I work as a detective for suspicious deaths in a town that I’d prefer not to mention. I spend my work days looking at some gruesome scenes trying to figure out time of death, reason of death, and if needed, who was the murderer. It may seem like an exciting job, but most of the time we just look at a body and decide whether they were murdered; most suspects in this town feel so guilty that they turn themselves in.
There was a case a few years back that I still have dreams, nightmares rather, about. The guy never got caught, but the victim had no relatives; the police station had no problem just closing the case. I’ll tell you about the gruesome details because I know that’s what people on this forum enjoy reading.
I walked into the house after receiving a report from a neighbor that said the person in the apartment next to her hadn’t left the house in a while and normally left every weekend to go party. We told her to just go check on him herself and she walked into his place to find him on the floor, face down. My group of fellow detectives and I arrived as soon as possible. We put on our gloves and turned the man over in order to identify him; the neighbor had no idea who he was. His face was horribly disfigured and burned completely beyond recognition. The man was missing his hands, feet, and teeth; whoever did this must have known how to keep a body from being identified.
We printed the entire house, but there was nothing. The only way we ruled out suicide was the fact that no one could have pulled out their teeth, cut off their feet, cut off both of their hands, and burned their own face. The most baffling thing was the fact that the neighbor never heard him scream.
When searching the house for evidence, we found a note telling us to look for his hands in the park. Just as I read the note, there was a report of someone finding a suspicious box in the park.
I dropped the case right away and decided to pass it on to someone else; no one took it, so we just closed the case.