Episode 190:
This classic episode is available to BUY NOW for just 79p at the Answer Me This! Store, through a secure server, without DRM restriction. CLICK HERE to find out more and support our podcast. (This helps keep our most recent episodes free)
Things we learn from Jon:
i) that to be cast on reality telly, you only need to wave your Prozac prescription in front of the producers’ eyes;
ii) how he could have been Captain Birdseye – no, really!
iii) how the 21st-century KKK are getting rusty;
iv) how you have to speak up when you’re on Conan. We’ll remember that, as it’s bound to come in handy soon in our lives.
We also talk of:
psychopathy (unsurprisingly)
conspiracy theories (ditto) Pleasurewood Hills
Disney character breakfast
Mr Blobby vs. Woody Bear
Noel Edmonds’s Winnebago vs. Les Dennis’s Winnebago
James Middleton’s arse vs. Pippa Middleton’s arse George Galloway’s milky mortification
David Icke
the name ‘Beryl’
traffic cops
the Little Mermaid’s mobility issues
and
pigtails.
This week’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App (available on iPhone, iPad and Android) is Jon venting his wrath at his archenemy Yo! Sushi. If that whets your appetite for more Jon Ronson, do read his latest book The Psychopath Test, visit jonronson.com, follow @jonronson on Twitter, and buy the Guardian on Saturdays just in case he’s in it that week.
Next week’s episode is the last till October 13th, so get your QUESTIONS in: send voicemails to the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or Skype answermethis) and emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. Harness your very finest question-composing abilities, so together we may endeavour to send off this series in style.
, 
and 
as finite and fulfilled, and 
actually manages to get even better right at the end. Then Darcy won’t break his shredder.
(movie rights owned by Leonardo DiCaprio).
, visit 
Answer Me This! Podcast 