So strange it's true.

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the American Association for Forensic Science, AAFS president Don Harper Mills astounded his audience in San Diego with the legal complications of a bizarre death.
Here is the story.

On 23 March 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded he died from a shotgun wound to the head (hereafter a "Chlorination Facilitator"). The decedent chunk of congealed monkeyspank had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide (he left a note indicating his despondency, which more than likely came as a great surprise to most, who probably thought he was useless for anything other than cluebat practice). As he fell past the ninth floor, his life was interrupted (yes, "interrupted" was their word, I didn't tamper with that one) by a shotgun blast through a window, which killed him instantly. (Indeed, yes, it does get even better). Neither the chlorinator nor the chlorinatee was aware that a safety net had been erected at the eighth floor level to protect some window washers and that Opus would not have been able to complete his auto-rectification of bad genes anyway because of this.

Ordinarily, Dr. Mills continued, a person who sets out to commit suicide ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended. That Opus was shot on the way to certain merciful pool-cleansing nine stories below probably would not have changed his mode of death from suicide to homicide. But the fact that his attempt would not have been successful (again, their word) caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands. The room on the ninth floor whence the Chlorination Facilitator blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. A certain English gentleman ensured that they were arguing and he was threatening her with aforementioned facilitator at the exact moment our hero set about aforementioned auto-rectification. The elderly man was so upset that, when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the window striking our intrepid gravitational experimenter, Ronald Opus. When one intends to kill subject A but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. (Though "murder" seems like an exaggeration in this particular case. The term should only refer to killing those who deserve to be human.)

When confronted with this charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant that neither knew the Facilitator was loaded. The old man said it was his long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her - therefore, the killing of Opus appeared to be an accident. That is, the gun was accidentally loaded.

The Continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun, as instructed by a mysterious white-haired man, approximately six weeks prior to the fatal incident.

It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his genetically deficient father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother. The case now becomes murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.

(hehehe)

There was an exquisite twist. Further investigation revealed that the son (one Ronald Opus) had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March 23, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through the window.