The Mysterious Teatime

The birth certificate that I found in Mrs. Petersen’s attic was a very big piece of the puzzle when you put it with the wedding photo found in Mrs. Tomas’.

If this case, now called, “The Teatime Murders”, was an interlocking puzzle then I now had the border in place, and all I had to do was fill in the middle. Those pieces were now lying on the card table in front of me. I called my friend; Detective Wurther and he agreed to meet me down at the station with all of the people involved in the case. It was time for me to pull my Sherlock Holmes antics and solve this case.

I had the photos, the birth certificate, the arrest warrants, the racing form, the Social Security décor, the cagey attitude of the mail carrier all working in my favor.

I was ready to see justice being done.

At the police station, in the interview room, they had Mrs.Jaminson, Mr. Peters, Mr. Sittwell, and Mr. Pepsowich waiting for me and Detective Wurther

“Good evening” I said. I was greeted by nervousness, and one could feel the tension in the room.

I looked at the bank manager and I called him by his real name, “Roger Petersen” and he looked like I just took the wind out of his sails. You see I noticed something didn’t look right on his office door. If you remember I thought some of the gold foil letters may have been scraped off and the birth certificate proved my theory.

Then I looked at the lady, Mrs. Stephanie Jamison, from the Social Security office. “Mrs. Petersen” I called her. The look of fear in her eyes registered but, yet I wasn’t done yet.

“Mrs. Petersen, your maiden name, wasn’t it Tomas?”.

She raised her hands to her mouth and stepped closer to her husband. I had linked the two deaths by marriage, which eliminated the Direct Deposit promotion. This confirmation wasn’t necessary from Mrs. Petersen because the lab had already done so with the toxicology tests on the other boxes of tea.

“Mr. and Mrs. Petersen, not only are you married, but you share the same bank accounts and large financial burdens. When you couldn’t get your mothers talked into a nursing home so you could have more access to their Saving Bonds and stock portfolios, you had to devise a plan to kill them or make them incompetent. That is when you recruited Mrs. Petersen’s younger half-brother, Mr. Robert Sittwell, who had connections with an exterminator, a Mr. Flores.”

I then look over at Robert Sittwell and continue my deductions, “Your fingerprints were found on one of the tea bags.”

“Mr. Petersen accumulated his debts from gambling, mostly on horse racing. Mrs. Petersen acquired her financial burden by her love of the finer things in life, mostly fine art. The sums of their debts ran into the ten’s of thousands of dollars.

“At first the moms were helping out by making sure their children had at least money for food. Then I imagine they started tightening the purse strings in an attempt to make their children self-sufficient for when they couldn’t be around. You two got greedy and you poisoned them.”

Justice was done. My investigating lead to the arrest and convictions to the three accomplices and they will be in jail a good long time.