At the 1994 Annual Awards dinner given for Forensic Science, AAFS, the President, Dr Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death as follows.

On 23 March 1994 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head. Mr Opus had jumped from the top of a ten-storey building intending to commit suicide. He left a note to that effect, indicating his depression.

As he fell past the ninth floor his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through the window which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor Ronald Opus were aware that a safety net has been installed just below the eighth floor level to protect some building workers. Thus, Ronald Opus would not have been able to commit suicide in the way that he had planned.

“Ordinarily,” Dr Mills continued, “a person who sets out to commit suicide and ultimately succeeds even though the mechanism might not be what he intended is still defined as committing suicide.”

That Mr Opus was shot on the way to certain death but probably would not have been successful because of the safety net caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands.

An elderly man and his wife occupied the room on the ninth floor from where the shotgun was fired. They had been arguing vigorously and he was threatening her with the shotgun. The man was so upset that when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife and the pellets went out of the window and struck Ronald Opus.

When a person intends to kills subject A but kills subject B that person is guilty of the murder of subject B.

When confronted with the murder charge the old man and his wife said that they believed the shotgun to be unloaded. The old man stated that it was a long standing habit of his to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her.

Thus the killing of Ronald Opus appeared to be an accident. That is, the gun had been accidentally loaded.

The continuing investigation turned up a witness who had seen the old couple’s son loading the shotgun about six weeks prior to the death of Ronald Opus. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son’s financial support and the son knowing his father’s propensity to use the shotgun to threaten his mother loaded the shotgun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.

The case now became that of murder of Ronald Opus by the old couple’s son.

Further investigation revealed that the son was, in fact, Ronald Opus. He had become increasingly depressed at the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother’s death. This depression led him to jump off the building on the 23^rd of March, in a suicide attempt that would fail because of the safety net below the eighth floor, only to be killed by the shotgun blast passing through the ninth storey window.

The finding? The son had murdered himself.

Verdict: Suicide.