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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”.
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.
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
***
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 1st 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
THE END
***
A big thank you to my students for a great way to end the semester.
I hope you all enjoy your summer!!
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| Hello from Intermediate Writing & Grammar Spring 2015. THANK YOU FOR READING! |
Link to the busy teacher.org worksheet used for this project:
Answer to the author's discussion questions: … secrets ...
