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An amazing tale of a bizarre suicide attempt appeared on the Internet in August 1994. Prized both for the entertaining logic problem it presents as well as the morally-just surprise ending, even years later it remains a cyber-favorite and continues to be forwarded to ever-widening circles of netizens: A story this good should be true. Alas, it's not. There never was a suicidal Ronald Opus, a feuding, shotgun-wielding older couple, or an increasingly confused medical examiner trying to get to the bottom of things. But there is some truth to it, for there is a Don Harper Mills, and he did tell this very story at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Here's how Mills explained his involvement with the story in a 1997 interview: The tale was pitched as a hypothetical, just a story made up to illustrate a point. It's hard to imagine anyone at that 1987 meeting took it for anything else. How did a 1987 illustrative anecdote morph into 1994's believed-to-be-true story? We'll likely never know. How did Dr. Mills come to concoct such a tale? As he said in a 1997 interview, Some of it I wrote out, and some of it I invented as I went along. Ronald Opus never lived. And his death will never die. In 1998 we began seeing versions attributed A true story from Associated Press, by Kurt Westervelt. If that venerable wire service employs a writer by that name, we've yet to see anything under his byline. As for AP itself having run the Opus story, no, it never did. Sightings: This amusing hypothetical case showed up in the 16 January 1998 episode of the TV series Homicide and is also said to have been mentioned in an episode of the TV show Law & Order, but in the latter case District Attorney Ben Stone merely offered a hypothetical example of a man who jumped off the Empire State Building because he wanted a ham sandwich and was shot on the way down by someone who thought he was committing suicide. A 1998 episode of the Australian TV show Murder Call also featured this legend, and it pops up early in the 1999 film Magnolia.
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