Making a Suicide Like Some Random Accident

Lot's of possibilities. Off the top of head:
Car crash. If he wants to make it less suspicious he picks a dark, rainy night.

If he's an outdoor type he could go rock climbing, or visit some scenic overlook, etc, and have an accidental fall.

He could "accidently" shoot himself while "cleaning his gun". (For more realism, hitting himself in the femoral artery and making it look like he tried to crawl in from the garage to get a phone to call for help would see it better.)

How weird are you willing to go. You want open casket? Methods that involve heavy physical injury are probably out. Car accident, dives off high places, they might induce too much damage. Maybe. Maybe not. Stepping in front of a vehicle might not result in a closed-casket scenario.

Hanging might work. Auto-erotic asphyxiation?

Something with a drug? The date-rape drug, rohypnol (sp?) is suppose to break down pretty quickly, and it can induce very high temperatures leading to death. But I don't know how that would look in an autopsy. They might not look for it.

Nowadays, there is very little that is not forensically detectable. So the only "safe" way would be to have an overt cause of death. And often death is not certain in such "accidents".

Well, there's staging a suicide to look like an accident, and then there's the reverse.

According to Scotland Yard, the best way to commit suicide is to zip yourself into a sports bag, padlock the bag on the outside while you are inside, and while still inside clean off your fingerprints from the bag, the lock, and indeed the entire apartment, and also scrub your flat for DNA traces. Then you can safely die of suffocation and the police will overrule the coroner's verdict of homicide because, really, does that seem very likely in the circumstances?

Telergic said:

Well, there's staging a suicide to look like an accident, and then there's the reverse.

According to Scotland Yard, the best way to commit suicide is to zip yourself into a sports bag, padlock the bag on the outside while you are inside, and while still inside clean off your fingerprints from the bag, the lock, and indeed the entire apartment, and also scrub your flat for DNA traces. Then you can safely die of suffocation and the police will overrule the coroner's verdict of homicide because, really, does that seem very likely in the circumstances?

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That only works if you work for one of the British spy agencies.

I agree with Trebor that your best option might be to give your character a hobby that will allow him to fake a mishap. Rock climbing would be a good one. He could also go horseback riding and purposefully fail a difficult jump. Or he could be a triathlete and let himself drown.

He could also take a knock-out pill and leave the oven on. If his house starts on fire, he would technically die of asphyxiation, so an autopsy would reveal the carbon monoxide in his lungs. Would anyone suspect that he knocked himself out so that he'd purposefully die of smoke inhalation? If the fire was extinguished before his body was burned, it would still possibly allow for an open casket.

Do keep in mind that the mental state of someone who commits suicide is not necessarily anywhere close to the mental state of someone who commits suicide which they premeditated and actively tried to cover up. If you make it sound like he was going to all this trouble to cover up his suicide "just because," i.e. the motivation is part of a mystery, the reader is going to assume it's sloppy writing.

The first thought that comes to mind is a car crash. That would definitely look like an accident.

Trebor1415 said:

Lot's of possibilities. Off the top of head:
Car crash. If he wants to make it less suspicious he picks a dark, rainy night.

If he's an outdoor type he could go rock climbing, or visit some scenic overlook, etc, and have an accidental fall.

He could "accidently" shoot himself while "cleaning his gun". (For more realism, hitting himself in the femoral artery and making it look like he tried to crawl in from the garage to get a phone to call for help would see it better.)

Click to expand...

Any plausible reason for him to be using power tools? Any one of a variety of power-saws could chop an artery, and, as with Trebor's gun, a faked attempt to crawl to the nearest phone would look good.

Cold snap or power failure? He starts up a gas-powered generator in an badly ventilated room, the carbon monoxide gets him. Maybe it's in his basement? The carbon monoxide builds up, he goes down to check on it, never comes back up. Or at least that's what the investigation figures.