Friday, 2 December 2022

Death Imitates TV

The popular TV show CSI Las Vegas in which crime scene investigators / scientists solve crimes that would take many weeks or months .... inside an hour (TV time 24 hours ... max!) .... 

A Suspicious Death In Florida  ... CSI On The Case
A Suspicious Death In Florida
 ... CSI On The Case

.... is believed to have inspired at least two real life crimes. 

In the first in January 2018, 71 year old Alan Abrahamson was found dead in the open in West Palm Beach Florida ... he had a bullet wound in his heart, but no gun or shell casing could be found, and there was no evidence of anyone being in the vicinity of the body. The only clue was a thin string like blood stain on the front of his jacket.

Police crime scene investigators found that Abrahamson had significantly upped his life insurance policies, and Googled 'can insurance companies refuse to pay out for suicides'. They found that he had also purchased a weather balloon just before his body was found.

The Answer Was In The Heavens
The Answer Was In The Heavens ..

They then realised that he had recreated a crime from CSI Las Vegas, whereby someone killed themselves with a pistol tied to a helium filled balloon, which carried the weapon away after the suicide. The string had left the mark on his jacket as the balloon floated away. An offshore wind was assumed to have taken the gun out across the Atlantic.

The same episode of the show had also prompted another attempt to disguise a suicide, as an execution murder, when in 2008 a body was found in the New Mexico desert. The body had been shot in the head from close range, but in this case the detectives didn't require any help as unfortunately for the suicide victim, the balloon had been snagged on a large cactus, with the gun still attached to the wire, so the police knew what had been  attempted.

Its not reported whether the insurance companies paid out anything.

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