by Tom Cutler
The problem
What exactly happened on Thor Bridge that night? Is Miss Dunbar guilty of murdering Mrs Gibson? How did the gun get into her wardrobe? Is the violent Neil Gibson concealing something? Why was Mrs Gibson clasping Miss Dunbar’s note in her hand? What is the meaning of the mysterious chip in the stonework on the bridge, and why should it have appeared at the very time and place of the tragedy?
Tap here for the solution.
LATERAL THINKING MYSTERIES FROM REAL LIFE
‘Every man at the bottom of his heart believes
that he is a born detective.’
John Buchan
Arsenic and Old Luce
The mystery
Clare Boothe Luce (1903–87), an American writer, editor, congresswoman and socialite, with a waspish tongue and an intriguing past, was born Ann Clare Boothe, the second illegitimate child of a dancer and a patent-medicine salesman. In 1935 Clare married Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life, whereupon an observer remarked that despite life’s woes she had ‘a knack for landing with her arse in the marmalade’.
In 1953 President Eisenhower made Clare Boothe Luce ambassador to Italy, but on her arrival in Rome she found that, as a forthright Republican anti-communist in a country with a strong Communist party, she wasn’t exactly flavour of the month.
All the same she set to work, revamping her official residence, the Villa Taverna, a place famous for its fancy gardens and Renaissance interior.
She was clearly determined to have everything just the way she wanted it, and rearranged not only her apartment but her staff too. Noticing the speed with which the new ambassador had given her press attaché the bum’s rush, embassy staffers became anxious for their own jobs.
But nobody could deny her discipline. The ambassador began each day with an 8 o’clock breakfast in her room followed by a busy round of engagements, interrupted only by lunch. She was back in her rooms at 7 p.m. to dress for what was often more than one party, and was seldom in bed before midnight.
Famous for her acid tongue, the ambassador soon ruffled feathers by complaining about the washing machine in the busy laundry room above her. This had been rattling her awake every day at the crack of dawn. She was also upsetting the Italians with some undiplomatic comments. It looked as if she was determined to make enemies everywhere.
And it wasn’t long before she started to feel strangely unwell. Chronic stomach upsets were putting her off the food prepared by her kitchen staff at the residence, and at the endless round of embassy dinners. She complained that her morning coffee tasted unnaturally bitter.
After she had been in the job for three months her husband Henry Luce paid a visit and was shocked by her gaunt figure. She was by now desperately fatigued and nauseous, and was starting to lose sensation in one of her legs, which she found she had to drag.
Taking a break in the US, Clare Boothe Luce began to feel better, but on returning to Rome her symptoms came back with a vengeance. Her fingernails were now breaking, her teeth becoming loose, and she was starting to behave weirdly at functions, complaining on one occasion of flying saucers on the roof.
Finally she went for tests at a US naval hospital and was advised to return to the States for Christmas. Over the holiday she received an urgent handwritten letter informing her that traces of arsenic had been discovered in one of her urine samples. The CIA explained that she had probably been receiving small doses over a long period.
It seemed that the ambassador was being regularly poisoned in Rome, possibly at the embassy or the residence, or at the functions she attended. Was someone putting something in her coffee?
Colourless and tasteless, arsenic is an ideal poison to administer in food or drink, and investigators realised that any poisoner must have access to the ambassador’s meals.
She was told to stay in the US as a gigantic operation was set in motion to look into the political backgrounds of likely suspects inside and outside the embassy and residence. Agents disguised as workmen arrived to begin surreptitiously investigating the staff.
Chefs and servants were watched closely, but since Clare Boothe Luce was not there to be poisoned they drew a blank. In any event, no evidence was discovered that anyone was tampering with the ambassador’s food.
Then one day in the private apartments an observant agent noticed a sprinkling of grey dust in Clare Boothe Luce’s makeup and on one of the Linguaphone discs that she was using to learn Italian. On analysis the dust was found to contain minute amounts of poisonous lead arsenate …
The problem
How was Clare Boothe Luce being poisoned? Was there any truth in the rumour that extermination agents of the Soviet Union were trying to murder her? Or was something else going on here?
Tap here for the solution.
The rather-short-very-long baseball game
The mystery
Past President of The Explorers Club, Captain Alfred Scott McLaren, USN (Ret.), PhD, FE ’71, is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and US Naval War College. He holds postgraduate degrees from George Washington University and Cambridge University. Captain McLaren has been on more than twenty Cold War missions and, to add to his list of illustrious awards, he’s got the Distinguished Service Medal, two Legions of Merit and four Navy Unit Citations.
Before his retirement from the navy, Captain McLaren was a nuclear attack submarine officer and climate change research scientist. He is one of the few people to have dived to the Titanic, he has visited the deep wreck of the German battleship Bismarck, and he’s explored the hydrothermal vents that sit along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where chemicals dissolved in the vent fluids support complex communities of bacteria, giant tube worms, clams, limpets and shrimp.
I’ve just been reading Captain McLaren’s fascinating book, Silent and Unseen: On Patrol in Three Cold War Attack Submarines, in which he describes one of his most exciting adventures, which happened on 25 August 1960, when the USS Seadragon, on which he was patrolling, broke the surface under an early-morning August sun. They were close to land that belonged to neither the US nor the USSR, but under international law both had exploration rights in the area.
The air was fresh and the sky blue, so a party was dispatched to set up camp on land, several hundred yards from the submarine. One of the crew’s duties that morning was to undertake an exercise designed to test the speed at which they could evacuate the sub in an emergency, so they got down to the job in hand.
But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, so Captain McLaren and the other officers and crew of the Seadragon decided to have a game of baseball. In fact they had been talking about it for days in the confined quarters of the boat. Fresh air and outdoor exercise are in short supply on a submarine and, unlike tiddly-winks, baseball is not a recommended underwater pastime. The clear open land provided an inviting opportunity.
The game promised to be an exciting and possibly heated contest between engineers aft and those who worked forward of the Seadragon’s nuclear reactor compartment. But the match had hardly got under way when a player whacked a fly ball into right field, where a fielder caught it. Normally the batsman would have been out, but owing to a curiosity it was clear to everybody that he could not possibly be considered out for another 24 hours. They would either have to allow him to remain in or stop the game and sit around chatting for an interminable time to await the decision.
As if this wasn’t odd enough, a player soon hit a ball into left field. There it was caught and thrown to first base, where again no decision could be made until the following day.
Action around second base was proving to be troublesome too. Everyone was running as fast as they could, throwing as hard and as accurately as they could, but every action was taking several days to complete.
The game continued like this until the end. Nobody could remember what day it was or how many days they had been playing when the game finally finished, and the umpire went mad trying to work out the scores.
The problem
Tap here for the solution.
The curious case of dihydrogen monoxide
The mystery
For years, campaigner Tom Way has been trying to alert the world to the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide, a deadly chemical compound that is used by industry in everything from spray-on oven cleaners to nuclear reactors. It is used as a fire-retardant and is an industrial solvent so corrosive that it can eat holes into solid metal. At root DHMO is a highly reactive hydroxyl radical that can mutate DNA, disrupt cell membranes and chemically alter vital neurotransmitters. Ingestion of the compound can cause painful abdominal bloating and diuresis, while accidental inhalation, even in small quantities, results in many deaths every year.
Dihydrogen monoxide has no detectible smell and is quite colourless, so its presence in household products easily goes unnoticed. It has been detected in varying amounts in liquid bubble products sold to children, as well as in jars of baby food, high-fat cakes and pies, and in the most popular brands of high-sugar and high-calorie soft drinks. Its frequent use in bath products and cosmetics is often concealed by use of alternative names.
The liquid, solid and gaseous forms of DHMO have all been a major contributory factor to serious air crashes, and in its gaseous form it causes severe burns to humans, especially children. Lengthy exposure to its solid form, though less common, leads to tissue necrosis, limb amputation and ultimately death.
Dihydrogen monoxide has been found in relatively large amounts in public swimming pools, where it is claimed to ‘maintain chemical balance’, and although it continues to result in numerous deaths, its use in pools is still not illegal.
While well aware of the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide, the UK government does not classify it as toxic or cancer causing, as it does with other dangerous compounds. It is worth remembering, however, that all governments are aware of the inconvenient truth that if its use were to be banned industry would grind to a halt.
Though most people have never heard of DHMO, when told about it overwhelming numbers surveyed in the US said that it should be banned.
Here is a short list of some of the dangers and questionable uses of dihydrogen monoxide:
Dihydrogen monoxide is present in high concentrations in acid rain.
Exposure to DHMO decreases the effectiveness of vehicle brakes and is the direct cause of many road accidents every year in the UK and abroad.
Dihydrogen monoxide is deliberately put into the food given to banned pit bull terriers and other dangerous dogs.
Though dihydrogen monoxide is consciously fed to prisoners in UK prisons, and also in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, it is deliberately not given that name.
DHMO has been used to greatly heighten the effect of so-called ‘waterboarding’, which, without it, is much less effective.
The problem
Pressure groups such as DHMO.org that fight to encourage the public to think carefully about this compound and its deliberately confusing names have had very little success. Why is something so harmful, corrosive and dangerous to humans almost universally used by industry without governments objecting?
Get your lateral thinking cap on.
Tap here for the solution.
The Mary Celeste affair
The mystery
Of all the ‘ghost ship’ mysteries to have haunted the minds of sailors and landlubbers alike down the years, surely the strange case of the Mary Celeste is the most thrilling.
Mary Celeste was an American merchant brigantine, a kind of two-masted sailing ship, which was spotted adrift off the Azores on 4 December 1872, with her lifeboat missing and nobody aboard.
She had left New York for Genoa a month earlier, and was well stocked with provisions. The personal belongings of the captain and crew were undisturbed, as was the ship’s cargo: 1,709 barrels of denatured alcohol (methylated spirits).
The Los Angeles Times later described the scene in dramatic detail: ‘Every sail was set, the tiller was lashed fast, not a rope was out of place … The fire was burning in the galley. The dinner was standing untasted and scarcely cold.’
As is usual with newspapers, this account was full of inaccuracies. Every sail was not set, the tiller was not lashed, several ropes and bits of equipment were out of place, the fire was not burning in the galley, and no meal – cold or otherwise – was standing untasted in the galley, on the tables, or anywhere else.
The Los Angeles Times was not alone in its embellishments. Explanations included an attack by bloodthirsty pirates and, more recently, paranormal woo-woo of various sorts, including ‘flying-saucer abduction’ by aliens with funny eyes. Chambers’s Journal went as far as to suggest that the crew of the Mary Celeste had been grabbed by the huge tentacles of a giant squid and eaten alive.
Twelve years after the event, in January 1884, the Mary Celeste story was retold in an issue of The Cornhill Magazine. This fictional account was by a 25-year-old ship’s surgeon named Arthur Conan Doyle – it was one of his more successful early works. In his story Doyle renamed the ship Marie Celeste, and the name stuck, such that even today there is confusion over the vessel’s proper appellation.
The true story was this. On Thursday 7 November 1872, Mary Celeste left the harbour of New York in fair weather, and sailed out into the Atlantic on her journey towards the metaphorical groin at the top of the great thigh-length boot of Italy. The weather was rough and the captain and crew had to deal with strong winds from the time they left New York until they arrived at Santa Maria Island, in the Azores, sailing the last stretch in a gale.
About a month later, at around 1 p.m. on Wednesday 4 December land time (5 December sea time), the helmsman of a ship named Dei Gratia, sailing far from land at a position about halfway between the Azores and Portugal, reported a vessel drifting erratically, about six miles off. Her unsteady movements and the odd set of her sails led the captain to suspect that something was amiss. The ship was heading towards them and as the two vessels approached each other the name on her side gradually became clear. She was the Mary Celeste.
Signals were sent but none were replied to, and as she drew closer it looked as though her deck had been abandoned.
The captain dispatched two men over the side to investigate and the pair scrambled aboard.
They found the ship deserted. Much of the rigging was damaged and ropes were dangling slack over the hull. The main hatch cover was on tight but other hatches were open, their covers sitting beside them on the deck. The sails were partly set but were in a poor condition, with some of them absent altogether. Galley equipment was neatly stowed but the ship’s compass housing had been damaged.
On the deck was a bilge valve and a rough-and-ready sounding rod, a tool used for measuring the depth of water in the hold, of which there was a significant amount. The depth was measured by the search party at some 3.5 feet, but this was not an unmanageable amount for a craft of the size of the Mary Celeste.
The crew seemed to have been taking readings in the hull, possibly believing that the ship was taking on water much faster than it was, and was going to sink. The open hatches, with their covers off, suggest a hurried departure, possibly following an inspection or a venting of the volatile cargo of alcohol. There were no signs of fire.
Most significantly, the ship’s only lifeboat was missing from its position lashed to the cover of the main hatch. Cut marks seemed to show that, instead of being untied, the ropes that held it fast had been severed with an axe.
The ship’s cabins were wet, water having come in through open doorways and skylights, but they were tidy and in good order. Personal items were scattered about the captain’s cabin, including a sword under the bed, but there was no evidence of a scuffle, or violence of any kind. However, the bed was unmade, something unusual aboard a well-run ship unless the
captain had been roused from sleep at the time of an alarm. Most of the ship’s papers, along with the captain’s navigational instruments, were missing.
The ship’s log was found in the mate’s cabin. The final entry was timed at 8 a.m. on 25 November, nine days earlier. Mary Celeste’s last position was recorded as 37°01'N, 25°01'W, off Santa Maria Island in the Azores, nearly 400 nautical miles (about 460 land miles) from the place where Dei Gratia had come upon her.
The Mary Celeste was sailed directly into port, and hearings were begun in Gibraltar in December. These were conducted by the boisterously named Frederick Solly-Flood, Attorney General of Gibraltar and Proctor for the Queen in Her Office of Admiralty – a title which would require quite a big badge to fit on for Admiralty strategy conferences. Flood was by all accounts a man ‘whose arrogance and pomposity were inversely proportional to his IQ’, and he was convinced that a crime had been committed. He demanded to see evidence.
Almost at once, Gibraltar’s Surveyor of Shipping, John Austin, found on the captain’s sword traces of what appeared to be blood. Possible bloodstains were also discovered on one of the ship’s rails, along with peculiar cuts on the hull. A report decided that the ship had not been in a collision or run aground, and Austin found these cuts highly suspicious. In his official report he remarked:
I found on the bow, between two and three feet above the water line on the port side, a long narrow strip at the edge of a plank under the cat-head cut away to the depth of about three eighths of an inch and about one and a quarter inches wide for a length of about six to seven feet. This injury had been sustained recently and could not have been effected by weather or collision and was apparently done by a sharp cutting instrument continuously applied through the whole length of the injury. I found on the starboard bow but a little further from the stern of the vessel a precisely similar injury at the edge of a plank but perhaps an eighth or tenth of an inch wider, which in my opinion had been effected simultaneously and by the same means and not otherwise.
