PSA: If you want to get away with murder, don’t google “how to get rid of a body”

While we hate to help murderers, one thing must be said: There is no such thing as private browsing when it comes to hiding your crime.

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to get away with murder without punishment.

In the good old days, you could simply evade justice by jumping on a passenger liner to the other side of the Atlantic, changing your name, and reinventing yourself as a shady antiques dealer with a mysterious past. Not so in 2024. Even a genius like Agatha Christie would struggle to come up with a sophisticated plot that could withstand the rigors of modern forensic investigation. Most contemporary crime writers have to go to great lengths to give their criminals a level playing field, for example by setting their novels in World War I or in a remote hotel with no cell phone reception during a severe snowstorm.

There have been many important advances in forensic investigation since 1892, when fingerprints were first used as evidence. DNA evidence has been used in court since the late 1980s. But fingerprints pale in comparison to the astonishingly large digital footprints that each and every one of us leaves behind.

I recently watched The Lie: The Murder of Grace Millane. The documentary is harrowing, especially the CCTV footage. But Kempson’s Google searches after the murder are either the work of a complete idiot or someone who doesn’t understand how the internet works. Not only did Kempson take photos of Millane’s body and watch porn on his phone, but his Google searches after the murder included the terms “Waitakere Ranges,” “hottest fire,” “big bags near me,” “rigor mortis,” and “carnivorous birds.”

Obviously, someone who decides to google “are there vultures in New Zealand?” to come up with a possible cover-up strategy isn’t the brightest. While I’m glad these murders aren’t going unpunished, I feel like this is such a widespread trend that it challenges our collective digital ignorance.

Kempson is not alone in his ignorance. Perhaps the most famous case in which someone’s search history was used to convict them of murder was that of Brian Walshe, who was charged with the murder of his wife Ana Walshe, whose body is still missing. Walshe’s Search history after his wife’s disappearance included:

04:55 am – How long does it take for a body to start to smell?
04:58 – How to stop a body from decomposing
05:47 – 10 ways to dispose of a body when it’s really necessary
6:25 am – How long does someone have to be missing to inherit
06:34 – Can you throw away body parts
9:29 am – What does formaldehyde do
9:34 am – How long does DNA last?
9:59 am – Can identification be made based on partial remains?
11:34 am – Dismemberment and the best way to dispose of a body
11:44 am – How to clean blood from a wooden floor
11:56 am – Luminol for blood detection
13:08 – What happens when you put body parts in ammonia
1:21 p.m. – Is it better to put away crime scene clothing or wash it?
12:45 pm – Metal saw is the best tool for disassembly
1:10 p.m. – Can you be charged with murder without a body being present?
1:14 p.m. – Can you identify a body with broken teeth?
13:02 – What happens to hair on a corpse?
1:13 p.m. – How quickly does a body in a plastic bag decompose compared to a body on a forest floor?
1:20 p.m. – Can baking soda serve as a mask or give the body a pleasant smell?

Jesus Christ.

Walshe performed the searches on his son’s iPad, but apparently made no further attempts to clear his search history. Not that that helped.

Normally, I’d be reluctant to post anything that might alert potential murderers. But the truth is, almost nothing you do on the internet is private. At least not in the context of a murder investigation. No amount of digital sanitization can completely wipe out your suspicious searches and deleted emails, making them impossible to recover by a digital forensics team. Not only is it extremely difficult to hide your online activity, but anyone without an advanced knowledge of digital forensics techniques won’t even know what to hide beyond the basics. To get away with it, you’d have to be smarter than the smartest person whose job it is to comb through your online activity for incriminating information, which is an extremely high hurdle considering most people still don’t know how to uninstall Bing from their family computers.

Of course, the police’s ability to find digital evidence does not always lead to a conviction.

Casey Anthony was acquitted of her daughter’s murder, even though she was looking for information on how to make chloroform. Anthony claimed she wanted to look for “chlorophyll manufacturing,” even though she was physically unable to photosynthesize sunlight. And human error is always a factor. CBS News reported that the digital forensics team in the Anthony case overlooked the search for “foolproof” asphyxiation methods.

As I write this, Polkinghorne has just been acquitted of his wife’s murder. Perhaps the most telling pieces of evidence in the case were Polkinghorne’s deleted internet searches released in court, including his search for “leg edema following strangulation” the day after Pauline Hannah’s death. But even though Polkinghorne deleted his WhatsApp history, looked into ways to delete his iCloud history, cleared his searches, put his phone in airplane mode, and used DuckDuckGo (a more secure browser), whether you believe him guilty or not, his actions still demonstrate a profound ignorance of how the internet works.

We all know—or should know, really—that incognito mode isn’t really incognito. The point of incognito mode is to search for “sexy beautiful naked ladies” and other terms you don’t want to appear in your browser history or autocomplete. But even if you follow Polkinghorne’s example and try to practice good digital hygiene, your methods are unlikely to confuse the experts. There’s no point in throwing your laptop into the nearest peat bog, because your internet history lives in the cloud, not just on your hard drive. Even if you use TOR, a VPN, and a secure browser, the information doesn’t just disappear. And downloading TOR or looking up “how to clear search history” after committing a crime is highly suspicious behavior that will almost certainly raise some investigators’ eyebrows.

Even if you use a disposable phone, you can get caught. Rex Heuerman, known as the Long Island Serial Killer, was finally caught due to a DNA-covered Pizza doughBut the location and pattern of his disposable cell phones near local cell towers and Heuerman’s home phone were enough for police to prove his guilt. They managed to uncover a staggering amount of incriminating evidence related to those phones, including common searches such as “why couldn’t law enforcement trace the Long Island serial killer’s calls?”, “why hasn’t the Long Island serial killer been caught?”, “Long Island killer,” and “Long Island serial killer phone call.”

Killers of yore only had to worry about eyewitnesses and shoe prints. Today, the modern criminal has to contend with CCTV, traffic cameras, Ring cameras, browsing history, location history, IP addresses, Eftpos transactions, and that’s just the tip of the digital iceberg. Many websites that claim not to track you are notorious for tracking you. It doesn’t matter if you’re logged in as “longislandkiller97” or browsing anonymously. Many websites record not only the obvious things, like user accounts and IP addresses, but also the size of your computer screen, the settings you have enabled, the time of day you’re online, and lots of other identifying information that I’m too dumb to understand.

Even if you’re a tech genius and for some reason have dedicated your life to murder instead of doing the sensible thing and taking a six-figure job, it’s highly unlikely that the victims of your heinous and reprehensible crimes will have the same standards of privacy protection. And you can expect the police to do a thorough search of their digital pasts, too.

Private browsing is perfectly fine for everyday activities that you don’t want to share with others using the same computer. But when it comes to covering up evidence of a crime, a good rule of thumb is: never Google anything you wouldn’t want to be read out in court and used against you one day. Or better yet, don’t kill anyone, you moron.