If you felt your theft would be discovered, you could very easily expect the explosion would destroy all traces of the theft and nobody would know any better. M

If you felt your theft would be discovered, you could very easily expect the explosion would destroy all traces of the theft and nobody would know any better. Many people, especially uneducated people, would not have expected that the theft would be detectable by the size of the explosion. I'm pretty smart and well educated, but I'm not even sure such a thing would have occurred to me, and even if it did I might have preferred my odds taking my chances on that anyway. To be very clear though, I wouldn't have done something so heinous in the first place. Given the sequence events, with the welding going on etc, I don't think this happened. But not for the reasoning you gave.