The Case of the Cooling Cadaver
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It was a dark and stormy night. Having spent all of your student loan to take a trip to England, you are none too pleased when the British weather refuses to cooperate. You find yourself marooned in a tent on the grounds of a large old country estate. The elderly manservant who had answered the door had taken pity on you, but not enough to let you sleep inside. "Lord Boddy is having some guests this weekend, and there is simply no room. Professor Prune and Colonel Catsup have the Regency bedrooms on the second floor, and Miss Carmine is occupying the vice-regal suite. I'm sorry but there just isn't any room." You accepted your fate stoically and lay awake listening to the rain.
A little while later, you are roused from sleep by the sound of a heavy door creaking on its hinges and slamming shut. This was followed by the sounds of male voices and strange dull thuds. Glancing at your watch, which read 10:00 PM, you unzipped the door of your tent and looked out. The two men were engaged in a game of croquet on the lawn. Even though the rain began to fall harder, they seemed to be in high spirits and kept playing for a full hour. Just as your watch read 11:00 PM, a large chunk of masonry, loosened by the incessant rain, slid off the edge of the roof and landed on a recently played croquet ball. This seemed to startle the men, and they vanished into the mansion. Not a moment later, one of the men re-emerged, this time accompanied by a lady. They went into the gazebo and began a low, animated conversation. A little after midnight the young couple disappeared into the mansion. With all of the traffic in the rain your curiosity is peaked, so you sneak over to the mansion window and the lady is now with the other man, playing cribbage, drinking and laughing. The game went on until around 1:00 AM.
Hearing a blaze of sirens, you realize you must have dozed off after watching the cribbage game. The mansion was ablaze with lights and police officers are swarming across the property. One of the cops approaches your tent saying, "You better get dressed and come inside, we may need your help."
Inside, the elderly manservant was wringing his hands. On the floor was the corpse of a large, white-haired man with a massive gash on the back of his head. A heavy brass candlestick lay nearby. "As you can see, Lord Boddy was murdered in the study with the brass candlestick. We don't know by whom. You all will have to be detained until our pathologist gets here."
"Perhaps I can help, " you said. "Is there a thermometer here?"
"A thermometer? I'll get one," said the elderly manservant.
"Poor Sherlock, " said the officer, "He's devastated. He's been Lord Boddy's personal servant for 47 years. He's devoted to Lord Boddy's welfare, and before you ask, no he isn't a suspect, he isn't strong enough to have committed the crime. Besides, everyone knows he held Boddy in high esteem."
"I've checked the entire building," said another officer, "and it must have been an inside job, all of the windows are painted shut and the door was locked. So, the only three suspects are Colonel Catsup, Professor Prune and Miss Carmine."
Old Sherlock returned with the thermometer, and you took the corpse's temperature. "Let's see, it's 1:30 AM, and the temperature of the body is 32 degrees C. I ought to be able to use Newton's Law of Cooling (listed below) to determine the time of death. Normal body temperature is 37 degrees C, so once we know the temperature of the study, I'll just need one more temperature sample and I'll be all set to figure out a time of death." You looked at the wall thermometer, and it read that the temperature of the study was 16 degrees C. At 2:30 AM, you took another temperature reading of the body and it was 30 degrees C.
"Now comes the tough part," you said, "We have two sets of readings and two unknowns - the time of death and the proportionality constant in Newton's Law. Using Newton's Law two times over, that should be enough information for me to determine a killer if I can be introduced to the suspects."
Upon meeting the suspects, you realized that Catsup and Prune played croquet, Catsup had the tete-a-tete with Carmine in the gazebo, and that Prune and Carmine played cribbage. Just then the pathologist and inspector Vince McFrito arrived, and you told him that you had solved the case, and Vince asked you to submit a full written report detailing the answers to these questions:
1) Whodunnit? 2) When? 3) Give a detailed explanation of how you arrived at your explanation.
This problem was borrowed and modified from a problem in "Calculus Mysteries & Thrillers" by R. Grant Woods.
Last Modified on
Saturday, May 5, 2001.