Question 4 - report the crime

If you were a crime reporter and you saw the final scene, how would you report it? Would you talk to anyone specifically for information?

I really have a hard time with this question. How do you report something that seems to have supernatural aspect to it? As a reporter, you are supposed to write only facts and since the artist of the painting is nowhere to be found (the reader knows what happened to him but the authories don't) you are unable to interview the person who created the painting. So I suppose the only people to interview would be the staff ad friends of the deceased to see if they could enlighten with hidden information of what happened.

"All we want are the facts, ma'am, just the facts" in my best Joe Friday (Jack Webb) voice.
LOL

I find this question a little odd, because I don't think the final scene really qualifies as a crime. Also, like cyderry, I find the idea of a crime reporter trying to describe a supernatural event as problematic. Either I'd be trying to justify it on realistic terms--good luck!--or I'd be having to accept the fact that something ontologically bizarre just happened, at which point I don't think what I'd be doing would be crime reporting.

My thought is that they would assume some rare and horrific disease or poisoning.

I don't know how I really would report the final scene if I was a crime reporter. I would possibly write that Dorian was so horrified by the portrait and was tired of looking at it that he wanted to destroy it and when he did destroy it, he was destroyed too. I would possibly talk to the staff to see if they saw or heard anything unusual to add to the report.

It would be tough to report it exactly as it happened because no one would believe it. The headline would read like something you would find in the "National Enquirer".

I think I would just stick with something like: "in a fit of hysteria, man takes own life". Dorian was well known and his death would have been sensational news even without all of the details.

"Unknown man takes his own life by stabbing himself in the heart. He did this in the home of Dorian Gray. There were no witnesses to the death and the only fingerprints belonged to the deceased. We have been unable to locate the owner of the home."
belva

Nannybebette - I like that one a lot.

Yeah, that really nails it. Man is killed in locked room. Is it apparent that he stabbed himself? Can't really tell from what I read. But it seems like it would look like that.
--BJ