The Shanniiwrites forums have been host to a gruesome event. There has been a murder of one of its users and everyone is a suspect; 670 users and counting. We have our best Forum Detectives in the case. Clues to suspects and evidence will be found all around the forums and the website as the case progresses. Just be sure to keep checking back to this page for further development on the case.
“AWWWWWWWWWWWWW EL DIED” – Eleanor
On this very early, almost regular, British morning, Eleanor lay on her bed, frantically scribbling on a pad of paper while stealing glances on her phone. She began to cough, something was tickling her throat, it had been there since dinner. Since she had gone out for dinner, alone. The coughing subsided and she went back to scribbling, but not for long. This next coughing fit was bad and when she pulled back her hand from her mouth, it was red. She knew this was it. The last thing she saw before her spirit left her body, was a Discord message saying, “Goodnight, Ellie Bellie.” It was from Deluge.
Welcome to the Forum Murder Mystery!
Spread out all around the world and only connected by the Shanniiwrites Forums, are our magnificent forum detectives. A few hours after the murder, yes murder, they’ve come together to find out who killed such a beloved forumer. Even Eleanor herself can help, though as a ghost she seems to have no memory of the week leading to her demise.
Through the amazing technology that we have, the detectives are able to examine the body for clues from the comfort of their own homes. They find nothing out of the ordinary, only her phone and the coded scribble she had been writing. In code so that her killer weren’t to know she was onto them. It read…
Shanniiwrites
3rd March 2019 paragraph 13 words 41/42, 30th March 2018 paragraph 2 word 35 (no s), 24th February 2020 paragraph 4 word 33, 9th December 2018 paragraph 5 word 6, 3rd July 2019 paragraph 2 word 1, 13th June 2019 paragraph 8 words 10/11, poisoned, 12th April 2020 paragraph 3 words 1/2/3, 4th March 2020 paragraph 5 word 34, 22nd March 2019 paragraph 2 word 3, 13th June 2019 paragraph 1 words 32/33/34…
Are our forum detectives able to decode the note to figure out what El was trying to say before she died? What does it say?
“Help me forum friends, I believe I’ve been poisoned and I know who by, and it was…”
The detectives made light work of it, they had it cracked within the hour. El chose her friends well… or perhaps not since one was after her life. Though the coded message wasn’t helpful without a name, they were a square one. Pretty sure that she was poisoned, Bluecookies sent a sample of her blood and a DNA swab to the lab for analysis while Nil organised for the body to be bagged up and sent to a morgue. Although the coroner wasn’t very happy to be awoken just before 5 am.
Who do you suspect?
Until they got the results, they had to make a list; a list of suspects. With a lack of evidence, or at least where to look, they needed to make a list of names of users with the motive to Kill El. At least five names, but more than twenty might be excessive at this point in time.
They weren’t completely sure of who to put on it. El didn’t have any enemies, she was a beloved member of the community, so who would want to kill her? However, they still made a list. They spent so long arguing discussing the list and analysing every single pot, that no one even thought to check their emails where a report was waiting for them.
The coroner’s report
The basic information was in the report, such as her name and time of death, but it was the cause that caught your attention. Next to the cause of death it said poisoned. However, the coughing up blood was not a symptom. After seeing a blue tint in her colour, her airways were examined and found to be heavily swollen. As well as finding traces of vomit, she had not only regurgitated recently but had also had severe diarrhoea. The poison itself can’t be determined at this point but more samples have been sent to the lab.
Taking a look at the contents of El’s stomach, we found what looks to be a spicy chicken dish, a jam doughnut, and from what we can work out, some cereal from breakfast.
El’s cellphone
While you wait for the report, Jass has the idea to run through what was collected from her phone, except, Passie bet her to it. She was scrolling through the recent messages. Nothing was there aside from text conversations with her family, nothing peculiar in them either. El must have deleted any messages. There weren’t even emails of interest to the case.
Notes and the calendar was next, but only one thing there, an plan for dinner last night; no location. The phone though could probably tell you that by where it has been, but you’d have to wait to get access to that information. Along with the location, you spot a banking app and know you will have to organise with the court to get access to her transaction history.
The call log was interesting, there were four numbers that came up but you didn’t quite recognise the area codes; +44, +972, +64, +91. Research was needed.
Nothing else on the phone seemed to be of any use until they checked the search history. El had been looking up poisoning, how different poisons kill, Iodine and where to get it.
El’s bedroom
Time to examine the crime scene, though not all the detectives are taking it seriously. Shelly and Isidora want to have a party with the ghost of El. Fortunately, no one else agreed with the idea.
Instead, the detectives started with the desk. Everything looked pretty tidy. Books stacked to the side with nothing in them of interest, pens away in their jar, and a desk light that was still on from the night before. In front of the desk light was Dumbo, wearing glasses. Lifting Dumbo up, a note was there. It read, Dumbo wanted to wear my glasses, and the line underneath that read, ‘Operation‘.
Turning away from the desk, they saw Nemo, Skipper, Otty, DVDs, CDs, and other personal items that wouldn’t help with the case. On the bed there was nothing more, but next to the bed there was an almost empty bottle of WKD. Next to that was a bin with one scrunched up note inside, “The flavorless scentless deadly poison thing like in the princess bride.”
There was one more place to check out; the closet. Inside there was black, a whole lot of black. The only items that weren’t were an oversized grey t-shirt and shorts, and pyjamas that were patterned with the same image over and over. You had seen it before. It was her Discord profile picture.
Lab Results
Bagging & tagging Evidence
The piece of paper you asked to have dusted and run against our database is here too. It was odd you asked for this since it wasn’t a written note but a printed one from the forums, however, we were lucky enough to find at set of prints and they weren’t El’s. They belonged to one of your detectives, they belonged to Shelly.
Attempting to be as efficient as possible, Chid bagged the bottle in El’s room and sent it to the lab. Fingerprints were found on the outside of the bottle, but the only ones that were clear enough to lift were El’s. The liquid was WKD vodka pre-mix, as predicted, but with an amazing 3,600mcg of Iodine dissolved into it.
The detectives had sent both sets of unusual clothing to the lab for analysis too. Two kinds of hair strands were found but both suspects’ DNA would have to be provided to check if it’s a match, as we don’t have a match in the database. After some deliberating, they asked Deluge and Saasha for a sample and they willingly obliged. The results came back negative. The next samples that were collected were from Hanna and Nessie, and they were a match.
If anything else needs to be analysed then it will be added to these report.
DNA & Blood samples
The results from the samples that both the detectives and the coroner had sent were in. Eleanor was found to have coughed up blood before her death. The cause of this was a parasitic infection called Paragonimiasis. From a look at her medical records, she was prescribed medication called Praziquantel for this, which was recorded that she had collected. However, there was no trace of the medication in her system.
What we did find was very high levels of Iodine, which would be the poison that the coroner rules as her cause of death. Almost six times the tolerable limit that day for a girl of her age, and by the look of her throat and muscles, she had been consuming more than the recommended dosage for at least a week.
If anything else needs to be analysed then it will be added to these report.
Technology Experts
The detectives send away El’s cellphone to Technology Experts and after a few days they had discovered the data they were looking for.
For starters, her location. Nothing seemed to be too out of the ordinary for El, all her usual activities, except her two oddities. First, was the location of her dinner the night she was killed, which can be pinpointed to the GPS location of Fast Food Centre established on October 8th. The other oddity is that her phone was stationary at her home address for 12 days, a week before her death.
Next, her deleted texts were recovered and what you may find interesting is that she had a conversation with Nessie. This was a friendly one either, it got pretty heated. It started with El worry about her as a friend would do and then things went south quickly when worry turned to panic, and El seemed to think Nessie had found other people to talk to and want to remain friends. It seemed to be a misunderstanding but we can’t tell you more than that.
If anything else needs to be analysed then it will be added to these report.
Sudden Report
A report has come in from your overseas detectives who have been keeping surveillance on Nessie and Hanna from afar. They have just confirmed that one of them, Hanna, has been admitted to hospital after showing mild symptoms, later tested to find out they were linked to large amounts of iodine in their systems. It seems to have been building up for the past month. They’ve been told she’ll make a full recovery once most of it has been eliminated from her body.
A worried Hanna asked for Nessie to be checked too. Luckily, the tests results did not come back positive, no such traces were found in Nessie.
Saasha’s Fast Food Centre
Once they worked out the coordinates of where El had dinner, the Forums Detectives headed straight there. The owner, Saasha, was there and gave them the names of staff who were working that night. It was time to question them. Except, they don’t have much time and have to get back to their shift today, so questioning has to be brief.
Before going to question the staff, Shelly quickly queries if they have security footage on the premises. Saasha shakes her head, they don’t. Damn. Moving along to the staff member who served on El that night, and Bluecookies asked who prepares the food? They told them that in this place it is the job of each server to prepare the food for their tables. He then asked if she was waiting for someone who didn’t show, but the waiter said no. That she seemed to be more interested in the other patrons in the centre.
Nil wondered what El ordered there. They told her that El ordered a plate of cookies and a bottle of WKD. Satisfied with their answers, the detectives began leaving the Fast Food Centre. Though the staff were a little surprised that they hadn’t been asked about the other patrons at all.
While the others were leaving, Duckling backtracked to ask the staff one more thing, “I want to know who else had been at the restaurant that day.” The server only looked at her, thinking it curious that she of all people were asking this. The told her that during the day they just had a few walk-ins but that she should know who was there since her and her partner sitting at the table opposite to Eleanor. Secretz and Passie sat over there, and Sumana and Meeke right there. Then there was that dark and mysterious man who sat in the corner and paid in cash… they didn’t catch his name.
Other Restaurant Information…
Upon hearing about Hanna’s case, the detectives had all the other named restaurant tested for abnormal amounts of iodine. All came back negative.
Saasha got back to the detectives and sent them a copy of the night’s orders. Secretz had a rotten peach, Passie had kalamata olives, Sumana had a lot of air in a bag, Meeke had Stroopwafels, and the other man had lemons with forum cookies. Hanna and Nessie both ordered duckling but left when they realised it wasn’t alive.
Eleanor’s Travels
Scratching their heads for hours and even days, thinking about why her phone hand been sitting home unused for 12 days, the detectives had an idea. They rang up passport control and after receiving a court order, they got the information they were after. El had, indeed, left the country a couple of weeks before her murder.
Her first stop was Israel. Knowing which user lived there, the detective jumped on Shelly for more information and rather quickly she caved. Telling you all that El had indeed visited her for those first six days and then produced two bottles of iodine capsules that had been prescribed to each of them by her local doctor. El’s message was to her, asking her to remove them. Why did they that them? She told you that they had contracted a parasite after having a dodgy/slightly uncooked meal out. A call to doctor and restaurant confirmed the story, and a call to the Israeli passport control came up clean and proved that Shelly was not El’s killer.
Next stop was Germany for four days followed by Greece for the other two before returning home. Nothing told them what she was doing there but there also seemed to be something that Shelly hadn’t told them.