However, cases of this type have historically been hard to prove, often forcing the prosecution to rely on circumstantial evidence, and in England there was for centuries a mistaken view that in the absence of a body a killer could not be tried for murder.
Charged with Sykut's murder, Onufrejczyk claimed that the remains were those of rabbits he had killed, but the jury disbelieved him and he was sentenced to death, but reprieved.
[13]The 1960 California case of People v. Scott[14] held that "circumstantial evidence, when sufficient to exclude every other reasonable hypothesis, may prove the death of a missing person, the existence of a homicide and the guilt of the accused".
In Singapore, law student Sunny Ang was hanged in Changi Prison on 6 February 1967 for the alleged murder of his girlfriend during a scuba diving trip near Sisters' Islands.
In 1990, it emerged that on the night he disappeared, Tildesley had been abducted, drugged, tortured, raped and murdered by a London-based paedophile gang led by Sidney Cooke.
As the remains of Da Costa's body lacked certain vital organs, making a determination of the case as one of murder, absent a confession, as seemingly impossible, although evidence suggested she had been dismembered by two alleged culprits.
Following conviction and retrial for murder, both suspects were acquitted as, due to the cause of death being impossible to determine, a "natural" or non-homicidal cause could not be ruled out.
[19] Causley was and remains the first person in Britain to be convicted of the same murder twice, by a jury in the absence of a body and any evidence other than purely circumstantial.
[22] In July 1989, Kansas serial killer Richard Grissom was arrested after being connected to the disappearances of three young women the month prior.
In 1990, a Connecticut jury convicted Newtown airline pilot Richard Crafts of killing his Danish wife, Helle, in the 1986 "woodchipper murder", so called for the machine he had rented to dispose of her body in nearby lakes and streams.
The state police's forensic unit, led by Henry Lee, was able to match the DNA of some of the fragments that were discovered to Helle Crafts and the wood chipper her husband had used.
He was convicted of first-degree murder in part due to the evidence given by his brother, Gerry, who had admitted to helping Capano dump Fahey's body in the Atlantic Ocean.
Gregory Chrysler and Lawrence Weygant were found guilty of beating coworker Dominick Pendino to death with a baseball bat and disposing of his body.
They relied on eyewitness testimony from a former girlfriend and police informant, as well as forensic evidence showing that enough of Pendino's blood stained a car seat for him to have died without immediate medical attention.
Despite her body never being found, circumstantial evidence was provided by forensic analysis of text messages sent by her uncle Stuart Campbell, who was convicted of her murder 18 months later.
Police determined that Campbell had sent messages from Jones's phone to his own after she disappeared, to make it appear that she was still alive, and noted that the spelling of several words changed after she was reported missing.
[30] In 2006, prosecutors in Nashville, Tennessee, had Perry March arrested and extradited from Mexico after he had been secretly indicted on charges of murdering his wife Janet, who had disappeared in 1996.
After conviction and before sentencing, Reiser pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of second-degree murder in exchange for disclosing the location of his wife's body.
[34][35] In 2011, in Spain, Miguel Carcaño Delgado was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Marta del Castillo, 17-year-old high school student from Seville, Andalusia.
The jury rejected his version of events, as bone fragments and blood discovered in Bridger's house within days of her disappearance were matched to the DNA of Jones.
[38] In May 2014, Randy Taylor, a man from Nelson County, Virginia, was convicted for the abduction and murder of high school student Alexis Tiara Murphy, who vanished after being seen at a gas station in Lovingston.
[40] On 12 July 2016, in Singapore, 48-year-old Leslie Khoo Kwee Hock allegedly killed his 31-year-old girlfriend Cui Yajie, a Tianjin-born Chinese engineer, in his car during a heated argument nearby Gardens by the Bay.
In delivering his verdict, the judge in the case said: "None of the circumstances considered alone can establish Mr Dawson's guilt, but when regard is had to their combined force, I am left in no doubt.
"[42] Kristin Smart was last seen on the Cal Poly campus on May 25, 1996, walking home intoxicated after an off-campus party in the company of Paul Flores.
A 2021 search of his father's home located a 6-foot by 4-foot anomaly in the soil under his deck, and serological testing confirmed the presence of human blood.