Wednesday, October 26, 2005
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The perfect crime

As a young lad I was especially obsessed with the idea of devising the perfect murder (I blame this in part on growing up without television). I decided right away that the victim had to be a stranger (so that I would have no motive should I prove to be a suspect), and there needed to be no witnesses. These were fairly easy: strangers are everywhere, and they're BAD! (Take the stranger quiz here! [Hint: They're all strangers even the fireman and the nice man with the flowers). So I figured it was probably OK to murder a stranger, as long as I got away with it. I had also decided that I had to do it on my own: accomplices are likely to fold under interrogation, and without accomplices there's no need to keep a story straight. I wasn't so worried about setting up an alibi, as a small child is seldom a suspect in a murder case. Especially if there are no witnesses, no motive (except for my desire to commit a perfect murder [which I did not publicize at the time]), and no accomplices to brag about it on the playground or at church.

The hard question was really the murder weapon. Although our house had plenty (knives [especially the one I used to chop at the edges of the kitchen countertops. It was more like a machete than a kitchen knife, at least as I recall]; lawn mowers; hatchets; rope; piano wire [inside the piano], just to mention a few), none of them were really suitable. If found (post-murder), many of them could be identified as Dunce family property (I was certainly not planning to let any family members know about it, so one of them might unwittingly incriminate me). So the weapon needed to be something that I could obtain from outside the house. Buying a weapon of some kind at a store was not really a viable possibility as I was young enough that the purchase of any potential murder weapon I could think of would be likely to attract notice, should the weapon be found and its possible purchasers investigated. I was especially worried about the possibility that I could be identified using fingerprints or some other physical residue (perhaps a hair caught on the rivet of a knife handle, perhaps a swatch of fabric from the sleeve of my shirt, perhaps an unusual chemical residue that turned out to match the homemade Agent Orange my father used to kill poison ivy in the yard [as you can see, I read a lot of murder mysteries so I was eager to protect myself against these kinds of possibilities]).

Then it occurred to me: an icicle would be the perfect murder weapon. In central Indiana there was no shortage of icicles, and one could be obtained from many outdoor locations without arousing much suspicion. Stab the victim with the icicle, then abandon it somewhere safe where it would be likely to melt away before it was found. Even a little melting would obscure any fingerprints (I'm not sure why I didn't just think of wearing gloves). A genius plan, or so I thought. The victim's heavy winter clothing would prevent me from becoming too blood-spattered (I didn't consider that it might also make the stabbing more difficult). I could also probably find a single victim on his own (for some reason I had decided that my victim needed to be a man), for example, shoveling snow. I could even commit the crime during a blizzard, which would obscure any telltale footprints which could lead back to me (I would of course take a circuitous wander before the killing, and a similar wander afterwards). It would be important to only do this once: I was worried about being identified by geographical patterns, or being spotted by a witness. Anyway once you've committed the perfect murder there's not really any way to improve on it.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that this perfect weapon is far from perfect, being in fact quite well-known (at least in the realm of possibility):

Google search: Results 1 - 88 of about 174 for "stabbed with an icicle".

Google search: Results 1 - 10 of about 25 for "murdered with an icicle".

And if you search for the phrase "the perfect murder weapon is", Google obligingly provides the following terms (in order of their listing on Google): a big icicle, paper, An icicle, an icecicle, ice that has been shaped into a point, CHAINSAW (also includes "icicle"), an icicle. Maybe my idea was not so original after all. It's even mentioned in a Telegraph article entitled "How to commit the perfect murder" (P.D. James advises potential perfect murderers to "Keep it simple" and "don't tell a soul", while Patricia Cornwell sneers contempuously at crime of all sorts, preferring to plug her misguided notions of the identity of Jack the Ripper). So it's a really good thing I didn't do it. Honest, officer.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005 12:10:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [1]  | 
Saturday, October 29, 2005 9:17:51 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
If you had grown up with a TV, you might have seen the episode of "Columbo" in which a man is brained with a chunk of ice in the pool and the weapon is left to melt. At first, everyone believes the victim simply hit his head and drowned, but then Columbo analyzes the puddle next to the pool and finds--no chlorine in this water! Ergo, it must have been a chunk of ice! It's tough to outsmart Peter Falk...
Frank
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