That was, until one victim decided to fight back.

***

I already knew a few things about detective work when I decided to take on this case, having hung out with cops when I covered the police beat as a young newspaper reporter in South Florida 15 years earlier. I knew that tracking down criminals took patience. That it required careful observation and critical thinking. And it required evidence. Good hard evidence. I also picked up a few pointers from old school TV detectives who sat in unmarked cars on overnight stakeouts, drinking black coffee and eating deli sandwiches while patiently waiting for the perps to emerge.

The crime I planned to investigate on my own was personal. It hit close to home. Someone was stealing one of the most treasured parts of my life, a piece of my morning ritual, my sense of the world.

My newspapers.

And the more it happened, the more incensed I became. My wife watched me swear and pound my fist each time I trudged upstairs empty handed to our second floor condo in the Edgewater neighborhood on Chicago’s Far North Side. I needed those papers.

I’m a newspaper junkie, still grasping onto a dying tradition of having printed papers delivered to my home that I can open and savor with my morning coffee. I find it comforting and life affirming, the big headlines and photos telling me what’s important that day, the crinkle of newsprint, the black ink on my fingertips that irks my wife when I smudge it on the white refrigerator door and light switches. I depend on having a newspaper—not a laptop—to take with me into the bathroom.

The morning paper is a ritual I picked up from my father, a longtime journalist and former newspaper reporter like me. I remember as a kid watching my dad spread out the broadsheet Chicago Tribune at the kitchen table, his coffee and Winstons at his side, streams of smoke shooting from his nostrils. He told me how important it was to read, to be informed, to be aware. I began subscribing to my own newspapers in college and never stopped. And now, every day, I receive the Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, and on Sundays I get the New York Times, as well. The papers are usually waiting for me at the front entrance to my condo building. I count on them to start my day, to inform and startle me, amuse and engage me.

***

My investigation began with some basic surveillance. I decided to get up early to watch out my second floor window in hopes of observing the thief in the act. The window was just above the front entrance to the three-story building, so I had a clear view of anyone who approached the door where the deliveryman left the papers. (The same carrier delivered both.) If I moved quickly, I could run down and confront the thief. What then, I did not know.

I began by getting up around 5:30 AM to determine what time the deliveryman arrived. I learned he usually came around 6:15, give or take ten minutes.  So the next morning, I made sure I was up around 6 and took my place by the window. I pulled up a chair, sat with my coffee and watched the tops of people’s heads bob by as the morning went from dark to early light. I got bored after about 20 minutes, having seen no unusual activity. I was eager to get down to get my paper so I could start the morning ritual. The papers were waiting for me during the next few days, but then, alas, the Sun-Times was missing one morning. During the next few weeks, some days I’d get the papers, others they would be gone. Perhaps the thief was toying with me. I wasn’t keen to play, nor did I have the discipline to get up early every morning to do window surveillance. I’d have to come up with another plan.

***

Newspapers hold a deep place in my heart. They helped sustain three generations of my family, beginning with my grandfather Sol, “Dixie” Davis, a photographer during the much romanticized, Front Page era of the 1920s and 30s, a time when major cities like Chicago and New York had half a dozen or more dailies, when reporters wore trench coats and fedoras, smoked in the newsroom and stowed bottles of bourbon in their desks. Sol worked for the Chicago Daily Times and Chicago Herald and Examiner, among other papers. When I was a teenager, my dad showed me yellowing newspapers and brittle old prints of my grandpa Sol’s famous pictures. Sol photographed some of Chicago’s biggest newsmakers, including John Dillinger and Al Capone; celebrities Charlie Chaplin, Charles Lindbergh, Rudolph Valentino and Shirley Temple; and sports figures Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth. My dad followed his dad into the business, starting at the sports desk of the Chicago Tribune, then on to the City News Bureau, the renowned training ground for journalists, (“If your mother says she loves you, check it out”), and later as a reporter for the El Paso (Texas) Herald Post where he covered everything from church news to labor unrest. He once had a bullfighting column.

By the time I was ready for college, I wanted to be like my dad and my grandpa. I had been seduced by the news business, drawn to the idea of making a living witnessing life as it unfolded, by having permission to go places, talk to people and ask questions that no one else could do and then writing about it. Like my dad and grandpa, I craved the adrenaline rush of being summoned at a moment’s notice to the scene of a big story, of facing impending deadlines and seeing my stories in print the next morning, knowing that my work and my byline would arrive on people’s doorsteps. I wound up studying journalism at the University of Illinois and writing for The Daily Illini, spending more time in the newsroom than in class.

After college I took my first newspaper job in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the Sun-Sentinel, working in a crowded, bustling newsroom that gave me that rush I had craved. I spent most of my time on the crime beat during the wild shoot-‘em-up, cocaine-driven 1980s. I covered riots in Miami, Cuban and Haitian refugees floating ashore on makeshift rafts, a deadly hurricane, plane crashes and scores of murders, fires and disasters. Later, as a freelance journalist, I wrote for the Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and covered the Midwest for USA Today.

News was my life. Newspapers put bread on my family’s tables. I knew what it took to produce the news that people depended on each morning. Damned if some low life thief was gonna mess with my newspapers.

***

The thievery at my building began a few years earlier. The first couple of times, I thought the carrier was simply late or forgot to come. I called an 800 number, spoke to a customer service rep, and usually in less than an hour, someone would come to the door with replacements. But after five or six times, it became clear that someone was stealing them. At first I suspected neighbors, and posted a sign in the foyer asking that my papers be left alone. I lived in a six-unit section of a 24-unit building, and didn’t know my fellow unit owners that well, so they were all in the initial pool of suspects. After a few more calls to the newspapers, the carriers placed warning flyers inside the plastic coverings stating that stealing newspapers was a crime punishable by fines and jail time. It worked for a few weeks, but the thievery eventually resumed.

I knew that calling the police wouldn’t do any good, and I’d be embarrassed to report it, given the much more serious crimes that occur daily in my city, and in my neighborhood, considered Chicago’s most ethnically diverse with its mix of middle class and poor, vintage 1920s apartment buildings, new condos, subsidized housing, single family homes, blacks and whites, Asians and Africans, Mexicans and Middle Easterners and the occasional roving gang bangers who spray graffiti and sell drugs in the alleys. About four blocks south, there have been occasional shootings and murders. One afternoon I came home while someone had been trying to climb though a bedroom window I stupidly had left unlocked. He ran off down the back stairs just as I got to the bedroom. A guy was stabbed in the stomach a half block from my front door one night.

Those were serious crimes that deserved police attention. Not mine. That’s why I decided to take the law into my own hands on this newspaper caper. Besides, I always thought detective work was cool, and often had fantasized being on the homicide squad, collaring elusive murderers thanks to my street smarts and keen instincts, and bringing justice to grieving families.

Seeing that the surveillance from my upstairs window wasn’t working, I decided that some kind of undercover operation might be in order. I figured I could pull it off. After all, I had first hand knowledge of how it worked. During my days on the crime beat I went on operations with undercover cops who posed as drug dealers, hookers and johns. I sat with cops in unmarked squad cars and surveillance vans, including one disguised as an ice cream truck in which I hid in the back with a bunch of sweaty officers on a 90-degree day. The trick was to pounce at the right moment. The element of surprise was key. When those cops got the signal, they burst out of the ice cream van just as the perp made a drug buy, and I tagged along right behind them. The guys they busted had this Holy Shit expression. One time I saw a guy piss in his pants because he was so scared at the rush of cops. The rule of thumb in these operations was to get ‘em fast, take ‘em down and no one gets hurt. I thought I could do that. Well, maybe not take ‘em down. I didn’t want any one pissing his pants, either.

***

The Chicago Police Department strongly encourages community participation in its mission to keep the city’s neighborhoods safe. On the other hand, the department discourages getting too involved. That’s what a sergeant recently told me when I called the department to ask about the do’s and don’ts of citizen involvement. What should regular folks do when witnessing crimes in progress? Should they try to solve their own crimes? Where do safety and common sense come in?

“Neighborhood residents can very effectively be our eyes and ears, providing valuable information regarding crime and quality of life issues,” Sergeant Antoinette Ursitti told me in a rather bland, carefully crafted email response after we chatted briefly by phone. “An allegiance between the community and police is the best tool at the disposal of law enforcement.”

But then she got to the heart of things. “However, we never encourage anyone to take any enforcement action, risking their own personal safety. Anyone who sees a crime being committed is asked to call 911 immediately and provide detailed information abourt the offender and incident so that police action can be taken.”

Call 911 for a newspaper thief? I had to take care of this.

***

After my paper was stolen once again, I moved into the next, more serious phase of my investigation. Instead of watching from upstairs, I decided to go on a real undercover stakeout in my car. That night, I waited for the perfect parking spot to open across the street from my building to give me a clear view of the entrance, but far enough away that the thief would not see me. My car, a black 4-door 2000 Toyota Camry that I bought used with 90,000 miles and two hubcaps missing, even looked sort of like an undercover cop car, like those Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors favored by cops and cabbies.

The next morning, I got up around 5:45. I didn’t even need the alarm because I was so excited. I brewed some coffee, put it in a thermal cup and went down to my car in my cool undercover cop-looking get-up, a mid-length black leather car coat and black knit cap. It was fall, the air cold. The deliveryman had not yet arrived. I tried to position myself in the car so that I was sitting low, and not easily visible. I sipped coffee and thought about those cop shows where they did stakeouts like this. The only thing missing were deli sandwiches.

About 6:15 the deliveryman pulled up in a compact car, got out and placed the papers on the doorstep. OK. Now I could watch.

Around 6:30 more people were emerging from their homes and apartments, going to their cars or walking east one block to the bus stop on Broadway Avenue or “L” train station another three blocks away. I sized people up as they walked toward my building. Everyone was suspect: The man in the business suit with his computer case slung over his shoulder. The joggers. The woman with the baby stroller.  The two snotty supersized guys who lived together in the condo unit west of mine and never talked to any one unless to complain.

I peered over the dashboard. A gray haired man paused in front of my building. “Aha!” I thought. I felt a rush of adrenaline, fear and excitement. But he continued on, heading east past the alley and on to Broadway. I hadn’t thought too much about what I’d do if I caught someone in the act. What if he was big and mean? What if he got violent? Just in case, I brought a small digital camera thinking I might photograph the suspect from afar. I decided to play it by ear, and react based on the size, age and manner of the thief.

After about 45 minutes of surveillance, I decided to call it quits. I needed to start my day. Such is detective work. Some stakeouts take weeks or months before paying off, though I wasn’t sure whether I’d have the patience to be in it for the long haul. I tried a couple more times with no results. Disappointed, I called off the undercover surveillance for a couple of weeks, and sure enough, the papers began to disappear again.

***

I recently located a video on YouTube titled “Man Stealing Newspaper.” The filmmaker set up a video camera to point at the front stoop of his condo in San Diego. About two minutes and 30 seconds into the video a man with a baseball cap and jacket walks up, bends down, takes the paper and quickly walks away. I learned that the video was made by Devin Braun, a transportation planner in San Diego. I had found a kindred spirit.

“Basically we live on a condo that fronts the street and our newspapers are dropped on the front porch…easily taken by anybody walking down the sidewalk,” he told me by email. “After many a stolen paper we asked the carrier to put it behind the bushes.  The man in the video apparently figured that out.  He’s one of many ‘resident’ homeless people in the neighborhood.  We set up the camera to catch the person and to see who it was and what time he did it.”

Braun said the man was the second newspaper thief he caught on camera. But like me, he didn’t go to the police. He did something even more radical. “Because of this man on the video we canceled the paper and just buy it when we feel like reading it.”

***

Cancel the paper? I would never do that.

Yet thousands of people have been canceling their newspapers during the last two decades. Most major metropolitan dailies are available online for free, as are hundreds of other news and information sites, aggregation services and media outlets that deliver the news you want when you want it and doing so with fewer employed in the industry. This is part of the reason newspapers have declined, and why I never sought to return to newspapers after seeing so many friends and colleagues get laid off. In 1985, the year I began my newspaper career, there were 1,676 daily newspapers. Not long after I started working in South Florida for the Sun-Sentinel, the Miami News and The Hollywood Sun- Tattler, both substantial daily papers in the region, went out of business, along with the evening paper, The Fort Lauderdale News. Economics were largely to blame. A lousy economy meant less advertising, the lifeblood of newspaper revenue. Today, there are about 1,400 daily papers left, though by one estimate that number could be reduced by half by the end of the decade. There’s a web site called Newspaper Death Watch, which chronicles their demise. A government report shows that in the last ten years, newsroom staffs have been reduced by 25 percent, with more than 17,000 employees being laid off or forced into buyouts. In 2011 alone more than 3,600 lost their jobs. If someone wasn’t stealing my newspaper it was just a matter of time before there’d be no newspaper left to steal.

This thief was stealing the very symbol of what remained of a dying industry and a part of my life I was still clinging to. Even though I bailed out of my job before I could get laid off, I opted to continue working as a freelance writer. At first I contributed mostly to newspapers, though for considerably lower pay than my once-salaried position. The flood of laid off journalists trying to make a buck drove down the value of the written word even more as papers tried to squeeze cheap content out of professionals like us to keep profits up. Pay for Internet sites was worse, sometimes pennies a word. Later, I began teaching college journalism classes part time, mostly for the money, but also with the faint hope of inspiring a younger generation to keep the fire going. I could never let go of my newspapers, clutching with all my strength a part of who I was and how I had defined myself for more than 20 years. I wasn’t going to cancel my papers and read them online. I wanted my printed newspapers in my wretched, ink stained hands. So it was back to surveillance work.

***

Once again, I secured a prime parking spot across the street, got up before 6 and took my place in the car.  It was another cold morning, just above freezing, cold enough to elicit streams of vapor when I exhaled into the car. I slouched down in the front seat, watched and waited. People emerged once again to make their morning commutes. My neighbors left for work. I eyed everyone with suspicion once more.

Then, from behind my car, a dark figure emerged from the alley. He crossed the street diagonally toward my building. I slouched down a little further. The man walked to the entranceway. He looked left, then right and crouched down and snatched one paper. He straightened up and walked briskly eastbound, across the alley.

I felt my heart pumping and a surge of nervous energy. It happened so fast and I did not think, but my body moved forward. I opened the car door, felt myself breathing hard as I slammed the door shut. I walked fast toward the man while yelling, “Hey, Hey, hey, you.” I was moving fast and entering his personal space. “What are you doing? That’s my paper. You’re stealing it.” My voice was loud in the still morning.

He was an African American man, about 60, who I assumed was homeless based on his ragged coat, stained slacks and peppery stubble. He had graying hair beneath an old baseball cap. I don’t remember seeing his shoes. I do remember his face, and his eyes told me he was startled.

“You just stole my paper,” I said.

He mumbled, and said something about it being his paper. That he gets the paper. I didn’t really understand what he was saying. I was breathing fast.

I swiped the paper from his hand like a child grabbing a toy from another. “That’s my paper. I saw you take it.”

I told him that I would be watching him. “I’m going to call the cops next time.” I said it twice and then he walked away.

My nerves were still electric when I went back upstairs, my wife now awake and wondering what was going on. She lectured me about putting myself in danger.

When I calmed down I began to feel stupid for yelling at this poor guy as if he did something horrible or homicidal. Had I reacted a little too dramatically? Here was a homeless guy, taking newspapers and likely selling them on a street corner somewhere. I’d seen guys doing that around town. Homeless guys stealing the product of a dying industry to stay alive.

There was something sad about this newspaper thief, this guy who had to steal papers and hustle them on the street. I didn’t think it excused what he did, but it helped explain why. I was reminded of the many people I’d seen busted for crimes, petty and felonious, when I was a reporter. It rarely felt satisfying to see them being carted away in cuffs, (except for rapists and murderers) and certainly not romantic. It wasn’t like TV at all. Most were poor, desperate souls, addicted to drugs or booze, locked in poverty, stuck with hopelessness, trying to make a buck or steal one.

So I got my newspapers back and scared the shit out of some poor old guy who very well might have been a victim of the same social and economic forces that have driven newspapers to their deaths, a man who might have lost his job, his livelihood and found himself unemployable, cast aside, and old relic. Perhaps as he walks the streets and contemplates stealing another paper he’ll think of the crazy dude who jumped out from his car and snatched away that newspaper as if his life depended on it. If only he knew.

***

Photographs by the author and Martie Sanders.

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The driver gets out and locks his limo. He’s a big man, about six feet tall, broad shouldered, more soft than solid around his midsection. He wears a full-length black leather coat, black trousers, black shirt, black hat, black boots with extended toes that taper into a small square at the tip and has a gold chain with Jesus on a cross around his neck. He walks down the street in a strained, lumbering gait with the aid of a cane. He seems old and tired. I’ve seen him walking around my neighborhood on several occasions and realized that I recognize this man.

He is Darby Tillis.

Darby Tillis was sent to Death Row in 1979 for a murder and armed robbery he did not commit. Spent nine years in the joint and went through four trials before someone found the main witness was lying. He was the first of 18 men freed from Illinois’ Death Row because they were railroaded and wrongly convicted and illustrated how broken the system was.

And here is Tillis now, walking around my neighborhood, driving a big old Cadillac stretch limo. I call out his name and introduce myself. I ask how he’s doing, what he’s up to.

“I’m street preaching,” he tells me. “I’ve got my street ministry and I talk to all kinds of people around the city.”

Darby Tillis. Telling his story to anyone who listens. Preaching peace and honesty. Pleading for the abolition of the death penalty. Sharing the good word with addicts and gang bangers.

“What does a man want?” he says. “What does a gang banger want? He wants the respect of his peers. He wants power. Money. Friends. To be part of something larger than himself.”

He stops walking and looks me in the eye. “What does a politician want?”

He waits a beat. “The same thing.”

Darby Tillis was kind of famous some years ago when his injustice was exposed. He told his story on stage, wrote songs, spoke at rallies. “I’ve been on TV and in newspapers all over,” he says. “Now they don’t want to hear me. I was invited to speak at a conference and they changed their mind. Said I was too angry. They say I’m angry. Damn right I’m angry. I spent nine years in prison.”

Darby Tillis. His face is a map of sorrow, of weariness and sometimes hope. Eyes heavy-lidded that do not brighten much even when he manages a smile. Lines. Those lines on his face are creases of not just time but of a thousand pains. A voice tired, tired of repeating, but committed to repeating.

“I went to this restaurant and the waitress sees me all dressed in black and makes a comment about it,” he says. “She tells me ‘get over it.’ Get over it? Get over it? You don’t get over something like this.”

Darby Tillis tries to open people’s eyes and they are repelled. “I met this white girl, a journalist. Told her my story. I took her to the ghetto. Showed her around. She saw things. She told me she went to some party and told people ‘you should see what’s going on in the ghetto.’ They didn’t want to hear it. White folks don’t want to hear it. Don’t want to believe it, man.”

Two months ago, the state of Illinois abolished the death penalty, becoming the 16^th state to do it. Tillis had been among the loudest and most consistent voices calling for an end to capital punishment here. About time, he says. But the system remains imperfect. People are still corrupt, people will still lie. Brothers will still go to jail for crimes they did not commit.

Darby Tillis says goodbye and walks down the street, this man clad in black, hobbling with his cane, his crucifix swinging.

He’s not over it.

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George Covaleski used to ask me this question every time I went to see him. No matter how hard I tried, I could never come up with the right answer.

George knew a lot about murder weapons and the many ways people could get killed. He was the chief investigator for the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. His job was to determine the cause of death for the hundreds of bodies that were delivered to his office every year.  He spent his days reviewing autopsy reports, witness statements, photos and evidence from the scene where people died, and then issued rulings that would be used by homicide detectives, lawyers and life insurance companies.

Each time he posed the murder weapon question, I’d rub my chin and try to think of something clever. An exotic poison? A lethal virus?  A homemade gun that you could disassemble and scatter in different locations?

“Nope,” he would say. “This one is perfect.”

I met George when I was a rookie crime reporter. Death was part of my beat, and my daily responsibilities included calling the medical examiner’s office to see if any bodies turned up that might be newsworthy.

When I called George for my routine checks, I was usually on deadline, and our conversations were quick and to the point. But over time, we became pals on the phone during my daily calls, a result of our regular contact. “Whaddya got today, George?” I would say.

He had a deep, gravelly voice, a sound that suggested years of unfiltered cigarettes, nasty crime scenes and too many late nights. He would say, “We got a floater. Looks like a suicide.” Floaters were just like they sounded – floating bodies, frequently grotesquely bloated with the gases of decomposition and usually found bobbing in canals or ponds. Or he would say, “multiple gunshot wound victim.” Sometimes he’d say “nothing but naturals today,” which meant that none of the deaths were of a suspicious nature.

One day when things were slow in the newsroom, I decided to drive to the Medical Examiner’s office to meet George in person for the first time. The office looked like one of those professional medical buildings, low slung, clean and quiet. But I felt nervous as I walked up to the entrance, thinking about how it was filled with dead bodies lying in refrigerators or on tables where they were being sliced open. Being new on the job, I was just beginning to learn about a world that I knew little about, spending time at crimes scenes, police stations and inserting myself into other people’s tragedies and personal grief. I felt weird, embarrassed, intrusive. My editors didn’t care. They wanted the story.

Once I walked inside the medical examiner’s office, the place didn’t seem so bad. It was strangely calming. Unusually quiet. It reminded me of a hospital, with clean tile floors that sparkled and fluorescent lights that hummed from above. A couple of receptionists sat at desks with computer terminals, the clicking of their keyboards the only sound in the room. Men in blue surgical scrub outfits walked out of doorways, which I presumed led to the rooms where they cut open the bodies. There was a faint, antiseptic smell, slightly sweet, yet somehow foul.

George was smoking when I came into his office, a small room down the hall from the autopsy theaters. He was a man of tremendous girth, perhaps 300 pounds or more. His face was wide and folded with lines that radiated from his eyes and creased his cheeks. But it was a friendly face. He smiled and shook my hand.

Tacked on the wall behind him were police bulletins, pictures of missing persons, artists’ renderings and clay sculptures of homicide victims whose faces had been destroyed by decomposition or shotgun blasts. Many of them looked like ghoulish cartoon characters. I wondered whether they would ever match real people with these hopeless looking reconstructions.

I sat down next to his desk, which was covered in papers, folders, color photographs of human bodies with all manner of wounds, holes, and slices.

“So kid,” he said, “What’s the perfect murder weapon?”

I thought for a moment, but came up with nothing. We’d been playing this game on and off for months. He seemed delighted to stump me.

When I spoke with George, I learned of all the terrible ways people could die and the details of their injuries. Car accidents (steering wheel embedded in chest) construction mishaps (man impaled by rebar, man crushed by 2-ton slab of concrete wall), shootings, stabbings, bludgeonings (hammers, crowbars, baseball bats). Blunt force trauma to the head, cocaine intoxication, asphyxia, or myocardial infarction, which meant heart attack.

There were many horrible cases, and I had to write stories about them. One time a woman at commercial laundry was decapitated when a tightly wound coil of wire snapped on a machine, unraveled at blinding speed and sliced off her head. I wondered how they informed her family. Another time, there was an infant who was stomped to death by his father for defecating on the floor, a swimmer struck by lightening, a mechanic crushed when a car jack collapsed, a homeless man who fell into a canal and drowned while squatting to move his bowels. George said they figured that one out after police discovered a pile of evidence on the bank of the canal, and linked it to the man who was found floating in the canal with his pants around his ankles. My first reaction was to think that was funny. George did not think that at all.

As a reporter, I instinctively became detached from the reality of this gruesomeness so that I could focus on my job. I adopted that kind of inside humor that cops and paramedics had, making light of the horrors we witness to block out our emotions, a sort of defense mechanism. I used to enjoy telling my colleagues in the newsroom about the bizarre cases, especially the one about the man squatting by the canal. Later, I felt ashamed for making light of it.

George liked to tell jokes, but he never made light of the dead whose bodies passed through his office. It was a place of respect, he told me. The dead must be treated with dignity. Everyone had a family, someone who loved them. That became clear one afternoon while I was visiting George, and a family came in, apparently to identify a body. I heard a woman crying and wailing in the hallway, and I felt a chill. When families like that came to talk to George, he knew just what to do. He was comforting and professional. He treated them like a funeral director might.

“Hey, kid, what’s the perfect murder weapon,” George asked me again one afternoon when I stopped by to see him.

“Jesus George, I don’t know. I give up.”

“This one is absolutely perfect.”

I sat silent.

“All right, I’m going to tell you now,” he said, finally preparing to reveal the solution for me as if announcing the secret of the universe. He leaned forward, his eyes widened and eyebrows arched upward.

“An icicle,” he said in a low voice.

George’s enormous face held a wide grin as he waited for me to react. “A good sharp icicle,” he continued. “Stab the victim, and the evidence just melts away, never to be seen again, completely changing form and then vaporizing into the sky.” He then waved his hands in the air while wiggling his fingers.

He was right. It was perfect.

I asked George if in all his years whether he knew of such a case. “No,” he said. “But then, again, how would I?”

George laughed so hard he began coughing from the deep recesses of his lungs, a booming hack of such respiratory rumbling that I thought I might have to run into the autopsy room for help. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, inhaled deeply and was calmed. George might have been carrying the perfect murder weapon in his shirt pocket all along.

Not long after that visit, I got a call in the newsroom. George was dead. I sat stunned. We had just been talking the other day. Everything seemed fine. I wondered whether they took his body to the Medical Examiner’s office. But that didn’t make sense. I found out he died at a hospital. Heart attack. He was only 61 years old. He would have classified his own death as “a natural.” “No story there,” he would say.

But there was a story, and my editor assigned me to write his obituary. It’s strange to write about the death of someone you know, though in many ways I hardly knew George. Like those who turned up on the autopsy tables, there were people who knew and loved George deeply, and would be hit hard by his death. I called some of his colleagues at the Medical Examiner’s Office to get some quotes and learn something more about my friend, George.

I learned he had four daughters and a son who died of cancer ten years earlier. He was born in Connecticut, served in the Marines and worked for years as a cop. He also had an interesting personal life, which he never told me about. George played drums with a polka band called Georgie K and His Orchestra. He used to wrestle as an amateur under the nickname of “The Crusher.”

One of the investigators at the office told me how much they loved George. “I can recall a lot of families thanking him as they walked out the door for his kindness and compassion,” he told me. Another investigator said, “he was like a father to us all.” These stories made me want to cry, but I was on deadline. I had a story to write.

I will always remember my friend George and his favorite riddle, which I have repeated many times to others, none of whom could come up with the right answer. But George was wrong about the perfect murder weapon. Time is the perfect murder weapon. It always works and it always gets away with it. If we don’t get in the way of a bullet, a speeding car, a 2-ton slab of concrete, fall into a canal or get sliced by an uncoiling piece of wire, something will get us eventually – cancer, heart disease or if we’re lucky, old age. It’s just a matter of time.

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