1993. Body in the woodshed

When Dawn saw the dead body in her woodshed she didn’t know what to do next. Clearly the body had died several hours earlier. Rigor mortis had already begun to set in. Dawn had once worked as a nurse so she knew these things. Trying to revive the body was a waste of time. It was as dead as the wood in her woodshed.

Dawn was a practical woman to the hilt. She remained absolutely calm. She surveyed the situation as if she was in a fabric shop selecting a pattern for a proposed table runner. What to do with the body? She shut the woodshed door and went back into the house.

It wasn’t winter. It wasn’t cold. There would be no need for her to get firewood for a couple of months. She had bought an air ticket for her husband to go to Hawaii on a vacation for several months. They did that in their marriage once every decade or so. It cleared the air and they could start afresh. He had left yesterday, so the story would go. Dawn would simply leave the body in the woodshed until winter.

That way the coroner would have difficulty determining the cause of death of her husband. “But I thought he was having a great time in Hawaii.”

1981. A well-planned homicide

Randy had “pinched” Willy’s girlfriend of two years. Needless to say, Randy and Willy were no longer friends. Willy decided that revenge was the best option. Randy was on Willy’s unwritten list: To Be Murdered.

Of course Willy didn’t want to spend the rest of his years behind bars. An undetected murder would take some creative planning. There were two viable options: accident or natural causes. All other forms of death could be construed as being possibly murderous.

Willy didn’t have enough knowhow to construct a death by natural causes. You would have to be a doctor or a chemist of some sort to engineer that. Constructing an accident was the best and only option. There was no hurry. Willy had a new girlfriend. The old girlfriend was a distant memory, but the memory of cheating Randy was still fresh in Willy’s mind.

A car accident? An industrial accident? (After all, Randy worked in a flour mill). Falling off a roof or out of a tree? Something like that perhaps.

The mutual rancour between Randy and Willy grew. Willy’s new girlfriend, the literary Sandy, oft quoted William Blake:

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

Willy was now just two days away from implementing his carefully planned murder. That was when Randy’s plan was enacted. It was a perfect murder. Willy, the murder-planner, is no more.