Actually, you can, believe it or not.
These cases are typically hard to prove, but a number of folks have gone down on homicide even where no body was ever found. What is odd is how do they conclude that the person is even dead? Perhaps they are hiding out in Costa Rica or Timbuktu. Maybe they have amnesia and are wandering the highways. Maybe they paid an agency $90,000 to make themselves “disappear.”
Sometimes the murdered are even resurrected, Yeshua-style.
In Australia, Leonard Fraser confessed to killing a teenage girl, Natasha Ryan. He was either lying or he did a lousy job of killing her. As he was on trial for her homicide, she suddenly disappeared after having been missing for several years.
Murder convictions without a body were ruled legal in the UK in 1954 and in the US in 1960, but a man had already been convicted of homicide in the UK in 1949.
No body, no murder was established in England in the 1660′s. It persisted far into the 20th Century.
Corpus delicti does not really have a literal meaning after all. The noun corpus really refers to the body of evidence and not to a physical body.
