This originally came from an email about the Darwin Awards.  This is an annual
honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing
themselves in the mostly extraordinarily stupid way.

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the American Association for
Forensics sciences. AAFS President don Harper Mills astounded his audience
with the legal complication of this bizarre death.

"On 23 March, 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and
concluded that he had died from a shotgun wound to the head.  The decedent had
jumped from the top of a 10 story building intending to commit suicide (he
left a note indicating his despondency). As he fill past the 9th floor, his
life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through the window, which killed him
instantly.  Neither shooter or the decedent were aware that a safety net had
been erected at the 8th floor level to protect some window washers and that
Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide because of this."
ordinarily"., Dr. Mills continued, "a person who sets out to commit suicide
ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism may not be what they intended.
That Opus was shot on the way to certain death 9 stories below probably wold
not have changed his mode of death from suicide to homicide.  But the fact
that his suicidal intent would not have been successful caused the medical
examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands."

The room on the 9th floor whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an
elderly man and his wife.  They were arguing and he was threatening her with
the shot gun.  He was so upset that, when he pulled the trigger, he completely
missed his wife and the pellets went through the window striking Opus."

"When one intends to kill subject A but kills subject B in the attempt, one is
guilty of the murder of subject B.  When confronted with this charge, the old
man and his wife were both adamant that neither knew the gun was loaded,   The
old man said that 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 had been accidentally
loads.:

"The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's'
son loading a shotgun approximately 6 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 father to use the shotgun threateningly,
loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.
The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of
Ronald Opus."

"There was an exquisite twist.  Further investigation revealed the son - a man
named (Ronald Opus) had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his
attempt to engineer his mother's murder.  This led him to jump off of the 10th
story of a building on March 23, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through
a 9th story window.

The medical examiner closed this case as a suicide.