Brandon Lamarre
6/17/2016
English Composition and Rhetoric
Slip or trip?

Arthur Volupides, the husband of Queenie Volupides, was murdered by his wife, Queenie, that night or early the next morning. The reasons for this claim are many, as all of the evidence is pointing towards a very guilty Ms. Volupides. For this reason, I don’t believe that the wife is telling the truth.
As the testimony goes, Mr. Arthur Volupides and his wife, Queenie Volupides, had gotten into an argument that night, just as Mrs. Volupides was leaving to go to a country club where a party was being held. After having a few drinks, Queenie returned home shortly before one o’clock in the morning. She invited her friends to come over for one last drink, but returned ten minutes before they arrived at her house. When they showed up, Queenie explained that
Arthur had fallen down the stairs and died, with his glass still in his hand. The autopsy shows that Arthur died by a head wound and was drunk.
There are many aspects of this story that simply don’t match the picture. To begin with, let’s look at how she answered the door. She exclaimed, “Something terrible has happened. Oh my God-what should I do”. This sounds too scripted to be a real reaction, especially when she didn’t shed a tear the whole time. As a rule, when your husband or a loved one dies, you call the cops immediately and you’re going to be in a very emotional state. Queenie didn’t show signs of either of those two things, as the cops would have shown up much faster than the friends, ten minutes later.
Also, Ms. Volupides said that Arthur still had the glass in his hand. However, she also stated that he fell down the stairs. Add those two statements to the fact that Arthur was hit on

Brandon Lamarre
6/17/2016
English Composition and Rhetoric
Slip or trip?

the head hard enough to cause death, and we find this claim a bit fallible. As a rule, when a person is knocked unconscious, their whole body goes limp, and they wouldn’t be able to hold on to a glass, especially not when falling down a flight of stairs. Albeit, perhaps he did fall down the stairs. There is still a problem that arises with this. First of all, anyone who is falling, be it down stairs or just falling in general, will tend to grab on to anything in reach in order to stay stable. There are, according to the picture, three very large items along with a handrail that
Arthur could have and would have grabbed onto in the case of a fall, and none of those items are disturbed whatsoever. The second, and most compelling, part of this claim is the way
Arthur seems to have landed according to the picture: on his back, face up, with his feet pointed towards to the top of the stairs. As a rule, when a person falls down or even up a flight of stairs, they will land on their stomach or side with their face down and their feet pointed towards the ground. Along with this false claim arises the clothes and hair which do not seem to be ruffled or wrinkled in the least, though this had most definitely occurred in the case of a fall down a flight of stairs, as well as his robe being tossed open, which it is not. Finally, there is a rug at the bottom of the stairs, which Arthur seems to have collided with. The rug is unmoved and is not wrinkled either.
We also see in the picture a pan on the stove cooking a meal. For starters, it is one o’clock in the morning, and her friends were invited for a drink, not a meal. There is no reason for a pan to be on a stove at that time.
From what I gathered, Queenie got home, drunk, at around 12:30 in the morning, and found her husband drunk on the couch. Arthur was probably drinking because of the fight he

Brandon Lamarre
6/17/2016
English Composition and Rhetoric
Slip or trip?

had with his wife earlier. Both the fight, the suit he was wearing, and the fact that he and the wife were drunk, led the wife (with poor decision making skills and critical thinking) to believe that Arthur had gone out that night with another woman. This angered Queenie beyond her breaking point, and she snapped, hitting Arthur in the back of the head with a pan. Afterwards, when she realized he was dead, she put the pan on the stove to burn whatever hair or blood was on it, as cleaning it would take too long, to destroy the evidence. Panicking to come up with an explanation to her friends who were about to be there, she drug him by his feet to the foot of the stairs, tried to take him up the stairs so her friends wouldn’t see him, but realized she wasn’t strong enough, as she is only 110 pounds and 5 ½ feet tall, so she left him as the picture shows, put and empty glass in his hand, and made up a story about how he fell down the stairs.