Can someone be charged with the murder of unidentified victims?

Question

I've been watching "Des", ITV's dramatisation of the arrest and trial of serial killer Dennis Nielsen. The police seem desperate to identify the names of the victims, despite having the bodies of the victims and ample evidence of Nielsen's guilt. Is there a particular reason for this (besides a desire to follow protocol properly and identify the victims' families, etc?)

I'm not a lawyer, but the show makes it seem like the police need to identify the victims in order to charge him with murder - like him being caught with multiple unidentified dead bodies in his house and admitting to guilt isn't enough.

(For those wondering, Nielsen claimed not to know the identities of his victims as they were predominantly homeless young men and, prior to murdering them, he had only had (in most cases) brief, consensual homosexual encounters with them and spoken to them on first-name terms, which was actually quite plausible). And it seems logical to me to believe that crimes require identified victims for charges to be brought.

Can someone be charged with murder of an unidentified victim?

Answer 1

Yes, a person can be charged with the murder of person or persons unknown

The reason that police are really keen to identify the victim include (in no particular order):

1. It will probably clear up a missing persons case;
2. So they can inform the next-of-kin;
3. Being able to place a named person who loved and was loved before a jury rather than nameless corpse increases the chance of conviction - all else being equal.

Answer 2

Let's try a thought experiment:

Assume (contrary to law) to get sentenced, not only you need to prove that someone did the killing, but also who the victim was.

This could lead to the following scenario:

• Alice kills Bob.
• To make sure nobody recognizes Bob, she chops off his hands and head, then throws both into a snowplow.
• To evade DNA evidence, she takes the resulting mess and the rest of the skeleton and burns them to crisp.
• Nothing to identify the remains as Bob's is left.
• The resulting head- and handless skeleton without DNA she puts up as Halloween decoration.

As it was made impossible to identify Bob with the remains, Alice can't be sentenced under this hypothetical law. In fact, its very setup does not only benefit such gruesome behavior to disguise the identity of the victims, it encourages it.

How the law works

Now, the thought experiment shows how gruesome the results would be if the law demanded identification. But the murder statutes are - in Common Law, Code Civil and Germanic tradition - written in ways that make the identity and even what the killed person did, in general, is made irrelevant, they focus on the mens rea of the one conducting the killing^{aside from self-defense}. Some examples:

• The UK does not define what is murder in a statute, but has laws which killing of someone is not murder by pointing to circumstances and the state of mind and what it is instead then.
• NY-State defines variations of murder based on the intent of the killing and the circumstances (Felony Murder Rule)
• Germany has its homicide crimes in StGB §211 to 213, which require the act of killing and an investigation into the intent and circumstanced to decide what section applies.
• France defines its (baseline) murder as "willful killing", so they require the act and the mens rea

Answer 3

In the U.S., John Wayne Gacy, one of the more infamous serial killers (famous for having a hobby of being a clown, though this was not used with his murder MO) was convicted on 33 counts of murder, all of whom were teenage or young adult males who Gacy sexually abused prior to their deaths. At time of his trial, 11 of the victims he was eventually convicted of killing were unidentified. Of those 11, 2 were identified while the trial was ongoing, an additional 4 were identified following Gacy's conviction, the most recent of which was identified in October of 2021. At least one of the 4 post-conviction bodies that remained unidentified until the renewed effort that begun in 2011 was long suspected by the victim's parents, however, they were unable to provide dental records as their family dentist had recently retired and all his records were destroyed.

While a reason was not asked, the renewed effort to identify Gacy's unidentified victims has led to the closing of four unrelated cold cases dating back as far as 1972 and ruled out several cases that Gacy was suspected of but never convicted of.

At time of writing, 5 of Gacy's victims remain unidentified, however all unidentified victims had viable DNA samples collected, as of October 2011.