Brainstorming Ideas for a Thriller. Weird Crime Scene.

Crime scene

For some unaccountable reason most visitors to my blog prefer to make queries through e-mail rather than use the comment feature. Anyway, one of the recurring themes I’m asked to pitch a few ideas for is unusual or weird crime scene. Guess what, I haven’t had to rack my brains too long: fact is stranger than fiction.

The other day I came across one of the weirdest stories of crime scene investigation, either fictional or true, I’ve ever heard, read about or seen on TV. It could be made into a terrific thriller, I doubt I could have come up with anything that bizarrely grotesque.

The story kicks off when a worried father goes over to his son’s place after he hasn’t heard from him for days and finds his son, 45, dead on the entrance hall floor stark naked. Police ruled out robbery since there was no evidence of forced entry, picked locks, or signs of struggle, no suspicious fingerprints, and nothing was missing.

Brain-twister. The answer.

Looks like no-one has managed to crack the puzzle, so I got down to work. It took me quite some time,  mainly because I approached the task as if it were Riemannian geometry, but it turned out to be much simpler.
The first step is to rearrange the numbers to make 34 in each row, column and diagonal. You’ll see that numbers 1, 8 and 13, 7, 9, 2 stay put, while numbers 15, 5, 12, 10, 4, swapped places with numbers 11, 6, 16, 14, 3. So all you have to do is cut the square 1 along the red lines and switch pink and blue figures to form the square 2.

     

square 1  1 15 5 12 8 10 4 9 11 6 16 2 14 3 13 7

square 2 1 11 6 16 8 14 3 9 15 5 12 2 10 4 13 7

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Brain-twister with answer.

1	15	5	12
8	10	4	9
11	6	16	2
14	3	13	7

A brain-teasing question this time. A 13-year old boy challenged us to an apparently simple riddle. I suspect he just couldn’t find the answer. Much to my shame, I’ll have to rack my brain for quite some time — I’ve never been on good terms with numbers.
Anyway, can you beat us to it?

Here goes the puzzle:

Cut this square in four parts and rearrange it so that the sum of the numbers in each column, each row and each diagonal equals 34.