A Murder To Look Up To!

Alexcia Reynolds & Matt Pederson

Prologue

Mark Samson wished he could join the party downstairs, but he had work to do. 'Oh, well,' he thought, 'another deadline, another dollar.' It was cold outside, so earlier Mark had turned on the heater. Now it was too hot in the upstairs den, so he opened the window to enjoy the cool, winter breeze. Getting into his work and listening in on the party downstairs through the widely open door, he suddenly heard a slight, breaking sound. He thought that maybe one of the guests had accidentally dropped a glass. He was just about to get up from his chair to see if he could help clean it up, when he saw a masked person standing in front of him. Mark hadn't heard anyone come into the den. The masked person held a sharp object in one hand just above Mark's head. Then the object was thrust into his chest and straight into his heart. The perpetrator took off the mask, and Mark with his last dying, breath, saw who it was. The last person he would have thought would kill him.

Chapter I

Within minutes, the murderer made it look like Mark had had a heart attack while opening the window and fell forward onto a spike just outside the window, breaking his watch (after it was set back half an hour). 'The weapon will not be found,' thought the murderer, 'because, by the time anyone sees him, it will have disappeared forever.' And, just like that, the murderer (and the mask) disappeared. A few minutes later, Liz came in to check on her husband.

"Mark?" No response. "Mark, are you all right?" Still no response. Liz walked over to him, turned him over and screamed.

Chapter II

"He appears to have been stabbed, but there was an unusual amount of liquid around the wound, possibly water, diluting the blood and cooling the body, making it harder to discern the time of death," said the coroner.

"No hints that could lead to any sort of intended demise," asked the detective Liz had called. She hoped he knew what the coroner would say.

"You mean murder? No, so far as I can tell, he had a heart attack and fell on the window spike. Completely a natural death... sort of."

"But, shouldn't you check for a possible murder? Couldn't he have been stabbed?"

Disch was starting to get on the detective's nerves. "Go away kid, okay? It's an open and shut case, so quit tryin' to ruin my day." Svei Disch, a friend of the Samson's, and an investigator for hire while finishing college, wasn't convinced. He was sure that Mark had been murdered, and he was determined to find out who did it.

Mark and Liz had been married for 15 years, and poor Liz was not taking his death well. As she left the morgue, the reporters swarmed about her. The death of the well-known magazine writer, Mark Samson, was a big event, and all the periodicals wanted the story. The police held back the crowds of reporters so Liz could pass through on her way to her house. Though she was to stay at the home of a close friend, she still had to gather a few basic necessities from the home of her late husband. Svei tried to catch up to her but the crowds paid no attention to him, closing in after Liz, and leaving him in the rushing sea of reporters.

Chapter III

Svei Disch returned to the Samson home. As he went up to the house, he paused to take in the situation. He knew something wasn't right. He sighed and looked up. He saw an uneven area where an icicle had been. Another icicle suddenly fell from the roof where it had hung. It made a slight rut in the snow on the lower roof where it landed. Svei noticed that it was a smooth, clean break, not like the jagged break of the one next to it. They both happened to be just outside the bedroom window, right next to the den. He then proceeded to searching the whole house, top to bottom, for anything that could tell him who had killed Mark. He found the following evidence.

  1. icicle broken from roof outside bedroom window

  2. small flakes of ice on windowsill in bedroom

  3. puddles of water in den and bedroom

  4. black leather gloves in trash compactor

With this list, Disch went to pay a visit to anyone at the party who might have wanted to kill Mark Samson. After two hours of questioning the people who were at the party, Svei Disch knew who had killed Mark. Before he took the sad responsibility of exposing the killer, Svei sat down on a park bench to review his facts and to check to see if there was any possibility he was wrong. He came up with the following relevant clues:

  1. The jaggedly broken icicle outside the bedroom window, the ice flakes on the sill, the water in the den and on the body proved that the weapon was not the knife he thought he was looking for. It was an icicle!

  2. The fact that no one had entered or left the house said that the killer definitely had to be one of the people at the house for the party.

  3. The fact that the killer had enough gall to kill Mark during the party when anybody could come up for any reason and catch them.

Svei hated himself or pushing to find the truth, but he also hated one of his dearest friends for what she made him do.

Can you tell who did it?

Svei rang the doorbell, and when Liz answered the door, he asked if she could call together all the present residents of the house for the revealing of Mark's killer. In five minutes, the group had gathered. Svei needed them only as witnesses and insurance that he couldn't be wrong. Through the group was there, he spoke directly to Liz. "I know who killed Mark, and so do you. Soon everybody will know who did it. Do you want to tell the people who murdered your husband, or shall I?"

Liz looked shocked and aghast. She said to him, "I don't know what you're talking about." Svei was patient and replied, "You know very well who Mark's killer is, but for the sake of the group, I will tell you who it is. You killed your husband, Liz."

Marcus, the head of the household where they were presently located, and where Liz had been staying, jumped up in outrage. But, Svei had become stone, his hand rose swiftly to silence Marcus, who sat back down. When Svei again spoke, there was an unusual set to his voice, a deep tone of command they had never heard before, and it quieted the hushed whispers that had been going on since he said that Liz had killed her husband.

"All the evidence points to you, Liz," he continued. "You are the only one who had the chance, you had to be the one."

Svei's face softened and Liz fell apart. Leaning on him for support, she sobbed. He spoke calmly, soothingly, calming her down. When her sobbing subsided, she spoke softly, confessing everything.

"Fifteen years I loved him. With all my heart. But in the last few years, he had been getting home later and later, showing all the signs. I knew he was having an affair, but I loved him, so I endured. But, I finally had had enough. He came home so late one night that I didn't see him until I got up the next day. At the party, I pulled out a few items I needed: my old cat woman Halloween costume and an old ski mask. I wasn't quite in control of myself, I didn't want to kill him, but something else was inside me, and I could feel it drive the icicle into his chest. Then I panicked, so I covered my tracks."

Svei had lost two of his closest friends in the past week; one was killed, and the other did it. Elizabeth Myra Samson got 15 years in the federal prison and 5 more as a worker in a preschool, and stayed with her sister-in-law.


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