1994's Most Bizarre Suicide
Don Harper Mills
At
the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the American Association for Forensic
Sciences, AAFS President Don Harper Mills astounded his audience in San Diego
with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story...
On
March 23 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that
he died from a gunshot wound of the head caused by a shotgun. Investigation to
that point had revealed that the decedent had jumped from the top of a ten story building with the intent to commit suicide. (He
left a note indicating his despondency.) As he passed the 9th floor on the way
down, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, killing him
instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had
been erected at the 8th floor level to protect some window washers, and that the
decedent would not have been able to complete his intent to commit suicide
because of this...
Ordinarily
a person who starts into motion the events with a suicide intent ultimately
commits suicide even though the mechanism might be not what he intended. That
he was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not
change his mode of death from suicide to homicide, but the fact that his
suicide intent would not have been achieved under any circumstance caused the
medical examiner to feel that he had homicide on his hands...
Further
investigation led to the discovery that the room on the 9th floor from whence
the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. He was
threatening her with the shotgun because of an interspousal spat and became so
upset that he could not hold the shotgun straight. Therefore, when he pulled
the trigger, he completely missed his wife, and the pellets went through the
window, striking the decedent.
When
one intends to kill subject A, but kills subject B in the attempt, one is
guilty of the murder of subject B. The old man was confronted with this
conclusion, but both he and his wife were adamant in stating that neither knew
that the shotgun was loaded. It was the longtime habit of the old man to
threaten his wife with an unloaded shotgun. He had no intent to murder her;
therefore, the killing of the decedent appeared then to be accident. That is,
the gun had been accidentally loaded...
But
further investigation turned up a witness that their son was seen loading the
shotgun approximately six weeks prior to the fatal accident. That investigation
showed that the mother (the old lady) had cut off her son's financial support,
and her son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly,
loaded the gun with the expectation that the father would shoot his mother. The
case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald
Opus...
Further
investigation revealed that the son became increasingly despondent over the
failure of his attempt to get his mother murdered. This led him to jump off the
ten story building on March 23, only to be killed by a
shotgun blast through a 9th story window.
The
medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.