A certain person owed him a sum of money, or he was threatening proceedings against a certain person, or for some reason--as in the famous Northumberland Street tragedy--it was to the interest of a certain person to get him into a house and murder him. The trap was laid. William Smith met his enemy--the enemy invited him to his house, his chambers, or his flat. A sudden blow felled the victim to the ground and killed him. How could the body be disposed of? The clerk to a Burial Board who gave evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons explains the whole process. To show that I am not imagining or exaggerating I will give the exact words from the report "ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 15th August and 1st September, 1893." The evidence is given on page 19 of the Select Committee's Report. "You do not want a certificate to bury a body; you can dispose of a body in the London Cemetery without any certificate at all. If any gentleman here was murdered, to put it plainly, and you had a queer undertaker to dispose of that body, he could dispose of it without any one being any the wiser." "2343. How could he dispose of it?--I will give you an instance. Say I am an undertaker, and I have got the body of a man named William Smith to be buried to-morrow at Finchley, and he is registered all right. A person comes to me at eleven o'clock at night and says, 'I have got a body to get rid of, and I will give you £500 to do it.' The undertaker takes the body he has got to get rid of to Finchley, and buries it as William Smith without a certificate; we send that notice to the registrar, who refers to his book, and finds that it is quite right. Then the undertaker will take the real William Smith to Ilford Cemetery, say, and take the body up there with a certificate, which saves any inquiry being made. "2344. What does he do with the other body?--He has already taken that up without a certificate to Finchley Cemetery; he buries the body he has got to get rid of at Finchley, and withholds the certificate of William Smith; the authorities then give notice to the registrar that William Smith was buried there, and the certificate was not delivered. The undertaker has that certificate in his possession then, and he can take the original William Smith up to another cemetery, and there they do not trouble, because they get a certificate delivered with the body. "2345. In that way you think it is very easy to get rid of a body if any one desires to do so?--Yes, unless there was a law passed that no body should be interred without a burial certificate being delivered at the time." That is the manner in which a murdered body might be disposed of. The friends and relatives would be in complete ignorance of the fate of the man who had disappeared. It would remain for ever a mystery.