Ronald Opus
Ronald Opus is the name of a man killed in a fictional investigation. The story, concocted by the American pathologist Don Harper Mills, begins with Opus's attempted suicide, but contains many twists and turns, repeatedly asking the question of whether it is a legal suicide or murder .
Origin and Distribution
The story was conceived by Don Harper Mills, President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences , and delivered as a speech at an academy banquet in 1987. According to statements in a 1997 interview, Mills had written down parts of the story beforehand and invented more as the speech progressed. On the one hand he came up with them for entertainment, on the other hand to illustrate "how you can massively change the legal effects if you change a few small facts."
After spreading on the Internet as a supposedly true modern saga from August 1994 onwards, newer versions often add that the case happened in March 1994 and was told by Mills that same year. As of 1998, a non-existent Associated Press journalist wrote a report on the academy's event. In 1999 the San Francisco Police Officers Association circulated it as a supposedly true story, to which the San Francisco Chronicle responded with a rebuttal.
Mills has received requests from history journalists, law students and professors to use it in textbooks since it was first published. It is now included in various books on law as a hypothetical case for discussion.
Content of the story
When narrating the alleged case, Mills reflects the development of the investigative findings and comments in each case on whether, according to the current status, it is suicide or murder.
A forensic doctor found the body of Ronald Opus dead from a shot in the head with a rifle . Investigations have already revealed that he jumped from the roof of a ten-story building to commit suicide, but was hit by the shotgun fired from the room at the ninth floor level. If someone dies while attempting suicide in a manner other than planned, the death is still considered a suicide. However, a safety net was stretched on the eighth floor , which is why Opus would have survived the case, so that the forensic doctor considers the shot to be murder.
An elderly couple had argued on the ninth floor, the man threatening the woman with a shotgun, but missing the trigger after the trigger. That would be the murder of Opus if the man had killed him with the intention of killing the woman. According to their own statements, the couple believed the shotgun was not loaded because it was the man's habit to use it as an empty threat. That he still met someone would therefore be an accident.
One witness reported that the shotgun had been loaded by the couple's son, to whom his mother refused further financial aid. The son, who expected his father to accidentally meet his mother at some point, is therefore the culprit of the murder, even if he neither shot nor was the mother actually killed.
In the final twist, it is discovered that the son was Ronald Opus, who thus killed himself from the gunshot. The coroner closes the case as suicide.
Processing in media
The story has been modified in particular in crime series as a case that the characters have to solve, or only as a hypothetical one, for example in 1998 in Homicide and Murder Call , 2003 in Law & Order and 2010 in CSI: Miami .
In the 1999 film Magnolia , screenwriter and director Paul Thomas Anderson used the story in the intro as one of three examples of special coincidences presented by a narrator. The dead man is called Sydney Barringer and it is his mother who shoots. She is charged with the murder of her son and he is named as an accomplice in his own death.
In the manga series JoJo no Kimyō na Bōken , it is varied in the sixth story arc Stone Ocean as the background story of the character Thunder McQueen, which appears in a volume from 2000: He was imprisoned for eight years because he accidentally shot a woman while cleaning his weapon, which just passed his window while attempting suicide.
The indie rock band Silvery processed the story musically with the song The Ronald Opus on their third album Etiquette , which they released in 2013.
Web link
- Text version : Murder or Suicide? , in: Duty First , Vol. 7, No. 2, Spring 2006, p. 22.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c 1994’s Most Bizarre Suicide . In: Snopes . December 20, 1999. Retrieved August 6, 2021.
- ↑ Fiction is stranger than truth . In: San Francisco Chronicle . October 1, 1999. Retrieved August 6, 2021.
- ↑ Kim Norvell: Fact check: Story of man who jumped off building but died by gunshot as he fell is a hoax . In: USA Today . December 1, 2020. Accessed August 6, 2021.
