1994's Most Bizzare 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 to 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, Dr. Mills continued, 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 a homicide on his hands. The room on the
ninth floor whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by and
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 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, one 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.