The Scottish Mail on Sunday

Man stages his suicide to look like a murder

- By Peter Sheridan IN LOS ANGELES

A MAN borrowed the plot from an episode of the TV crime drama CSI to make his own suicide look like murder – in the hope of securing a fortune in insurance money for his family, police have revealed.

Detectives were baffled when they found Alan Abrahamson, 71, dead in a field beside his country club home in Palm Beach, Florida.

He had a bullet wound to the chest, but there were no shell casings or murder weapon to be found.

But a six-month investigat­ion concluded that Abrahamson had killed himself in an elaborate plot borrowed from a 2003 episode of CSI.

Police believe he tied a gun to a piece of string attached to helium-filled weather balloons and, after shooting himself in the chest, the balloons lofted the murder weapon up to 105,000ft into the sky, most likely exploding and dropping the evidence in the Atlantic Ocean.

His death initially appeared to be a murder but then an investigat­ion found Abrahamson had recently purchased weather balloons and helium tanks, and had searched the internet asking the question: ‘Can life insurance companies deny payment for suicide?’

Abrahamson, who worked for an LED lighting company, was on his second marriage and had recently made large payments into his life insurance account.

Police have now closed the case and the Florida state attorney has ruled that Abrahamson’s death was suicide.

Amazingly, this was not the first time the CSI plot had been borrowed to fake a murder – a restaurant chain executive employed the same method in 2008, in a case that was also eventually exposed as a suicide.

In that case in New Mexico, the man was found with a gunshot wound to the back of his head.

Police soon found balloons caught on a cactus close to the body, with a gun tied to ribbons hanging beneath them.

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