* Id: CrimeScenes * Revision: 2 * State: approved * * Log: * Revision 1 1999/08/09 Dirk van Deun * Initial submitted version. * * Checked-out 1999/09/10 Roel van der Meulen * * Checked-in with * Revision 2 1999/09/28 Roel van der Meulen * Edited and author-approved. * * Checked-out 1999/12/19 Mark Seaborn %t Crime Scenes %s What To Do Upon Discovering A Dead Body %n 8R %a Dirk van Deun (dirk@igwe.vub.ac.be) %d 19990801 %x Rules Of Car Chasing %x Meteor Strike, Recommended Procedures For A %k Television, Film, Movie, Love, Murder %e Careful study of tens if not hundreds of films and episodes of television series, containing plenty of material on this subject, teaches us that calling the police or any other authority is the least common reaction upon being the first to find a dead body. The same cinematic sources do also suggest some better courses of action to take, which lead to a highly successful future, a so-called happy end, for the finder. This success further in life, usually of an amorous nature, seems to depend on the finder making himself a suspect. If the body should have a knife sticking out of him, the finder should touch it to leave fingerprints. To be discovered in this position, holding the knife, preferably by any kind of law-enforcer, seems to be a guarantee for success, and is sometimes easy to arrange. In case of murder by a firearm, you should pick it up to apply your fingerprints on the weapon. If you are lucky, the police will arrive in the meantime. Now if you had any reason to hate the deceased, you should start looking for any material evidence thereof, and you should take it away and start carrying it on you. If the police hasn't arrived by then, you should leave; if the police should arrive while you leave, for best results run away as hard as you can, even if you find yourself at that moment in time in the lobby of a hotel with 100 rooms, in one of which the body is to be found. Behaving in a suspiciously nervous or sneaky way will do the trick also, however. From this point on, many things may happen. The most common is that you will be hunted, but able to stay out of reach of the authorities with the help of an extremely attractive member of the opposite sex, while hunting the real murderer yourself. Do not be disappointed if the only supremely attractive member of the other sex that you meet hates you at first sight: hate will transform into passionate love after a reasonable period of being dependent on each other. If you are not so lucky as to have been chained to this person by phony law enforcers, and no occasion occurs to save his or her life, you can simply resort to kidnapping. We must stress here again that events may take many other courses. However, almost constant elements are the drop-dead gorgeous member of the opposite sex, the physical chase (in the old days, often a race through and over long trains; nowadays usually a car chase through crowded streets lined with fruit stands and stacks of empty boxes), and a period of captivity during which you fallaciously believe to have been betrayed by the love interest. The pay-off is really almost a certainty. Sometimes fantastic amounts of money are involved; sometimes, especially in times of war, the highest honours; but almost always marriage. This will often be marriage with someone you would never have met if not for discovering the crime scene, but making yourself a suspect is certainly also the best way to marry that person you are silently in love with, but who doesn't even know you exist. Still, the reader should be warned that although the risk is small, tragic endings have been known to occur: fortunately their relative amount is decreasing and projected to be infinitesimally small by the year 2020. Note: why the second person to find a body always phones the authorities immediately, only to resume his or her extremely boring life, is still a very active area of research. %e *EOA*