Realman cometh.....
1994's Most Bizarre Suicide
At the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the American Association
for Forensic Science, AAFS President Don Harper Mills astounded his audience
in San Diego with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the
story.
On 23 March 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald
Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound of the head. The
decedent had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit
suicide (he left a note indicating his despondency). As he fell past the
ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window,
which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware
that a safety net had been erected at the eighth floor level to protect some
window washers and that Opus would not have been able to complete his
suicide anyway because of this.
Ordinarily a person who sets out to commit suicide ultimately
succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended. That Opus
was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not
have changed his mode of death from suicide to homicide. But the fact that
his suicidal intent would not have been successful caused the medical
examiner to feel that he had homicide on his hands.
The room on the ninth floor whence the shotgun blast emanated was
occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing and he was
threatening her with the shotgun. He was so upset that, when he pulled the
trigger, he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the
window striking Opus.
When one intends to kill subject A but kills subject B in the
attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. When confronted with this
charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant that neither knew that
the shotgun was loaded. The old man said it was his long-standing habit to
threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder
her - therefore, the killing of Opus appeared to be an accident. That is,
the gun had been accidentally loaded.
The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old
couple's son loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to the fatal
incident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial
support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun
threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would
shoot his mother. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son
for the death of Ronald Opus.
There was an exquisite twist. Further investigation revealed that
the son [Ronald Opus] had become increasingly despondent over the failure of
his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the
ten-story building on March 23, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through
a ninth story window.
The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide. |
