Murder Mystery Stories

Hello!

My name is Elizabeth Magnotta; I am a faculty member here at the Loyola Intensive English Program, Loyola University New Orleans. This blog post contains the murder mystery stories written by my Intermediate Writing & Grammar Class, Spring 2015.

The guidelines for this assignment were to write a "… murder story using all these words and numbers: man, woman, poor, rich, children, young, sister, beautiful, poison, kill, 20, 22, 45, and 70." These guidelines are from a worksheet on busyteacher.org, (the link to the worksheet is at the end of this post).

Those were the instructions, and my intrepid students had 2 hours to complete their mission:

-create & develop characters (including a victim, a killer, and an investigator),

-outline their plot, &

-write the story !!

The results were entertaining and full of plot twists. Enjoy.

***

SECRETS

authors: Wan Chien Lee, Yousef Bakheet, & Ruiwen Lv

300 years ago, there was a poor man in a small village, and he worked for a rich family. The family had a beautiful girl. At the first glance, he liked that girl. After, they started dating together in secret. He proposed to her, but she refused him. One day, her younger sister found her dead in her room. Peaceful.

When the beautiful girl's younger sister went to her room, she noticed the temperature was very hot, around 45⁰ C, and she smelled an aroma. She found the remainder of some candy in an oil burner. She started to wonder why there was melted candy in it. She didn’t realize that the candy was poison, so she tasted a little bit of it, and she felt dizzy and hot, so she drank 22 bottles of water. Immediately, she understood what had happened to her sister. But she didn’t know who had given her sister this poison.

She found a small toy under the bed. This led her to discover her older sister’s secret child that no one had known about. She went to the child’s room, and saw that he too was dead and his mouth was full of candy. She was very sad and upset. She had to find the killer. Then, she looked at the name brand of the candy. Oh! It was “Ice” candy!!

Finally, she found 20 stores in “Rebeca Street” which had this candy. Because it was poison, if someone wanted to buy it, they had to sign their name. Now, she looked at the signature list. And she knew the answer!

After 70 days, she found the man. The man was dead, and beside him was the poem of 1.“Barabara Allan”.

THE END

1. “Barabara Allan” is a traditional ballad which tells the tragic tale of a man and his unrequited love for a beautiful woman.

A discussion question from the authors : Why do you think the man killed both the woman and the child? The answer can be found at the end of the post.

Meet the authors:

***

LADY LOVE

authors: Rebeca Ampa & Fahad Aloufi

A cold Christmas night in 2012.

Sarah was smoking while she was arguing with Josh. Their forbidden relationship had been going on for almost 3 years, and she had had a baby one year ago. Josh, 45, had been married for 20 years, but he had decided to break up with his beautiful lover because his wife suspected about it.

Bitter tears ran down Sarah’s face. She was surprised, but she got an idea about how to take revenge on him.

The next day, Sarah called Josh to meet her for the last time at Harrah’s Hotel. When he came into the room, she was waiting for him wearing his favorite lingerie. He thought it could be a romantic farewell with his young lover and he never suspected her plans.

Sarah offered him a cup of his favorite wine and he drank it very quickly. After that, he felt dizzy and he couldn’t breathe. She set the scene while he was dying. One hour later, she called reception and told them that she was worried about her partner who had fainted.

Immediately, a doctor came up to their room and he certified that Josh was dead and called the police because he thought Josh had died by human hands.

Close to midnight, the agent Katty Smith entered the room, and she found her younger sister Sarah was crying and lying on the bed. Katty didn’t need to ask her anything.

“Why, why Sarah?!?” she asked a few minutes later.

Sarah didn’t answer, she just cried. Katty told her “There is a witness who saw you when you put the poison in his glass!”

Sarah asked, “How, how?!?”

Katty answered, “The housekeeper told me she was behind the door and saw everything.”

THE END

Meet the authors:

***

FOOLISH HUSBAND

authors: Marcela Ruiz, Ekapol “Ice” Thongrsi & Mohamed “Shams” Shams

Some years ago, in 1870, the detective Sherlock Holmes received recognition because he discovered and solved the murder mystery of the year.

One raining Monday, in May of 1870, the rich Ampa family had terrible issues.

Agatha and Sarah lived in a beautiful house because their parents gave them a lot of money. But, they gave the most expensive things to Agatha.

Agatha had married with Johnson Ampa, who was a poor guy and lived in the street homeless, when she was 45 and he was 22. They lived with Agatha’s beautiful younger sister and after a while they had children. Agatha lost the little beauty that she had, and Johnson began to lose interest in his wife and started to fall in love with Sara, who was 20.

One day, Sarah noticed Johnson’s feeling, so she decided to use him to kill her sister because she needed the money because she needed to pay the debts of the gambling problems.

Sarah started to convince him and (eventually) did convince him to kill his wife. He planned to kill her with poison but Sarah told him that with the poison it was easy to find the person who bought it. The next plan was to stage the murder scene to look like a robbery.

Johnson and Sarah decided to begin with their plan and Johnson went to the bedroom to stage it by breaking the window and taking all the expensive stuff and making it look like there was a fight.

When Agatha went back to her room, she was surpised and in that second, Johnson stabbed her when she was in the middle of the room. She died immediately.

Johnson put everything in a bag and threw it in a lake which was 70 meters away! Sarah called the police after he threw the bag away.

The policed tried to solve the murder but the investigation only showed that it was a robbery. It was a dead end, so the police called Sherlock Holmes.

Johnson was not a good liar so Sherlock knew from his body language that he had killed Agatha but Sherlock didn’t have evidence to prove it.

Sherlock found a picture of Johnson in the Olympic Games. Johnson had taken 1^st place in the Javelin. When Sherlock stepped out onto the balcony, he noticed the lake. He told the police to search the house but they didn’t find anything. After he saw the lake and the picture, he connected them to each other. So he told the police to search the lake and they found the jewelry bag with the knife and the knife was with Johnson’s prints on it.

The police questioned Johnson for 1 hour and after that he immediately broke and told the police that Sarah had planned the whole things and he only helped her because he loved her.

At the end, the children had an uncle who took care of them after their mother had died and their father was captured.

THE END

Meet the authors: