The New City Suicide

On January 11, 2000, the Chicago Police Department was investigating the death of 41-year-old Richard Cooley. The deceased was found in his two-room apartment in the New City area, hanged by a noose from his ceiling fan. The police, while investigating the case noted unusual scribbles on the walls.

As two inspectors examined the body, one of them stated in near-certainty that this was a suicide, having needed only an initial glance to reach this conclusion. The door was locked, requiring a locksmith to open it for investigators, and none of the windows showed any signs of tampering, as they had been taped shut from the inside. The victim's apartment was a messy sight, papers with seemingly mindless doodles strewn everywhere, a few house plants that looked to have not been tended to in months, food wrappers and clothes cluttering the floor and all available surfaces.

The investigators placed the time of death at around two days before. Friends of the deceased had made plans involving him for New Year's Eve, which he did not attend for no stated reason. This was the last contact these friends had with the deceased. When one of these friends grew concerned after several days and went to the apartment to investigate, they found the door locked and the deceased unresponsive. They found this suspicious, as they had no explanation for why the deceased would suddenly leave. Authorities were alerted when a strange smell was noticed.

The writing on the walls appeared to be meaningless, just a seemingly random assortment of letters and an odd number here and there. One investigator pointed out that the spaces and seemingly strategic placement of vowels indicated that these were supposed to be words, but not any language they were familiar with. Further investigation showed these words to not be any known language.

One investigator noticed something very strange. The deceased's palms were covered in dried blood. Further investigation determined this to be the deceased's own blood, although no scars or wounds were seen on the body. Dried blood was also found caked on the soles of the deceased's shoes, which he was wearing at the time, although no blood was found anywhere on the floor. Upon further investigation, a small number of the writings on the walls seemed to be written in blood, also that of the deceased according to the laboratory.

The specific precinct which primarily handled the case, which will not be revealed here, saw an unusually high suicide rate among its officers and investigators since the case was dropped. No connection to the case itself has been drawn to this. The circumstances of these suicides have all been realistic and unconnected, all of the officers individually came to take their own lives, as if completely by coincidence.

However, what truly marked this case as unusual for the detectives was simply that the blood used for the writing on the walls was still fresh when the investigators found it, indicating it had been left there very recently. As previously stated, there was no apparent method by which any outside persons could have done this, and the only available person had died two days prior. To this day, the investigators have no explanation as to what chain of events could have led to these circumstances.