Mystery Writers:Creative Murder Ideas

Ooo.

I don't know, I'm always afraid to contribute to these sorts of lists because you all will find out what a crazed psycho I am at heart.

Poisoned marshmallows. Do you know easy it is to make homemade marshmallows? Except you have to be standing there stirring the whole time, so when would someone else (assuming the cook isn't the killer and even saturation) poison them? Or maybe fudge. Fudge...

Death by superstition; someone wants to kill a very superstitious man and arranges some 'omens' that will drive him to change his behavior just enough that he gets killed. "What? I've always owned a black cat!"

Oh, and those big, heavy photo trimmers; the handle comes off pretty easily.

My problem is that I don't have enough people I dislike to kill off mentally for practice!

I bleached a character to death. Seemed fitting. He was a stain on the fictional community I'd created.

JD

I like the Waterford crystal sailboat paperweight through the skull myself.

Also - coming up in the future - oleander poisonings, nicotine poisonings, bludgeoning with frozen food, gas leak from the water heater, decapitation via wire fencing & a motorcycle, frayed-wire & hot tub shock, gentle push from a very high balcony, rum over with a tractor while unconscious and choking on an icicle.

You don't need more than one person you'd like to kill off - in fiction, you can do the same one over and over...

Stabbing with a frozen object ala Roald Dahl's classic about the lady bludgeoning her husband with frozen leg of lamb and then serving it to the police. A knife shaped popsicle maybe? What about a fountain pen to the carotid?

Soccer Mom said:

What about a fountain pen to the carotid?

Click to expand...

That was also a great self-defense technique in Grosse Point Blank.

Soccer Mom said:

A knife shaped popsicle maybe?

Click to expand...

I used something like this in my first published short. A woman killed her husband with a sharpened popscicle. She started feeding it to him then shoved. Ouch!

(I may look like a nice sweet middle-aged lady, but you never know what lurks inside us writer types. ;->)

A mile from here is a 700 foot deep sink. Until the state built berms around it geezers were forever driving into it with their Crown Victorias. About once every year divers would go down, and wreckers would winch the cars to the surface. Very recently a Cadillac was pulled from a retention lake adjacent to an apartment complex. The car-body had been there since 1989.

Ah, yes. One musn't forget to properly dispose of the corpse.

Hmm. Now I'm trying to figure out how I can kill a character in a sink.

Not some namby-pamby 700' hole, where anyone could manage to kill someone and have it go unnoticed until the amateur sleuth figured it out. Nope, I'm talking about a real challenge: a kitchen sink.

Couldn't be a bathroom sink. They're getting smaller and more fragile these days, but kitchen ones are getting bigger, with the pseudo-antique country-kitchen apron-front style crossed with the American "industrial/bigger is always better" style.

Yeah, it could be done. I wonder what one of those suckers weighs. Enough that it would do some damage if dropped on a human being, I'm sure. I've always wanted to do a mystery involving a house renovation, and this might be my opportunity. Lotsa' people a homeowner might want to kill after being without a kitchen sink for six months and having to wash their dishes in the shower all that time.

JD, who knows whereof she speaks, about kitchen renovations and homicidal thoughts related thereto, and is feeling a little silly this evening for no apparent reason, but whose mystery stories tend to be silly rather than scary, anyway.

People routinely dispose of bodies at the garbage incinerator. Chop up the body, mix it in with regular garbage, haul it to the incinerator.

Oh! This was in the paper today.

A well connected girl used this as an excuse for leaving the scene of an accident where she ran over a pedestrian. The state attorney bought the excuse and dropped the charges.

"He was screaming and very angry. I felt intimidated."

So drive over the victim and have the killer claim to be a victim, too.

MyFirstMystery said:

What evil acts are your future antagonists thinking up?

MFM

Click to expand...

My Favorite.
Okay how this for an evil minded way of doing your mate off – very slowly and painfully:

The Tiger Whisker:
Obtain a few strands of whiskers from a tiger (if you have to ask how, don’t read on).
Next, using a pair of scissors cut them into the smallest pieces you can possibly make.
Next, sprinkle a small bit of the chopped tiger whiskers into your mate’s food (it is tasteless, odorless)
Next, repeat the above step for five days.
Next, take your mate to the nearest emergency room as they are doubled over and writhing in abdominal pains. The doctors will eventually (as your mate still suffers tremendously) diagnose the source of the problem, being bleeding intestinal ulcers. The doctors will then prescribe/administer massive doses of antibiotics. Which (he he he) will have no effect.
After 2-3 months of absolute constant agony it is over. The autopsy will show massive intestinal ulcers and no toxicological findings – the doctors will scratch their heads and note it as “natural causes.”
Go and collect the life insurance policy.

Why tiger whiskers? Tiger whiskers have microscopic barbs along the entire length of the hair. Remember the small pieces you cut up and put into you mate’s food? Well, the barbs snag onto the intestinal walls and cause infections, which cannot be cured or detected.
__________________

Ew! That's clever. The killer could be a zookeeper. That would give someone reasonable access to a tiger.

Sink murders: Drowning in a full sink of water? I had an ME tell me that If you put someone in a proper chokehold, they could lose consciousness in less than a minute. Once they were truly out, push them face down into the sink.

Drain the water and let the local gendarmes figure out how someone drowned in his own kitchen.

Tiger whiskers--ew.

death by 9 iron.

death by (if you REALLY want to know I suggest you pm me because it's rated NC-17).

death by cheese grater.

death by staple gun.

death by ripping someone's throat out bare-handed.

death by backing over someone's skull with a SUV.

death by jackhammer.

death by sledge hammer.

Fire -- afterwards the murderer sings, "Burn, baby, burn, disco inferno"
or "The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire!"

Death by cheese grater sounds painful.

Death by corkscrew?

Some of the oddball things I have seen in real life were bludgeoning by a log, head bashed in by a huge padlock and a woman beaten to death with a flute.

Oh, and there was a duct tape murder-suffocation.

Kitchen sink - you know you can drown someone in as little a 3 inches of water...
I like the idea of a garbage disposal accident - water, a chopper and electricity - there's something lethal there somewhere...

The tiger whiskers sounds difficult to harvest.

A simple overdose of prescription drugs is always a good one, and usually blamed on the victim.

Make sure he's wearing a tie. Give a document to feed into the shredder. Be standing in front of him when he leans over.

Wow, I'm just choked with laughter here. All these are interesting ways to die I suppose. One thing I don't ever recall reading, are the types where the victim dies slowly, like with poision and the victim doesn't die the same day--yet dying away each day.





How about
-Death by cotton candy. A stuffing of it. Yeah?
- Death by the heel of a woman's shoe
- Death by the blade of a fan


..... Can't think of anything else at the moment.

Risen_Flower said:

How about
-Death by cotton candy. A stuffing of it. Yeah?

Click to expand...

You just brought to mind that horrible scene in the movie Seven - death by Spaghetti. Which is actually what I was planning on making for dinner. Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.

I remember reading about a true 19th century detective in England where prostitutes were dying in the bathtub, but they weren't drowning and electricity wasn't in common use then.

It turns out that, in order to solve the mystery of their deaths, the detective actually had to hire prostitutes to take baths so he could figure out how the others had died.

He tried pushing them under water... Their legs prevented their heads from being pushed down, no matter how hard he pushed. And it would have left bruising the murder victims didn't have.

Finally in desparation, he went to the foot of the tub and pulled the girl's legs out of the tub. Her head hit the lip of the tub and knocked her out.

The detective pulled the girl out before she drown, but then went to examine the other corpses and found they also had bruising on the ankles... They managed to convict the killer.