by irishelk » Sun Mar 11, 2018 2:36 pm
invisiblemimsy
They could establish how long the food had been in the stomach by the stage of digestion? Therefore when the guy had been eating his meal, so the time he was served and the approx time he arrived? Yes, good connection.
I feel this one could drag on and on, and you've got 95% of it, so I'm declaring a
************************SPOILER
This is based on a true story (though I think I added the detail that the killer was the manager). A man was walking home from a restaurant when he was hit by a car and his body was dumped in another location. One suspect stood out, but she would have had to hit him in a very narrow time frame, and she denied even seeing him on the road. An autopsy of his stomach contents revealed potatoes, which made sense because he ate hash browns at the restaurant, but also onions. Everyone who worked at the restaurant swore up and down that they didn't put onions in their hash browns. So it seemed the man had eaten somewhere else also, before he died, and the suspect's story that he wasn't on the road was true.
However, a detective decided to stand in the restaurant's kitchen one night and observe their routine. The first thing the chef did was fry a ton of onions on the stove top. He sloppily pushed them to one side and then, with the same spatula, started preparing hash browns. Bingo. The hash browns were accidentally contaminated with onions, and therefore the victim's last meal had been at the restaurant.
Caught in a lie that she hadn't seen the victim on his way home, when he definitely would have been on that road at that time, the driver then confessed to killing him and dumping his body.