Note Pinned to Mate's Chest

The Note Pinned to Mate's Chest is the message found attached to Eldon Mate's body: a typed insult that turns his own euphemism for death into a taunt. Its wording links the murder to Mate's practice, but the investigators also recognize that the note may be a deliberate misdirection, inviting a philosophical explanation for violence that appears more theatrical and personal.

Physical Form and Wording

The note was plain white paper, eight by eleven inches, computer-typed and tacked to Eldon Mate's chest. The attachment was more brutal than an ordinary pin: a stainless-steel brad had been nailed into his sternum. Its message read, "Happy Traveling, You Sick Bastard." The contrast between an everyday sheet of paper and the violence used to fix it to the body makes the note part of the crime's staging, not merely a written record of the killer's thoughts.

Echo of Mate's Language

Alex Delaware identifies "Happy Traveling" as Eldon Mate's euphemism. Repeating those words in the message makes the insult depend on knowledge of Mate's own language: the killer takes a phrase associated with his work and turns it against him. The added abuse makes the echo openly contemptuous, while its placement on Mate's chest makes the body itself the surface on which that contempt is displayed.

The Note and the Staged Murder

The message accompanies a killing arranged, in Alex Delaware's reading, as a grotesque parody of Mate's method. Mate was struck unconscious before being cut up; Delaware contrasts that sequence with the process of sedating someone before death, describing the killer's use of a piece of pipe in place of thiopental. The note's reference to travel therefore sits beside a physical reenactment of Mate's ritual, but in a brutal travesty rather than a clinical procedure.

Delaware cautions that the note may have been left to encourage investigators to see the crime as a philosophical attack on Mate's work. The killer might even be telling himself that this was the motive. Yet the message does not settle the question of motive: Delaware sees the staging, playfulness, and calculated brutality as signs that the killer enjoyed the process, not simply that he opposed Mate's beliefs. He further considers the possibility that the killer has done this before, while noting that no matching cases appeared in the VICAP files he checked.

Investigative Significance

Milo Sturgis had not initially disclosed the note; he tells Alex Delaware that the detail needs to be kept quiet. Its secrecy marks it as information the investigators are treating cautiously, while its singular wording gives the case a conspicuous signature. The note directs attention toward Mate's practice and the murder's imitation of it, but Delaware's interpretation resists taking that apparent message at face value: the taunt may point toward a theme the killer wants others to see, even as the staged violence suggests a more disturbing pleasure in the act itself.