Urban Legends, The Ronald Opus story

Been a while since I started a thread... This one was motivated by a mail that my chic sent me, so I did some research


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...

So begins a text circulating rampantly on the Internet since 1995, cropping up again and again in postings to mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups, almost always accompanied by the claim that the story recounted is actually true. Even now, years after its Net debut, search engines pull up no fewer than a hundred Websites where "1994's Most Bizarre Suicide" still resides in more or less its original form. Is it just another Internet-enhanced urban legend, or did it really happen?

Let's investigate.

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...

Obviously the story's main selling point is irony, which is also a promising clue as to its veracity. In urban legends, suicide attempts always have an ironic outcome – as in the familiar (but untrue) tale of the man who was fired from his job and leapt from his office window intending to kill himself, only to land on his former boss on the sidewalk below, killing the latter instead. The impact of the story in both cases derives from the "poetic justice" brought about by a freakish coincidence – perhaps too freakish to be believable.

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...

Note that regardless of whether it's true or false, the story is lent credibility by the fact that it's told from the point of view of a medical examiner trying to determine whether a crime was committed or not. From this point on, it reads much like a detective story.

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...

Accidentally loaded? By whom? The plot thickens...

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...

Except for one last, perfect ironic twist...

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.

This is a great story – so great that we want to believe it, we hope it's true, however outlandish the "facts" presented may be. The question we must ask ourselves in our investigation is: mightn't it be too good to be true?

And who is Ronald Opus?  A Nigerian politician?

He got what he wanted