TEETHING SPLAINS

A few months back, I wrote about how a murderer probably found inspiration from a book which detailed past investigations of Lt. 'Columbo'; but Patrick Jane, once famous as 'The Mentalist', used another one of Columbo's homicide cases to catch the culprit.

It wasn't the first time a Toobworld killer played copycat with another murder - three magicians attempting the same stunt over a period of three decades were all murdered in the same manner - shot dead inside a coffin in which they had been submerged at the bottom of a pool in front of witnesses. Two of those murders were investigated by the same detective (and the fact he didn't remember the details of the first case during the investigation of that third one was the basis for my argument that Captain Amos Burke was showing signs of Alzheimer's by the early 1990's.)

If a murderer was going to draw inspiration from the Past, it would be better to do so from a more O'Bscure case farther back in Time. Not that it would be successful as this next example will show, but it would at least provide a worthy, imaginative effort.

Dr. Wesley Corman, dentist to the stars, wanted to not only rid himself of his wife's lover, but make it look like she had committed the murder. And on top of all that, he wanted to use the crime to force his father-in-law into keeping him as a member of the very lucrative family practice.

Corman found the perfect means in a case investigated by Dixon Druce in turn-of-the-century London: a Brazilian heiress named Edith Dallas had been mysteriously poisoned and Druce eventually determined that the poison had been placed inside one of her teeth. All the murderer needed to do was wait for it to eventually be released once the filling wore away, which took only about a month. That deduction saved Miss Edith's sister, Beatrice Selby, who might have fallen victim to the same fate.

Although his origins are in some variation on the literary universe with stories by Mrs. L. T. Meade, "one of the most prolific of all writers of detective short stories in the 1890's" (according to W.O.G. Lofts and Derek Adley), Dixon Druce is also part of Toobworld because of an episode of 'The Rival Of Sherlock Holmes' - "Madame Sara", starring John Fraser as Druce. So for Dr. Corman to have learned about the case, it may have been written up as an historical curio for one of his dental periodicals like "Spit Sink Weekly".

Oh, wait. That's from the comic strip "Zits", so that's a different fictional universe.......

SHOWS CITED:
'The Rivals Of Sherlock Holmes' - "Madame Sara"

'Columbo' - "Uneasy Lies The Crown" & "Double Exposure" & "Prescription: Murder"

'Burke's Law' - "Who Killed Merlin The Great?"

'Burke's Law II' - Who Killed Alexander The Great?"

'Blacke's Magic' - "Breathing Room"

'The Mentalist' - "Every Rose Has Its Thorn"

BCnU!