Solving Mysteries One Search Engine At A Time

Oh man, you guys. I'm like Nancy Drew over here. If Nancy Drew were real, an adult, and used Google to solve all her mysteries. But I'm just as fiesty.

So. On Mother's Day my family went to the cemetery to pay tribute to both my parents' moms who are buried there. This is not the mystery part. That part went as expected. But when we were leaving, a grave caught my eye. It was a large double gravestone, but the woman buried there, Amy, was only 15 when she died in 1985. I looked at the other gravestone, the guy, Larry, was 16. Between the two it said, "Together forever." So they had been buried together but only at 15 and 16. My brother pointed out that they had different last names. So they probably hadn't been married or related. And finally we saw that they had died on the same day.

Whoah. MYSTERY.

We started talking about what might have happened. Car accident, we figured. Although that doesn't answer why a boyfriend and girlfriend would be buried together. Suicide pact? Possibly, but still not right. Finally, the mystery was consuming me. I whipped out my handy dandy (notebook) smartphone and typed in the names of the people and the date they died and voila:

MURDER.



So here's the story as I've pieced it together.

Two high school kids, Amy and Larry, are desperately in love. As 15-year-olds tend to be. But Amy's family was moving to Maryland and they couldn't stand the idea of separation. So they ran away to Colorado where people could get married much younger, I suppose (crazy Colorado and its healthy, lawless hippies.) For some reason they brought along Larry's friend, Patrick. Little did they know, however, that Patrick is CRAZAAAAAAAAY. The three of them decide to make the marriage trip into a camping trip as well, and go traipsing through the Colorado mountains. Larry's truck overturns, and that's when Patrick grabs Larry's rifle and kills his two friends. Eventually the whole story comes out that Patrick has some form of schizophrenia but an IQ of over 140 and admits to the whole thing with no remorse. He's charged as an adult and gets 20 years. Which means, in theory, he could be out right now. But I can't seem to find anything more on the matter. I figure the family is so guilt-stricken that they had forced the two to run away in the first place, buried the couple together.

WOW. What a crazy story! It makes me want to walk around to every grave, Googling things and solving mysteries. "This woman was only 94 when she passed away. Looks like someone had some unfinished business." *whips out phone*

Mostly I'm just proud of myself for being The Master at Googling Stuff. And I'm seriously curious about this guy with the rifle and why he shot his friends, which no one seemed to be able to piece together entirely. Although I guess that's the whole thing with mental illness, not a whole lot of explanation possible sometimes. But there seemed to be some hints in this article that it had to do with the relationship between Larry and Patrick, platonic or...one-sidedly platonic, perhaps.

In the end, I leave you with this:

Looks like this was a shotgun wedding...*puts on sunglasses*...without the wedding.
YYYYYEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHH!

Sorry. I had to.