When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [64]
Perhaps because of my experience in talking to people who are dead, I get a fair number of calls from living people who want to know what would happen to them if they were to commit suicide. My answer is always the same: “I can’t tell you. I don’t know.” What I can tell them is that often, when I encounter ghosts who died by suicide, they tell me that at some point they tried to stop the process, but it was too late.
It’s interesting to me that people who commit suicide may want to leave this world, but they do not always simply cross over into the next. In some cases, this can mean that there is more to the suicide than meets the eye. In many suicides, I am invited to the funeral because the family has unanswered questions—no matter what someone may write in a note, many more questions always seem to remain for those who are left behind. Often families are angry and want to understand why loved ones would kill themselves.
I’ve also had the police contact me to help them investigate murder-suicides, or suicides that might have been murders, or murders that might have been suicides. Of all the ways to die, taking your own life can create the most dramatic ripple effect. However, people who commit suicide are generally doing so for selfish reasons and usually aren’t too concerned with the mess they are leaving behind for others to sort out.
In one particularly unusual case, a man’s apparent suicide created an unbelievable tangle for all those who knew him. The police called me in to help when their investigation of the death hit a dead end. The man’s wife was saying it was suicide, but evidence at the scene had suggested that there might have been someone else involved. The police had a main suspect—and a good reason to believe he might have been involved in the crime—but their suspect had a rock-solid alibi.
What made this case so unbelievable was that the suicide victim was a twin—and that twin brother was the main suspect. The dead man’s wife had told the police she was positive her brother-in-law had nothing to do with her husband’s death, despite the fact that his lighter was found on the floor of the garage, right under the dead man’s feet. The police, however, had the lighter, and the fact that the victim had died by hanging with his feet bound but his arms free, and no sign of how he’d managed to get himself to the high rafters of the garage. They also told me they knew the wife had been having an affair with her brother-in-law; the husband had most likely found out.
Armed with these facts, I visited the crime scene, but there was no sign of the ghost. The wife and the dead man’s twin brother were equally adamant that he had killed himself. They were as willing to have me talk to the ghost as the police were. Based on some information the wife had given me, I suspected that her husband’s ghost was still around, so I arranged to meet with everyone at the home the couple had shared.
The detectives, the wife, the twin brother, and I all sat at the table and waited. The tension was unbelievable. The detectives glared at their main suspect. The widow and her brother-in-law exchanged furtive glances and tried to hold hands under the table. I just wished I were somewhere else. Finally the ghost came into the kitchen. I acknowledged him and let him know that I could see and talk to him. Then I got right to the point. “So, who killed you?”
The ghost, by this time, at least had the good sense to look dismayed by what he had done. He shuffled his feet and looked around nervously as I waited patiently. “I killed myself,” he finally admitted.
“He says he did it himself,” I told the group at the table.
“How?” they all asked in unison.
As the ghost explained what he had done, it became clear that it had been his intent to frame his brother for his death. “I knew they had started an affair,