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The curious case of Ronald Opus

How can a planned murder turn into a suicide?
By David Cocksedge

AT THE 1994 ANNUAL awards dinner given for Forensic Science, AAFS President Dr Donald Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a strange and bizarre death.

The story begins on March 23, 1994 when the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he had died almost instantly from a shotgun blast to his head. Mr. Opus had jumped from the roof of a ten-storey building intending to commit suicide. He left a note to the effect, indicating his deep depression. But as he fell past the ninth floor he was hit in the head by buckshot passing through a window.

Neither the gunman or the deceased was aware that a safety net had been installed just below the third floor level to protect workers painting the outside of the building and that Ronald Opus would thus not have been able to complete his planned suicide. The fact that Mr. Opus was shot on the way down caused the medical examiner to research the grounds for homicide.

Now an elderly man and his wife occupied the room on the ninth floor, from which the gun was fired. The two old people were arguing vigorously and the man was threatening her with a shotgun. The man suddenly pulled the trigger, missing his wife completely as the buckshot pellets went through an open window, striking Mr. Opus as he fell past. Think about it - the odds against such a freak killing must be in the millions. But nevertheless, “When one intends to kill subject A, but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B,” stated Dr Harper Mills.

When confronted with a possible murder or manslaughter charge the old man was adamant in stating that he had been sure that the shotgun was not loaded. The man said he had formed a long-standing habit of threatening his wife with the unloaded gun: he never had any intention to murder his spouse. His wife confirmed this; in all their arguments, he had waved the unloaded weapon at her, often pulling the trigger as he did so, she claimed. Therefore the killing of Mr. Opus appeared to be a freak accident, and the real killer was whoever had loaded the shotgun.

The ongoing investigation then turned up a witness who saw the old couple’s son loading the shotgun six weeks prior to the fatal accident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son’s financial support and the latter, knowing the propensity of his step-father to use the gun threateningly, loaded the weapon, hoping that the old boy would shoot his mother during their next row. He knew that he stood to inherit her fortune on the death of his mother. The old couple’s son was therefore guilty of the murder of Ronald Opus.

Now here is the twist - the son was in fact none other than Ronald Opus! He had become increasingly despondent over his failure to engineer his mother’s murder, and depressed as he incurred mounting debts that he could not pay. This led him to sign a suicide note and then jump off the roof of the building on 23rd March – where he was accidentally killed by his step-father as he fell past the ninth floor. Concluding that Ronald Opus had “murdered himself”; the medical examiner closed the case as a suicide. It is quite possibly the most bizarre case of suicide in British legal history.

Cavid Dox

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