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Megan Price Packed Her Father a Hospital Bag. He Had Been Dead Three Days.
Published 2 months, 3 weeks ago
Description
Frank Price wrote the date on every jar of preserves he put up, in blue ink, in careful capitals, and then gave nearly all of them away. Eleven days after a neighbor found him dead in his basement workshop, a volunteer at his church food pantry lifted a jar off a sorting shelf and recognized the handwriting before she had finished reading the label. The box it came in had arrived the previous afternoon. Frank had been dead since January.
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This is a work of crime fiction. Frank Price, fifty-three, a retired shop teacher, was found dead in the basement of his home on Alderman Street in the fictional town of Delwood, Ohio, on Sunday, January twenty-eighth, twenty twenty-four. The medical examiner, Dr. Sandra Ochoa, determined that he had died of a single blunt force injury to the head and recorded the manner of death as homicide. Investigators placed the death on the evening of Thursday, January twenty-fifth, the night a heating technician inspected the furnace. Paul Fitzgerald was arrested on February twenty-fourth, twenty-seven days after the body was found. He first denied taking anything out of the house, then said the preserves had been a gift. A jury convicted him of murder and the associated robbery, and the judge imposed a life sentence. Months after sentencing he told a journalist that he had struck Frank and taken a tin of silver coins. Two unattended deaths in Ohio and Pennsylvania were reviewed for comparison, and no charges followed in either.
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The episode is told from the invented case file: the detective's reports, the pantry intake sheets, the trial testimony and a recorded interview given after sentencing. Frank Price, Delwood and everyone named here are fictional.
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This is a work of crime fiction. Frank Price, fifty-three, a retired shop teacher, was found dead in the basement of his home on Alderman Street in the fictional town of Delwood, Ohio, on Sunday, January twenty-eighth, twenty twenty-four. The medical examiner, Dr. Sandra Ochoa, determined that he had died of a single blunt force injury to the head and recorded the manner of death as homicide. Investigators placed the death on the evening of Thursday, January twenty-fifth, the night a heating technician inspected the furnace. Paul Fitzgerald was arrested on February twenty-fourth, twenty-seven days after the body was found. He first denied taking anything out of the house, then said the preserves had been a gift. A jury convicted him of murder and the associated robbery, and the judge imposed a life sentence. Months after sentencing he told a journalist that he had struck Frank and taken a tin of silver coins. Two unattended deaths in Ohio and Pennsylvania were reviewed for comparison, and no charges followed in either.
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The episode is told from the invented case file: the detective's reports, the pantry intake sheets, the trial testimony and a recorded interview given after sentencing. Frank Price, Delwood and everyone named here are fictional.