The Case of the Wheelchair Murders

 

The sign on my door says “Rick O’Shea, Private Investigator”. My cases almost always involve dames, either being spied on for someone or spying on someone. Divorce lawyers love me or hate me, depending on whose side I investigate. 

I work for cash. I’m fifteen years off the police force, paying alimony to two ex-wives, child support, and have a taste for expensive whiskey, so every dollar helps. I bought a 12-year-old Scotch one time. His mother was furious. But I digress. Sometimes I work pro bono for a friend with a very unique case. This is one such story.

An old friend walked into my office with a sorrowful look on his face. I poured him a drink and he began his most unusual tale. His mother, in her early 90s, was dead. Heart attack. The circumstances were very strange. I poured him another drink.

“My mother was in a seniors’ care home. She had all her marbles, even at 93, but physically was confined to a wheelchair. It was motorized, controlled with a joystick and had two speeds. Very slow for inside a building and about 10 kmph on the street. She never used the street mode as she did not go out by herself.

“Out in the hall, she was approaching a very frail lady, even older than my mother, slowly making her way down the hall with a walker. Suddenly the wheelchair malfunctioned. It went into street mode and slammed into the old lady at 10 kmph. She hit her head on the floor and died on the way to the hospital.

“Instead of writing it off as an accident, the police started questioning my 93-year-old mother as though she had done it deliberately. What was her relationship with the frail old lady? My mother was not friends with anyone in the home, she said they were all idiots, but she would ignore them, not kill them. The stress of being accused of murder was enough to give her a heart attack. One wheelchair, two dead old ladies in the care home.”

“Did the cops examine the wheelchair?”

“Of course not. They just wrapped up the case and called it an accident.”

“Could the controls have been jimmied with?”

“That’s my way of thinking but why would someone do that?”

“Did any of the workers in the care home have anything against the frail old lady or your mother?”

“My mother was not the easiest woman to get along with and I know nothing about the other old woman.”

“Okay, I’ll have a look. I’ll need to see the wheelchair, a list of employees at the care home, and the autopsy report on the frail victim. In the meantime, tell me about your mother. Was she mentally capable of killing someone?”

“Oh, Lord, yes. In her younger years we had a visitor show up at the farm and she came screaming out of the house with two butcher knives and my father had considerable trouble restraining her.”

“What in hell was that all about?”

“Long story. My mother was born in eastern Germany close to the Polish border. Her maternal grandparents were Jewish, quite wealthy, owned a wholesale/retail chain servicing small mainly Jewish owned shops. In the late 30s the Gestapo started coming for her family. One at a time they would disappear. She was 7 and small enough to hide behind a cupboard. After the war broke out, the rest of her family were taken to the concentration camps and in cleaning out the house, my mother was discovered. She was sent to a concentration camp for kids in Serbia someplace.

“She ended up on a list of kids to be sent to Auschwitz but missed the round up as she was sick in bed. As Germany began losing and the Red Army approached, the camp guards told all the 12-year-old girls to head west as fast as they could. My mother was in the group that escaped and ended up in a British run camp for Displaced Persons after the war. It was there she met my father, a German farmer, who had dodged the Gestapo and worked in the underground.

“Eventually they married and moved to Canada in 1955, along with many others and settled on farms in a close community. It was one of these farmers she tried to kill. She said she instantly knew he was an SS concentration camp guard by his arrogant attitude and clipped accent, different from all the other neighbours. How he got through, no one knows but the RCMP picked him up and eventually deported him.”

“Your mother survived a great deal. She must have been one tough old bird. Do you remember his name, by the way?”

“It was in the papers, but I was young. Kohl, Gottlieb or Gunther, something like that. Don’t quote me. Check the local paper archive.”

“Were your mom and the other victim from the community? Care home staff? If possible, I need details such as previous addresses, previous names of the staff. I’m sure we can get a list of the staff if someone needs a bit of spare cash”

“Staff, yes, all from the community. The patients from within a 50 km radius.”

We arrived at the care home, and I went to work. For a hundred buck, HR gave me as much info as they had on the staff. The coroner-ambulance driver-mortician (no conflict of interest there) was equally helpful, for the same price. The local rag was ecstatic that someone wanted to look at its archives and brought me a tall stack of dusty old papers.

The papers confirmed that a Gunther Koehl had been deported several decades back. The coroners report gave the old lady’s name which sounded Polish to me. She had a tattooed number on her arm indicating Auschwitz. Everyone in the care home would have known about the tattoo though some may not have known its meaning. Ok, what did she find out that suddenly made her dangerous?

The wheelchair was in a storeroom. No one would touch it. The console had a small lever on the side to switch from inside to street mode. Could not have accidentally tripped. Opening the console revealed a baffling mass of electric wiring. I called a friend in the electronics business, and he agreed to drive up to see what he could see.

In the meantime, I worked on the staff names. The tattoo made me think German. Who was on duty when the incident occurred? Narrowed it down to 10 people. Six of them had German first names and three had German last names which would not be unusual for that community. They were all married and none of the names meant anything to me. I needed names prior to marriage.

If they had been married in a local church, there would be a record. There were three. Good thing it wasn’t a Mennonite community as five Mennonite families would have seven churches. Second church I hit paydirt with a contribution to the mission fund. Hilda Janzen. Hildegard Koehl had married Helmut Janzen in 1989. Now I needed a baptismal certificate as a birth certificate was out of the question, even if I could have lied well enough to get past Vital Statistics bureaucracy. Likely she was baptized in the same church she was married in. That called for another contribution to the mission fund. Bingo. Born 1957 to Gunther Koehl and Mary Murphy in the community hospital.

We had a suspect, now what was the motive? Had the old lady tumbled onto the fact Hilda was the daughter of a deported SS prison guard and threatened to expose her for some reason? That would be most likely. And my friend’s mother was not-unwelcome collateral damage.

By this time, my electronics whiz kid had arrived and was anxious to see the wheelchair control panel. It didn’t take him long to spot a tiny radio-controlled switch that bypassed the side lever.

“Clumsy solder job”, he said.

“Where would she get a thing like that?”, I wanted to know.

“Online, maybe even Amazon, or a dozen other places. YouTube would have how-to videos. It isn’t rocket surgery as my mother would say.”

“If she were handy with tools, Hilda could have come into the room at night, taken the wheelchair to the maintenance room and soldered in the switch. Safe enough since my friend’s mother never used street mode anyhow.”

“Thank you. Now my friend and I will go and see about Hilda.”

My friend was impatiently waiting for me. I explained what we had found out and asked what he wanted to do.

“Let’s just talk to her first. What is done is done. Both women lived many years, maybe they would have lived a few more, who knows. My mother did not want to linger for years, so she got her wish.”

We spoke with the Director and must have looked and sounded very serious, as she immediately summoned Hilda to a small meeting room. She recognized my friend from his visits to see his mother. She crossed her arms and gave us a hostile look. I laid out the case before her as though it were completely factual, even though some was pure bluff.

Her face went pale, and she broke down completely, so I knew we had scored a bullseye. “I just didn’t want anyone to know my background. With all this stuff in the papers about Nazis, I was terrified people would turn on me.”

“We are not going any further with this but if anyone else in this care home dies under mysterious circumstances, we will go to the police. Do you understand?”

My friend was relieved that his mother had no part in any of this and was simply used by Hilda to deal with the frail old lady with the Auschwitz tattoo. He insisted on paying my out-of-pocket expenses and bought me a bottle of 16 year old Laphroaig.

I couldn’t say no.