I had head this story before and saw an episode that at least mentioned this on
a
TV show "Law & Order" or "Homicide" . So I decided to see what I could find on
the net.
I found this on http://www.snopes.com/ an Urban Legends page.
Origins: This amazing tale appeared on the Internet in August 1994.
Prized
both for the entertaining logic problem it presents as well as the morally
just
surprise ending, even years later it remains a cyber-favorite and continues
to be
forwarded to ever-widening circles of netizens.
A story this good should be true. Alas, it's not. There never was a
suicidal
Ronald
Opus, a feuding, shotgun-wielding older couple, or an increasingly confused
medical examiner trying to get to the bottom of things. But there is some
truth to
it, for there is a Don Harper Mills, and he did tell this very story at a
meeting of
the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
Here's how Mills explained his involvement with the story in a 1997
interview:
I made up the story in 1987 to present at the meeting, for
entertainment
and to
illustrate how if you alter a few small facts you greatly alter the
legal
consequences. In 1994 someone copied it on to the Internet. I was told
it had
already garnered 200,000 enquiries on the Net. In the past two years
I've had
around 400 telephone calls about it - librarians, journalists, law
students, even
law professors wanting to incorporate it into text books.
It was hypothetical; just a story made up to illustrate a point. It's hard
to
imagine
anyone at that 1987 meeting took it for anything else.
How did a 1987 illustrative anecdote morph into 1994's believed-to-be-true
story?
We'll likely never know. How did Dr. Mills come to concoct such a tale? As
he
said
in a 1997 interview, "Some of it I wrote out, and some of it I invented as
I
went
along."
Roger Elliott
Thearthurhsmith@cs.com wrote:
> --part1_62.1937055.25f90506_boundary
>
> In a message dated 3/8/00 7:28:55 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> mcgrice@eisa.net.au writes:
>
> > Isn't this ironic!
> >
> > At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science. A past
> > president, Dr. Don Harper Mills stounded his audience with the legal
> > complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story:
|