The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:32am on Friday, 20th May, 2005:
Anecdote
Think of all those movies and TV programmes where someone gets killed and the murderer tries to make it look like suicide. Don't want that to happen to you? Easy! Write an anti-suicide note.
People who commit suicide almost invariably leave a suicide note, explaining why they took their own life. However, they don't quite all do it, which is why murderers can sometimes get away with making a homicide look like suicide. There are 5,000 or so deaths per year in Britain that are recorded as suicides, as opposed to around 850 for murders. How many of the suicides are actually murders?
OK, well once you've been murdered there isn't much you can do to let police investigators know it wasn't suicide, but there's something you can do before you die: take 60 seconds to hand-write a note saying that you have no intention, under any circumstances, of committing suicide. Put the note somewhere safe where a murderer wouldn't find it but anyone making a thorough investigation of your affairs would, and forget about it. If you ever decide you do want to commit suicide (shame on you!), you destroy the anti-suicide note before topping yourself.
I wrote one of these 20 years ago, and so far it's done a very effective job at stopping me from being murdered in such a way to make it look like suicide.
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Copyright © 2005 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).