Solution: Gossipers
Answer: STONE DEAD
Written by Janice Heng
This puzzle deliberately requires solvers to make the looser, intuitive inferential leaps that characterise murder mystery games, instead of relying only on objective logic-puzzle processes.
Each interview has two types of information: 1) the movements and identity of the neighbours; 2) additional observations in italics at the end. Each piece of evidence has a specific bolded item.
The clues about movements and identity yield the following timeline. (The first letters of each interview spell the cluephrase TIME ORDER.)
| Order of visiting | Name | Identity | What they brought/are associated with |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Effi Veerasamy | animal enthusiast | a jar of “flies or something” |
| 2 | Geoff Iverson Lim | hipster | vape liquid and other paraphernalia |
| 3 | Bridget Wong | doctor | fruit basket |
| 4 | Indrani Nehru | chef | grilling with charcoal |
| 5 | Faith Reed | cleaning lady | cleaning chemicals |
| 6 | Haron Effandi | lawyer | the law |
| 7 | Cayleigh Teo | ah lian | uses shower |
| 8 | Ananth Reeves | gardener | vegetables |
| 9 | Dillon Eng | ah beng | drinking alcohol |
Given the context of what the neighbours have been doing, combine the italicised hints and the bolded items (“connect testimony and evidence”) to get murder methods, some more far-fetched than others:
| Italics | Bold | Method | Bolded item |
|---|---|---|---|
| never opens his windows | toxic gas | carbon monoxide poisoning from grilling with charcoal in unventilated room | CARBON MONOXIDE |
| death penalty | name (as used in law) | drugs planted in an amount (15g) at which the death penalty is mandatory | DIAMORPHINE see here |
| dengue zone | genus | dengue-carrying mosquitoes | AEDES |
| ah-moh-neah (ammonia) | cleaning liquid | combination of ammonia and bleach to form chloramine gas | BLEACH |
| even more paraphernalia | chemical (in syringe) | injection of liquid nicotine into bloodstream | NICOTINE |
| Dron... drone-something (dronedarone) | fruit (half-eaten) | interaction of dronedarone and pomelo | POMELO |
| baths | appliance | electrocution via hairdryer falling into bathtub | HAIRDRYER |
| specific combinations of food and drink that you shouldn’t consume together | fruit (with alcohol) | health myth re: the deadly combination of durian and spirits (most commonly XO) | DURIAN |
| toxins | chemical (in salad) | poisoning from high concentration of toxin in rhubarb leaves | OXALIC ACID or OXALATE |
Match the murderers and the bolded items. Each murderer’s name hides a number (previous REDDOThunt participants might remember Iverson). Index into each bolded item using these numbers, in time order, for the final answer STONE DEAD.
| Murderer | Bolded item | Extracted letter |
|---|---|---|
| Effi Veerasamy | AEDES | S |
| Geoff Iverson Lim | NICOTINE | T |
| Bridget Wong | POMELO | O |
| Indrani Nehru | CARBON MONOXIDE | N |
| Faith Reed | BLEACH | E |
| Haron Effandi | DIAMORPHINE | D |
| Cayleigh Teo | HAIRDRYER | E |
| Ananth Reeves | OXALIC ACID or OXALATE | A |
| Dillon Eng | DURIAN | D |
I’ve been playing a lot of murder mystery games (specifically, Chinese jubensha). The well-developed genre runs on a very different sort of reasoning: the bold and imaginative drawing of narrative links, instead of puzzle-hunt-style self-confirming logic.
I wanted to write a puzzle that operates in this completely different mode; to showcase a reasoning style that lies outside puzzle hunt orthodoxy. I recognise that some solvers may have disliked this need for inferential leaps, but I hope the puzzle was still fun and/or interesting.
Setting this puzzle in Singapore allowed me to include some fun local flavour (the durian and alcohol myth, ah lian and ah beng characters) as well as grimmer details (the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking, against which civil society campaigns continue today).
edit: Only after the hunt ended did I realise (thanks to a kind notification from Just-Us League) that one of the key italicised phrases... was not italicised in the puzzle, whoops. This was the bit about "even more paraphernalia" in Effi's testimony, which would have suggested Geoff's nicotine-related modus operandi; instead, the fruit basket detail was italicised. My apologies to any teams whose solve paths were affected as a result!