How to fake a suicide at a boarding school

Putputt said:

I need one of my characters to kill another character and make it look like a suicide. The killer is pretty strong, the victim is fit but nowhere near as strong as he is. They're both 17. The method could be anything, but they are teenagers at a fancy boarding school and it needs to look convincing enough as a suicide such that it fools the cops. Halps!

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Hey Putputt,

Just a smidge more context plox:

Is the victim aware that they're a target and what is their relationship like with the killer?

Also, do they need to be found in a particular place (like their room) or is there freedom so long as it's in the grounds?

(I don't have anything yet, but it'd help my brain bubble).

Would auto-erotic asphyxiation count as "suicide"?

I'm better at killing people and making it look like an accident... they tend to flail around too much to make a suicide look good. Much easier to just snap their neck and toss the body down some stairs.

Falling from a high place? Any scenic cliffs in the vicinity? After the fact it's hard to tell if someone jumped or was pushed.

The suicide might be more plausible if there's some kind of farewell-letter. Of course, nobody writes those things by hand any more. The murderer could swipe the victim's phone/hack the victim's social networking account and make some ominuous tweets/FB status updates.

Also:

Messing with prescribed medication.
Drug-overdose.
Pushing someone in front of the Hogwart's express.

Putputt said:

Hi little hedgehog!

-The victim dislikes the killer but doesn't think of him as someone who is potentially dangerous. If he told her to meet him somewhere, she would go by herself since she's a loner.

-The murder and the body could be found anywhere as long as it's on the school grounds. It could also happen at any time day/night.

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In that case then Sohalts suggestion is probably one of the simplest to go with - big fall with a guaranteed smoosh at the bottom = difficult to prove murder.

Keep in mind that in many cases when a murder is disguised as a suicide, the thing that usually gives it away the reaction of the killer afterwards.

The texts/updates could be interesting, but remember to account for a digital trail if you want it to be as airtight as possible. Don't have your character post updates from their own computer etc - and remember library computers at a school would likely have a login that could be traced to activity sessions. Just because it comes from the victims facebook account, doesn't mean if police decided to look deeper they couldn't trace the computer and find, with the time of the post and IP, which student was logged on.

sohalt will become my to-plot-a-murder consultant from now on. I love her e-suicide-notes and drug-overdose ideas. These are wealthy kids so nothing beats over-dose for suicide, no?

Several of the above suggestions are good, so I'll play devil's advocate and try to find flaws in the killer's methods. :

1. Drugs are always good, but did the victim usually use drugs? If not, where did she get them, and when? Is there an empty drug container near the body? It would be tested for fingerprints and DNA.

2. Hanging is a good method, but a good forensics team can probably determine whether the victim was first strangled (e.g. by an electric cord) and then strung up to look like a suicide. The marks on the neck would be different. Also--this is an old one in mystery fiction--if the hyoid bone, a small bone in the neck, is broken, it typically indicates manual strangulation, even if the victim has later been hanged by a rope.

3. Pushing someone off a cliff is good, but how gullible is the victim? Even if I had no great fear of my companion, I'd be reluctant to step closer and closer to the precipice. "Just a little closer, there Nymtoc, so I can get a better picture! Step back a little closer! Closer! Just a little closer!" Whoosh! (But such murders have happened. I recall a real one in which the victim had been slightly drugged before the event, just enough to make her woozy.)

4. I would stay away from knives, since forensics can determine quite accurately how cuts were made, whether by the victim herself or by someone else.

5. Guns are tricky--assuming your characters have access to them. The angle of the shot, how close the muzzle was to the victim, whether there is gunpowder on the victim's hand etc., can all be determined. And, of course, whose gun was it?

6. The suicide note. An old trick in mystery stories is to have someone unknowingly sign a suicide note. This can be done, for example, by asking someone to sign an innocent document, while cleverly slipping the actual suicide note in its place. There's always forgery, but that can be detected, or at least suspected, by experts. I would say that any suicide note without a signature--even in today's hyper-digital world--is suspect.

7. Drowning is good, but the main way people drown themselves is by walking into the surf. The killer would have to make sure there are no, or at least few, marks on the body. He would also have to make sure that the water in the lungs is consistent with the water in the place where the body was found. In real life, people have sometimes been murdered by drowning in a bathtub and then had their body thrown in the surf. The water in their lungs would be fresh, not salt, revealing the crime.

8. Apart from the dramatic push off a cliff, there's always a fall down the stairs. That's a real-life method that has been used fairly often and disguised as an accident. When the murderer is caught in such deaths, it's often because there's too much trauma to the body--all kinds of bruises and cuts, which wouldn't result from a simple fall. Also note that, even if you push your victim down the stairs, he or she won't necessarily die and will survive to point the finger at you.

9. Messing with someone's car. Possible, but today's experts are often able to tell what you did to the vehicle. And who would commit suicide that way? Maybe deliberately driving a car off a cliff or into a tree could disguise a murder as a suicide, but again, experts can figure out a lot by tire tracks, etc.

In conclusion, I think I would choose drugs or hanging, but beware of the caveats above.

I haven't tried these murder methods myself yet , so I can't guarantee which method would work best.

The pushing off a high thing sounds good. At my school, we used to climb out one of the dorm windows at night onto the roof (the roofs were a mish-mash of different heights), and then hop up on to the flat roof over the dorm - good views from up there, and a real sense of freedom. We thought it was great.

Sadly, a house mistress found out eventually, and they fixed the window so we couldn't climb out of it. Rats...

None of us pushed each other off the roof, because we were all nice non-killery types (as far as I know). But I can see how it could work!

Easiest thing in this case, I think, would be for the murderer to get the victim drunk. That's something he could probably do without arousing too much suspicion, if that's a part of the social climate at their school. Then once she's drunk she will a) be easier to manipulate into other scenarios (such as "let's go make out on the roof!" or "here, eat this!") and b) the police will be much more likely to attribute any accidental death to the alcohol, even if her blood alcohol level isn't really high enough to explain it.

Something else to add: Have the responding police officer be too arrogant/lazy/stubborn to consider anything besides suicide. Maybe he's always disliked those rich kids at this boarding school. It's the end of his shift. People say she's a loner, and look, there's an e-suicide note, so he just doesn't feel like digging deeper into the case.

You left Californica? Sheesh.

anyway, mechanics are of little consequence. The emotional state is all. One can self extinguish from snow-flakes, if the anguish/despair is credible enough.

Just thought of another method. This one is really old, but it might work:

Depending on how well the murderer knows the victim, and a few other things, the murderer gets the victim to read a script aloud, supposedly to try out for a part in a play. The script goes "I have decided to end it all..." The murderer tapes this, and it is shown later as a suicide tape.

Gimmicky, I know, but it has been done.

Nymtoc said:

.

Gimmicky, I know, but it has been done.

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You admit to knowing this, yet you still offer it up?


You sure that hammer is hitting its target?

Um, why not offer up a valid suggestion?

I'm getting tired of the commentary on the answers being offered in this forum. Please don't do it. By all means suggest an alternative or rebut an option with a valid argument, but posting simply to critique a reply is not helpful.

There's a suicide method that can be used for murder too in an undistinguishable fashion:

Give the victim sleeping pills; not too much, just a normal quantity, to make them sleep. Sit them on a chair or bed, with a rope hanging around their neck and tied to the ceilling or somesuch, in a way that by simply having their head fall down due to sleeping, they choke on the rope during their sleep.

Leave the sleeping pill box right nearby, as if the victim had use it themself. If this is done correctly there will be little to no evidence of murder.

I might favour TheNighSwan's suggestion simply because of all the stress the victim may be suffering. Stress has been known to induce insomnia. And a doc will prescribe sleeping meds to combat this, or a type of relaxation med that will help the victim fall asleep.


Note that sleeping pills and relaxation pills are different. So, if you want something very subtle, you might consider relaxation pills instead -- to be taken an hour or less before bed. You want to be in bed by the point you're ready to fall asleep.

Dosage varies from person to person, especially when it comes to stress levels. If the dosage is strong enough per pill, only one is needed.

If you go this route, you'll need to do a lot more research. Best person to ask is actually the doctor.

(Talking of meds, time for a painkiller here -- another med that might be considered?)

The thing about pills is, they're drugs... and therefore leave a massive paper-trail. From the doctor's appointment, to the prescription, to the pharmacy receipt; it's pretty tough to fake. And even if could be done, the LD50 (Lethal Dosage for 50% of population) for any common medication is usually a ridiculously high amount, usually multiple times the amount a doctor is willing to prescribe.

Since relaxation pills were mentioned. Let's take Zolpidem (Ambien) for example. The stated LD50 is 600 mg/kg... so for a 50/50 shot of killing a 55Kg (120lbs-ish) person, you need to get 33grams (33000mg) of Zolpidem into them. The highest dosage commonly available is 10mg/pill. That makes the LD50 limit 3300 individual pills.

Suicide by pills isn't easy even when it's for real...

At our boarding school we had access to the kitchens so knives, bleach, walk-in freezers. And same as Corussa said, we used to climb out the (3 stories up) windows and jump onto ledges to get out.
As we were on school grounds there was also the swimming pool, science labs etc. lots of fun stuff to kill with in there!

A couple drinks to get her tipsy and suggestible, "borrow" her phone and send a few depressed tweets/make a facebook post or two while she's in the bathroom. Get her to a high place (roof, parking garage) and give her a bit of a shove. Just make sure there are no security cameras, and she's tipsy enough not to put up much of a fight.

If someone else from the college (especially someone she knew) had killed themselves recently, that would make it even more convincing (copycat suicide.)

If the victim owns a vehicle, I would say have the murder get her black out drunk and drive the car where needed, then let carbon monoxide poisoning do the killing. Have the murder wipe down the car and put the victims finger prints on the car keys.

Falling off something tall, resulting in a broken neck, is probably the best way, as mentioned above. Something to think about, although my medical knowledge is mostly confined to CSI and Law & Order: make sure she's taken by surprise, so there can be no defensive wounds as he's trying to push her off - and, obviously, the worry of witnesses. Facebook accounts are often left open in places like boarding school so it would be relatively easy to leave a message from that person, a "goodbye cruel world" status update is believable.

Also, if for some reason falling off couldn't work, an option would be unknowingly spiking her drink with something. Give her a glass of drain cleaner or something, tell her to drink it and, if drunk or just gullible, she downs it, and doesn't realise what she's ingested until it's too late.