Insanity or Brilliance?

In the case of one Fred Muin I have found him most cooperative and polite. If I had not known that he had in fact murdered his wife I would never have suspected it by his actions. He kept well composed for the duration of our sessions and actually seemed quite brokenhearted in the case of the late Mary Muin. Everyone else I asked held similar opinions and they were also quite perplexed regarding his predicament. His mother, however, informed me that he had uncharacteristic moods every now and then. She even went on to describe a young Fred of twenty climbing a tree in an appallingly undressed condition, yelling about some sort of devil creatures residing within the basement. As you would expect her husband went downstairs to look, but there was nothing in the least bit suspicious within its stone walls.

This led me to believe that poor Fred may possibly have suffered a manic attack frequent of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia. With a curious resolve to prove his mental illness I delved deeper into the life of Fred and his family. As I had suspected, various members of his family also shared these episodes of mania although none had been properly diagnosed. However, all these memories were brought to me from word of mouth within the family itself and could not be very well verified as to its legitimacy. With that in mind, I asked the neighbors if they had heard of any of the various manic attacks the family claimed to have endured. Only Jane the maid and George, Fred’s best friend, told me they had seen Fred’s first bout of mania, but not the others. Suspecting that I had stepped into a considerable web of deception, I took a step back and pondered upon their intentions.

The late Mary’s father was a prosperous and influential gentleman of business and owner of a profitable chocolate factory. In his will I found that ten million dollars apiece were to go to his daughters and the rest to a variety of charities around the world. Supposedly since Fred had proven to be a good spouse to his eldest daughter, the old man had decided that if anything should happen to her, Fred would get the money. Fred was a business owner himself, inheriting the family business, called Muin Tires, from his own elderly father. With this new evidence before me, I conclude that I shall look into this more carefully, although now I am convinced that it is an all-consuming greed that drove Fred to kill his wife.

Marvin Zandolski

Marvin Zandolski

Family Psychologist