Several of us were “talking” on Facebook this morning about the fact we can’t see a rolled up carpet alongside the road without thinking there’s a dead body in it.
If any organized crime enforcers are reading this blog, I have a question: Do real killers roll bodies up in carpets?
If a cop or a nosy neighbor sees a couple of guys putting a roll of carpet in the trunk of a car at night, you’d think the scene would be a dead give-away.
Perhaps we’ve seen too much TV where bodies are lamely rolled up in carpets. A popular show last year showed a bunch of college students moving a body that way. Gosh, if that’s the disposal method of choice for students, just think about older people who’ve seen a thousand crime shows where carpets and the dead always went out in the trash together.
When I see ads for rolled up carpet, I expect a disclaimer at the bottom that says: Dead Body Not Included.
There must be a better way of removing the dead from our presence that doesn’t attract attention. The wood chipper in Fargo had possibilities until a lot of people saw the movie and assumed that if they heard a wood chipper at night, somebody was going to be reported missing in the morning.
The TV series Bones finds interesting (and usually gross) ways of disposing of bodies at the beginning of each show. They seem to like the “high yuck” factor to attract the disturbed segment of the population.
As an author, I speculate about this kind of thing for research purposes. However, what with the feds spying on us, it’s become harder and harder to do Google searches like “How Can I Hide Uncle Ned’s Body” without some web crawler bot finding it and flagging the query at one of the alphabet soup agencies that claims it isn’t watching for key words like “body” and “rolled up carpet.”
We hear on TV and the Internet that cops think cop shows are unrealistic. They could help. All it would take would be a web page with information like this:
- How to put granny on an ice floe without getting caught.
- How to poison your husband/wife so that even Abby on NCIS won’t figure out how it happened.
- How to dispose of a body without getting caught by the police.
- How to successfully launder money, hire a hit man, move weapons around the country, and get away with running a numbers racket out of your kitchen.
Frankly, all of us would benefit from this kind of information: (a) authors would make books and screen plays more realistic, (b) readers/viewers would have higher quality entertainment, (c) kids would stop getting scared when they see rolls of carpet in the ditch because nobody would be using carpet improperly any more.
Those of us who have been scarred for life worrying about what’s in rolls of carpet would finally know that carpets are safe. The country would save billions of dollars that go to therapists who are helping patients cope with this problem. (My guess is that most health insurance companies don’t over “Carpet Phobia.)
Personally, when I see a roll of carpet, I want to visualize how beautiful it will look in the living room rather than thinking, “hmm, I have seen Dad for a couple of days.”
–Malcolm
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “At Sea,” “Conjure Woman’s Cat,” “Sarabande,” and other books in which no dead guys have been rolled up in a carpet.
Malcolm's Round Table 
Seems to me that a body rolled up in a carpet would be a rather heavy and large load. Never had the problem myself though.
Seems that way to me as well. One needs a “staff” of goons take care of the heavy work.
Of course there’s certainly no shortage of “goons”.
No, probably not.
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