Murder by Chance

pocketsights.com

       Bill Arter was an Ohio State University graduate who loved Columbus and digging into its stories. He also taught advertising and journalism classes for almost 20 years at both O.S.U. and Ohio Wesleyan. Something about Charley's story caught Bill's eye and he revisited the story periodically. In the Nov. 6, 1961 Columbus Dispatch Magazine, he had an article, Murder by Chance, with accompanying artwork -- some of it his own. It was the usual recap, except for a possible new clue.

        Very recently a man who was a student at that time recounted the old story and added, "I'm pretty sure I knew the murderer." Then he gave his disappointing anti-climax, "I haven't the faintest idea what his name was or where he went from there."

. . . 

        My informant was rooming on Chittenden Avenue. Among others at the same address was a pharmacy student--a grinning, good-natured fellow but a sort of nonentity nevertheless. A third student told my friend that he'd walked into the bathroom and found the pharmacy student dumping a bottle of white crystals into the toilet. He had laughed and told the intruder he was dumping his supply of "strychnine -- because they're making such a fuss about the stuff."

        The third student, telling my informant of the incident, was convinced that the pharmacist was just being funny.

        My informant friend, in turn, thought nothing more of the incident, he said, until years later, when something he heard or read reminded him of a conversation he had had with the pharmacy student long before the poison mystery began. The would-be pharmacist had told with certain gloating detail about administering strychnine to cats and watching their spines nearly crack as they doubled backward and died.

        As I said in the beginning, my friend has no recollection of what the student's name is (or was) or whatever became of him. When accused of stupidity, he shrugs and says, "After all, you don't expect a guy you room with, just an awfully ordinary guy, to be a poison-roulette murderer."

        Bill Arter died from cancer at the age of 60 in March 1972. We have always wondered if the pharmacy student was the killer, or was the so-called informant?

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