Letitia Blacklock murders Rudi Scherz

Letitia Blacklock murders Rudi Scherz during a carefully prepared deception at Little Paddocks. The staged hold-up depends on making a real killing look like part of the intruder’s performance: a deliberately disabled lamp causes a blackout, allowing Letitia to shoot Rudi and return to the scene as though she, too, had been attacked.

Preparation and Deception

The plan had been assembled through actions that could initially seem like small domestic errands or practical adjustments. Letitia obtained Colonel Archie Easterbrook’s revolver from a drawer, carried eggs or jam into the empty house, and oiled the drawing-room’s second door so it could move quietly. She also suggested shifting the table, ostensibly to display Phillipa Haymes’s flower arrangements to better advantage. In retrospect, these preparations made a route and opportunity for the shooting while keeping their purpose concealed.

Letitia was frightened on the day of the plan, as Dora Bunner had noticed, but she did not withdraw. The narrative’s contrast between the preparations’ game-like appearance and the killing’s irreversible reality underlines the change from staging to murder. Shortly after six, Letitia went out on the pretext of shutting up the ducks, let Rudi into the house, and gave him the mask, cloak, gloves, and flashlight he needed to play the intruder.

The Blackout and Shooting

At 6:30 p.m., as the clock began to chime, Letitia stood by the table near the archway with her hand close to the cigarette box. She had judged that the people in the room would look toward the clock. While the others were distracted, she picked up the vase of violets and spilled its water onto the nearly bare wires of a lamp whose cord she had previously frayed, then switched the lamp on. The water shorted the wires, plunging the room into darkness.

The blackout gave Letitia time to pass through the oiled door and approach Rudi from behind while he was sweeping his flashlight around the room in character. She waited until its beam reached the wall near where she was supposed to be standing, then fired twice. When Rudi turned, she fired again at close range, dropped the revolver beside him, left her gloves on the hall table, and returned through the other door to her former position. The vase, the switch, the cigarette box, and the lamp were close together, making the staged electrical failure appear to arise from an ordinary movement in the room.

The False Account and Its Unraveling

Letitia also arranged the scene to support the appearance that Rudi had attacked her. She had a small cut on her ear, and the resulting blood on her white blouse made it seem that the intruder had nearly hit her. Dora’s insistence that Rudi had aimed at Letitia reinforced that impression; without intending to, Dora conveyed that she had seen her friend wounded. The story might therefore have been treated as suicide or accidental death and closed without further investigation.

The case remained open because Jane Marple and Inspector Craddock did not accept the apparent explanation. Craddock later found that the second door had been tampered with and that its oiling was evidence of deliberate preparation, rather than merely a theory about what might have happened. The investigation thus connected the seemingly separate details—the altered lamp, the movement of the table, the quiet door, and Dora’s account—to the sequence that let Letitia kill Rudi and disguise the murder as a failed hold-up.