The Uncle Ned Theory of Murder

Ever since the Xanathians altered the DNA of apes and penguins, giving rise to modern human beings, a theory of figuring out who is certain to be a murderer and who could never kill has haunted us, obsessed us, caused us to expend treasure and consume drugs. But, as with everything, people think that the answer is complex, when, like picking winning lottery numbers, it is remarkably simple.

Quick quiz: who are the greatest murderers of all time? The answer, as everyone knows, is Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Saddam Hussein. And what do they have in common? An affection for military uniforms, yes, but so did Bob Crane. No, the answer is mustaches! They all have mustaches! Persuasive, I know you are saying, but conclusive? Not yet.




Another quick quiz: who is Hollywood’s everyman, the one actor who embodies our ideals? Uncle Ned, star of Bachelor Party, Volunteers, Joe Versus the Volcano, and You’ve Got Mail, among others. Now, in almost all his film career, Uncle Ned has been clean shaven … and never killed! However, in his one mustached movie, Road To Perdition, Uncle Ned is a killer. Compelling evidence, I’m sure you’ll agree. After all, Uncle Ned didn’t win an Oscar for his role in The ‘burbs and been a runner-up for The Man With One Red Shoe for nothing!

But wait, some might say, but I’m way ahead of you, waiters. In both Castaway and in the running across America scene in Forrest Gump, Uncle Ned had a mustache. Faithful peruser, I would point out that in said instances, Uncle Ned also had a beard, and everyone knows that beards negate the evil influence of mustaches (see, for example, Jesus Christ, my Uncle Walter, or Obi Wan Kenobi).




So, what does this stunning and significant discovery mean? Well, for starters it simplifies murder investigations and trials. It also could free a lot of wrongly convicted unmustached prisoners. Quit picking on O.J. and start asking Ron Jeremy where he was when Ron and Nicole were killed.  And it gives a lot of us a heads-up as to which co-worker is going to bring a gun to the office and start shooting.

Thus the undeniable connection between mustaches and murder. Case Closed.™

Elvis Captained the Titanic!

A Case Closed™ Exclusive by Manny Fatback

They said she was the best of her kind. They said she would modernize sea travel. They said she was “unsinkable.” They said a lot of things. The one thing they didn’t say was that one fateful April night in 1914, the pride of the White Star Line —the Titanic— would strike an iceberg (or at least something that appeared to be an iceberg) and plunge into the cold depths of the icy Atlantic. That was omitted from the travel brochure.

It was Robert Ballard who found the Titanic’s chilly resting place. It was James Cameron who wove a tapestry of magic in his aptly titled movie, “Titanic.” And it was yours truly, Manny Fatback, who discovered the real truth about what happened on that cold April night over ninety years ago. And the truth about that terrible, awful, horrible night will shock readers to their very souls!

“I remember seeing the Captain a few times on the voyage,” said coach passenger Tinkus McFee. “He sure didn’t look much like anyone else on board. Big hair and sideburns. He was an odd one.” An odd one indeed.

During the midnight buffet, passenger Alicia Liver said that the Captain began singing for all the passengers. “I’d never heard music like that in my life,” claimed the spry ninety-nine year old. “It sounded like some kind of devil music.” After the performance, the captain headed to the buffet where he devoured everyone’s fair share of bacon, meatloaf and amphetamines.

“We don’t normally have amphetamines at a buffet, but the Captain insisted,” said second-class passenger Haines Boots.

The idea that Elvis Presley—the King of Rock and Roll, the Emperor of the Singing Picture—took the helm during the Titanic’s fateful maiden voyage seems the thing of fantasy! Well, I say this: at Case Closed™, the line between fact and fantasy is paper-thin. I gathered up the “evidence” and presented it at an Elvisology Symposium and left the attendees stunned. Even our own Case Closed™ panel of experts™ seemed mystified. When asked if Elvis could actually have captained the Titanic, they responded with a resounding, “Why not?”

Is it possible that Elvis Presley took advantage of a rift in time to visit the ill-fated Titanic? And how coincidental is it that the White Star liner sank on April 12 and Elvis died on August 22? Even famed explorer Ballard couldn’t explain the trunk full of sequined jumpsuits found among the debris at the ocean’s bottom. “It might’ve just belonged to a really big woman,” he suggested.

Really big woman...or really big Rock and Roll star? It is the opinion of this reporter—and you can take that opinion to be fact!— that Elvis Presley travelled through time to captain the Titanic! Unfortunately, during a drug-addled stupor he very likely mistook an iceberg for a barbecue restaurant and the rest, as they say, is history. But what isn’t history is the gripping intensity of this story and the question that it raises: did Elvis travel through time on other occasions? Was he driving Kennedy’s car that fateful day in Dallas? Did the King of Rock and Roll help build the pyramids? Was Elvis Jack the Ripper? Right now, these are questions that no one can answer.

But one answer is clear: Elvis Presley stood bravely at the helm of the Titanic, mutton chops and all! This disaster at sea was less about icebergs and bad decisions than it was about one Rock and Roll singer's night at sea.

CASE CLOSED™!

The Myth of Radiation Poisoning—An Ongoing Investigation

To hear "scientists" and "the media" and "the government" tell it, radiation is bad for us. It supposably gives us "the cancer" and makes us "die" "painfully." As far as I'm aware—and at last measure it was 14.3 kilometres—there has never been any conclusive study that proves radiation's so-called harmful effects. Well, I'm not a pawn to the anti-radiation forces, and so, at great personal expense, I will be conducting a lengthy investigation as to whether radiation is, in fact, even remotely dangerous to people.

I have procured a significant amount of enriched uranium from a former Soviet republic (don't ask which one; us journalists gotta protect our sources) and have hidden it in my neighbour's house. I've also purchased an x-ray machine from a dentist who was being sent to jail, and will, whenever possible, secretly take pictures of my neighbour to see if he seems to be getting cancered up or developing superpowers. Any results—or, as I believe, non-results—will be posted here when they come in.

This is, I believe, a momentous event, when the tyranny of science and medicine will finally be exposed.

Stephen’s Lot (or a Whole Lotta Stephens)

Flashback: Dateline June 21, 1999
Horrormeister Stephen King is run down by a mini-van and barely survives… or does he?

It was June and yours truly was just returning from a week-long stay in the Himalayans, where the famous Mountain Yeti had just won his fourth straight bowling league championship, when I heard the news. Stephen King, renowned for his tales of horror and keeping Maine’s returnable beer can and bottle law jumping during the 1980s, had been critically injured in a traffic accident. At first, reports were as sketchy as the screenplay for Maximum Overdrive, but it was finally revealed that King had made a full recovery.

Or had he?

If there are two things that I’ve learned during my journalistic endeavours, it’s this: nothing is ever what it seems. Unable to locate any documents charting King’s release from hospital, I became convinced something was afoot and possibly even afoul. King had taken a stand against a blue mini-van, but what had really been the outcome? Had the gnashing teeth of the publishing industry chewed up the truth? Did the minions at Scribner and Doubleday want to hide the fact that Stephen King had slipped into a dead zone of his own?

With my daring photographer and intrepid editor by my side, I set out to prove, once and for all, that Stephen King perished that day on a rural Maine roadside. But even he wouldn’t let that interfere with his writing!

I scoured the hospital for evidence, but came up with nothing. It was almost as if the hospital was Stephen’s own personal kingdom! I was thwarted at every turn, from my interview with the Bangor police (“Would you get off the steps, you crackpot?” Sergeant Ace R. Lois requested respectfully) to my request for some local news footage from OWE-1 TV. It seemed as if my investigation, like my 1975 Dodge Dart, had stalled.

Not so…

Fast-Forward: Dateline October 2000
Sultan of Scares Stephen King publishes On Writing to critical acknowledgement.

I, Manny Fatback, have always been a fan of Stephen King’s stories of unflinching horror—Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption brought chills!—but nothing terrified me more than what I found inside the cover of King’s aptly titled tome, On Writing: CAN$37.00 for a book barely over 250 pages? Without pictures? Still, I slapped down my hard-earned cash (the receipt submitted for reimbursement was for $52.95—ed.) and began reading. What I discovered both shocked and galvanized me! There, in black and white, was the piece of evidence I had been seeking!

A lengthy 255 pages into his book, King writes that the man who hit him (a man who conveniently died a short time later!) noticed that King’s ”spectacles [were] lying on the front seat of his van.“ I found this to be very interesting indeed because Stephen King doesn’t wear spectacles! At best, he wears glasses—though to be fair, anything with lenses that thick should be called goggles! I immediately investigated this information and was politely told that any number of photographs show King wearing spectacles. Doctored photographs, I thought. I allowed our panel of Case Closed experts to examine said photographs and asked if they had been doctored. Our experts say … maybe!

So … if this one bit of evidence had been fabricated, what else had been made up?

Deciding I had to find out, I packed a bag, grabbed my dog-eared copy of On Writing, and headed out the door …

… After unsuccessfully returning On Writing to the book store for a full refund, I drove straight to Bangor, Maine, the hometown of Stephen King, Monsignor of the Morbid. A stop at Bangor’s Acadia Hospital brought me the next piece in the puzzle—King had never been admitted, nor had he been discharged from the facility! And if this was the case for Acadia Hospital, I knew I could make the assumption that I’d discover the same information at Bangor’s remaining hospitals.

It seemed clear to me then—as clear as the reason for the demise of King’s Golden Years—that he had, in fact, died after being struck by that van! But why? For what nefarious means? I returned to my room at the local Bangor Hojo to gather my thoughts. Little did I know that, thanks to free satellite TV, A&E, and pay-per-view adult movies, I would find satisfaction before the night was out …

… While my intrepid photographer took snaps of the local scenery and my editor finished himself off in the shower (sans Viagra!—ed), I became immersed in an A&E biography of Stephen King. Ironically, it wasn’t the program that broke the Stephen King conspiracy wide open—it was a commercial for King’s novel, The Dreamcatcher. I was only half-paying-attention as King, who narrated the advertisement, stepped into centre screen and declared, “I should know. I wrote it. I’m a Stephen King.”

I sat up, grabbed the remote and punched rewind. Upon remembering that I didn’t have a VCR, I replayed the scene in my head.

King … walking to the centre of the screen. He’s wearing flood pants that expose his white socks. His face is thin. He looks into the camera and says, “I should know. I wrote it. I’m a Stephen King.” (No, really, he says this—ed.)

I’m a Stephen King?

At last it all came crashing down around me. The doctored photographs … the errors in On Writing … the lack of hospital paperwork… it all pointed in one direction.

Stephen King had been cloned!

By the following morning many of the startling revelations had become foggy (thanks to a bite from a Wild Turkey), so I reviewed the list of compelling “evidence” (I’ve grudgingly used quotation marks on the advice of our paralegal’s janitor). I worked my way through the proof, starting with King’s “spectacles” and ending with his TV ad. The conclusions were everywhere as long as you were looking for them!

Still, I knew there had to be more. A quick cell phone call to Case Closed™ headquarters and I was able to speak to our Cloneatician, Dr. Fantastic. Searching the bowels of his wisdom, Dr. Fantastic informed me of several well-known facts about clones. They include:

1. Clones love organized sports… KING LOVES BASEBALL!
2. Clones hate cold weather… KING WINTERS IN FLORIDA!
3. Clones are indecisive… KING HAS REPEATEDLY UN-RETIRED!

He provided me with many other Truths™, but by then my mind was made up. However, to assure that my assertion would stand up under the close scrutiny of the Kings’s lawyers, I decided to analyze King’s writing for more clues.

I returned to the book store, where I was informed that King’s novels weren’t available in Cliff’s Notes—“They only do those for real writers,” explained the moon-faced clerk. With a resigned sigh, I selected a few of King’s novels to explore. The Carrie and The Cell seemed like good starting points.

I was dumbfounded®! In King’s pivotal work The Carrie (a touching story about Vinnie Barbarino and the prom), his writing was concise, brief and to the point. The novel comes in at under 250 pages! With The Cell, however, the work of a clone was evident. The novel (a heartfelt story about girls, cinderblocks, and head injuries) is a meandering tale at best; a wandering story at worst. It became quite clear that, unlike King’s books, his clones weren’t improving after a number of drafts.

The biggest sign of Clone-ism appeared in King’s The Colorado Kid. Not only did it lack an ending (a sure sign of a clone’s declining mental faculties), but in the afterword, he writes, “all I can do is summarize from memory, a notoriously unreliable reference source” (p. 181). Especially for a clone!

Gathering up my evidence, I left Maine behind and headed home.

Dateline: May 24, 2006 (The Present)
The very idea that King, the Earl of Eerie, has cloned himself—perhaps dozens of times—leaves me exhilarated and terrified. This seems like something out of one of King’s horror novels! However, the evidence rarely lies. Our own Case Closed™ panel of experts, when asked if my theory could be true, had to respond with a resounding, “Why not?”

So… could a thousand Stephen Kings on a thousand typewriters complete a novel (before retiring) that came in under 800 pages? It seems possible. So, the next time you pick up a King novel at your local bookerorium, ask yourself one simple question: is this worth $42.95, and are you a Stephen King?
CASE CLOSED™

Note: why was the recent TV movie called “Stephen King’s Desperation”? Is this a clue that the real King (unable to rest thanks to all these clones?) is desperate? Or are they trying to assure us that the real King is still alive?
CASE CLOSED…AGAIN™

An inauspicious beginning.

Cletus and Manny thought that they were ready to unleash The Truth™, but it seems that they aren't quite ready (Manny didn't bother to preheat the oven to 450˚, so The Truth™ didn't rise properly). If you're reading this—congratulations on becoming one of The Enlightened™— take a break, swallow some Lies from the media and come back later for a Truth™ enema.