That’s the take away lesson from the Zahra Baker murder case.
As a reward for her proficiency at disposing of her 10-year-old victim, Elisa Baker is doing a minimum of 14 years for murdering and dismembering a child. If she behaves well, 14 years is all the time she will do for her crime.
Life Lesson: If you are going to dispatch someone, you can’t be a sissy and leave the body lying around at an intact murder scene. You have to take matters into your own hands. Elisa Baker did that and got, relatively speaking, rewarded with a slap on the hand for her crime.
What you’ve got to do is to hide the body well. Baker chose to dismember her victim and spread the pieces across a couple of counties, buried in random places and scattered among hunting carcasses. If Baker hadn’t cut a deal with the authorities to tell them where some of the pieces were, I seriously wonder whether she’d be doing any prison time at all.
Even after Baker led them to some of the disposal sites in exchange for prosecutors agreeing to only seek second degree murder changes, the authorities only recovered the torso, which was decomposed enough that investigators couldn’t tell what the cause of death was.
It also helps if no one can say for sure who the last person your victim was seen with was or when exactly they disappeared.
Something is profoundly wrong here.
Bonus Observation: If either of Zahra Baker’sbiological parents had given a rip about her, this wouldn’t have happened.
