| You may have come across this before. After reading and enjoying it, I thought I'd do a little Googling to see if I could come across some sort of archived news report about this. You'll have to read this first to see what I found. ----- On March 23, 1994 a medical officer examined the body of Ronald Opus. He concluded that Mr. Opus had died as a result of a shotgun wound to the head. Mr. Opus had jumped from the top of a ten story building intending to commit suicide. He had left a note to the effect indicating his despondency. As he fell past the ninth floor his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through a window, which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the deceased was aware that a safety net had been installed just below the eighth floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide the way he had planned. Ordinarily a person who sets out to commit suicide and ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended, is still defined as committing suicide. The fact that Mr. Opus was shot on the way to certain death, but probably would not have been successful because of the safety net, caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands. In the room on the ninth floor, where the shotgun blast emanated, was occupied by an elderly couple. They were arguing vigorously and the husband was threatening the wife with a shotgun. The husband was so upset that when he pulled the trigger he missed his wife and the pellets went through the window striking Mr. Opus in the head, on his way down. When one intends to kill a subject A but kills subject B by mistake one is guilty of murder of subject B. When confronted with the charge of murder the old man and his wife were adamant and both said that they thought the gun was unloaded. The old man explained that it was a long-standing habit to threaten his wife with an un-loaded shotgun during the course of their arguments. He had no intention to murder her. Therefore the killing of Mr. Opus appeared to be an unfortunate accident; that is, if the gun had been accidentally loaded. The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun about six weeks prior to the argument and fatal shooting. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his Father would shoot his Mother. Since the loader of the gun, was aware of this, he was guilty of murder even though he didn't actually pull the trigger. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus. Now comes the exquisite twist. Further investigations revealed that the son was in fact, Ronald Opus. He had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his Mother's murder on March 23rd 1994 he went to the top of the ten story building and jumped off, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through the ninth story window. The son had actually murdered himself. True Story. ----- I found http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa072097.htm. On page two, they detail the original story had the following introduction: ----- 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. ----- Later, they continue... ----- As you might imagine, Dr. Mills has been queried thoroughly and frequently regarding the Opus case since the story broke on the Internet in 1994. In 1997 he came clean to the press about it: "I made up the story in 1987 to present at the meeting," he told the London Daily Telegraph on March 2, "for entertainment and to illustrate how if you alter a few small facts you greatly alter the legal consequences." Anticlimactic, isn't it? Unfortunately, that's as much reality as there is to be found behind the Opus story. Seven years after it was made up, the text of Mills' speech, sans disclaimer and with the date revised, found its way onto the greatest rumor mill ever invented and continues to circulate there to this day. How many thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people have read it and believed it, we have no way of knowing. At least you and I have the advantage of knowing it's not true... for whatever that's worth. Case closed on another urban legend? Probably not. | 
