cristo said:
Or he's privy to far more information than the public, like, having examined the dead body. I don't understand how you can make contrary claims to those made by the coroner when you have a fraction of the facts in hand.
The simple fact that he apparently attempted death-by-pills, and then added a wrist-slashing "coup de grace" makes it less than textbook, as I mentioned in a previous post. I'm sorry, but that is not a textbook suicide, especially for a male. 29 tablets of what amounts to Tylenol is an odd MO for suicide, if you're immediately going to slash a wrist. You could argue that he wanted to ease the pain of cutting himself, but that would be highly unusual in that context. You could argue that he wanted to give himself a horribly damaging and lethal dose of acetaminophen so that he wouldn't "chicken out", knowing his liver would be shot, but that's a bit far-fetched.
It is unusual for someone to leave no note, especially when they're still interacting normally with friends and family. Cutting the wrist and taking pills is a deeply strange MO for a grown man who was angry and frustrated with his superiors. It's also unusual to commit such an act away from home. Frankly, a "textbook" suicide would involve slashing both wrists, unless you posit that he cut the ulnar and radial tendons (with a horizontal cut) on the left wrist, and was unable to cut the other wrist. This would be an amazingly stupid thing for a scientist to do, and cutting of the wrists and taking minimally narcotic pills with a liver-killing dose of acetaminophen is more often a suicidal gesture or means of self-harm than a definitive act.
I could go on, but you can do incredibly easy research and discover that if this is the ME's textbook, he shouldn't be in a morgue. He takes a very lethal dose of Co-Proxamol (presumably to achieve a narcotic high from the dextropropoxyphene), which is the method of someone who wants "death by pills", then adds the relatively painful single-wrist cut? Do you have any idea how unusual it is for people to suddenly mix methods, do so out of doors, and without a note left?
Here is one study dealing specifically with the co-proxamol suicide, among others.
http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/resmethods.html
http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC154756/
Note in the last, that co-proxamol accounts for 5% of suicides, and of those 18% of that 5% didn't involve other drugs at the same time. This is a method of suicide that is not uncommon, but is most common among the young, and not consistent with wrist-cutting. Here's a thought; I inject you with a short-lived opiate in the wrist during a "handshake", then give you common pills. To cover the injection site, I slash your wrist. Again, my opinion, but it fits with decent trade-craft more than it does with the psychology of suicide.
