It's a mystery to me
I’m working on my first ever mystery story, and, to no great surprise, I’ve already run afoul of my ignorance of police procedure.
Premise: successful, affluent man who lives alone, with seemingly everything to live for is found dead in his driveway, apparently having fallen from his house’s balcony above. There’s absolutely no evidence of forced entry or struggle — everything points toward his having simply awakened in the night, opening the doors to his balcony, and jumping off (all forensic evidence is consistent with this.) But there is no history of depression and seemingly no motivation for suicide — everyone who knows him, including his family, remark on his sunny disposition.
So my question is… how long and how hard would the police investigate this? I’m guessing not very, that a coroner’s report that there was no struggle and he died from the fall plus the absence of evidence of anyone else having been in the house would quickly make for a conclusion of suicide, even with a family member insisting that’s implausible. (And while the dead man was reasonably affluent, he wasn’t a mover and shaker who played golf with the mayor or otherwise had any special pull, and his family has even less.)
Anyone out there have any familiarity with police investigations of deaths?
If nobody reliable posts anything, you could consult the police on one of their non-emergency or information lines. You'd be amazed at how much people want to tell you if you tell them you're a writer researching a piece of fiction. In this case, I'd probably be careful to say that I wanted to know, for a mystery story, what the steps were for the police to determine something was a suicide rather than a homicide or an accident, because otherwise they might try to overstate how careful/attentive they would be. But it's something to consider.
If that doesn't work, I'll call my cousin Tank for you.
Posted by Mris on May 24 2003 11:51
my first reaction to the situation you describe, zed, is that someone is not seeing what's right in front of them (not you as writer, but the family who asserts the victim was a helluva guy).
you need a hook of a significant detail to snare both the cops' and the readers' interest, a detail (like Mris suggests) that hints that not all was sunny and rosy for this victim. perhaps this detail is so obvious that no one but a detached investigator could see it. maybe the community left behind even deters the investigation with their own denial over this death, which might be more interesting, since you could leave the most horrifying clue for those folks to see, and they wouldn't dare look at it for what it is.
i know of which i speak. i happened to be consoling a dear friend the morning after her father's murder when the cops came over to interview her and her family. it was a pretty open and shut case, but what made it unusual for the cops, i believe, was this family's extraordinary level of denial. the victim, after all, was found lying in a pool of his own blood with a blunt object lying next to him, but his family refused to believe he was murdered. watching the cops assess the family's reaction definitely made the detectives less hard-nosed, less "i've-seen-it-all," and cued them to look at the case more carefully. the family itself clearly had nothing to hide where the investigation was concerned. they simply couldn't allow themselves to believe that this kind man without an enemy had been murdered.
there's more to this, zed, which i will share with you privately, should any of it ring a bell for you. but maybe it takes it in too psychological a direction.
Posted by barth on May 28 2003 10:05
ps. we missed you at wiscon!
Posted by barth on May 28 2003 10:07
The mystery writers I have known or know of have all made friendships with some willing neighborhood police officer or other.
But there's also a good writer's alternative to getting it right, and that's to invent a bold but satisfactory motivation for why you've got it wrong. Like the chief of police has his or her own strikingly shady motivation for wanting to suppress the investigation and that's why the police are ignoring obvious suspicious circumstances. That sort of device, if pulled off well, is like a magician's sleight of hand because it's really just handling the awkward plot element but what it SEEMS to be doing is adding another layer of complexity to your plot.
Posted by Scott on May 28 2003 12:08