Vehicle Assisted Suicide

[Meatpie]

In January 2009, a security guard observed a car on the upper floor of a large parking garage. The car suddenly started and drove in high speed across the parking place before it slowed down and stopped. The rear door was open. As the car placed itself within a marked parking place, the security guard did not check the car further. Later, the car still with its rear door open, and with the parking lights on, was checked, and a dead man was seen sitting in the front seat. The police and the forensic pathologist arrived shortly after and observed the dead man, sitting in the front seat, with his seat belt on (Fig. 7). The ignition was in ‘‘on’’ position, but the engine was not running, and the manual transmission was placed in second gear. The CD player repeatedly played the same music. The head was lying between the front seats, and a lot of blood was found on the car’s window and ceiling. As no tools or rope were found, a police dog searched the area and found a 7-mm-thick, blue nylon rope fastened to a light post, 55 m away from the car (Fig. 8). The whole rope, measuring 28 m was lying by the post. At the free end of the rope a ligature was found. A piece of skin with some hair from a beard was compressed in the ligature. The head was decapitated through a relatively sharp cut wound in the skin in the front of the neck. In the posterior part, a fragment of skin, together with some subcutaneous tissue had been torn off and was found in the extremely tight ligature. The cut surface of the skin had some small irregularities in the posterior part of the neck, but was difficult to discern from a possible knife cut. The soft tissue was, however, irregularly cut. Close to the severance plane, a ligature mark was found on the skin (Fig. 9). The severance plane was between the third and fourth vertebrae. There were some small fractures in both of these vertebrae, but not in the vertebral bodies. The thyroid cartilage was cut through the upper part. Both upper horns of the thyroid cartilage, and the hyoid bone were fractured, leaving the upper horns of the thyroid cartilage on the torso. The rope seemed to have found its way through the weakest point of the vertebral column, through the intervertebral disc, which also was sharply divided, however not at the same level as the cut in the skin in the anterior part of the neck. No drugs or alcohol were found in the blood.