article by
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
On the morning of 12 March 1981, at a house in a leafy suburb of North Little Rock, Arkansas, Sergeant Tom Farley, a hard-boiled homicide detective, realized he had "an impossible crime" on his hands.
The body of 38-year-old heating engineer Roy Orsini was face-down on the bed. Orsini was wearing his pajamas and had a bullet hole in the back of his head. The gunshot headwound had been made by a .38 caliber bullet fired from a Colt, but the circumstances of the murder were truly perplexing to Sergeant Farley, because the doors and windows of the bedroom had all been locked from the inside. Also, because the bullet-wound was in the back of Orsini's head, suicide was ruled out. Orsini did have a gun, but it was a .38 Smith and Wesson (the bullet that had taken Orsini's life was from a Colt) and the dead man's firearm was still in its drawer.
Farley had arrived upon the murder scene within minutes of it being reported by Orsini's wife, Lee. Lee had rose that morning at 7 a.m. and had breakfast with her 13-year-old daughter Tiffany. Lee had assumed that her husband had already gone to work, because he had gone to bed in the main bedroom on the previous night at 9 p.m. so he could get enough sleep for an early morning start. On those occasions when Roy Orsini had to rise early, he would sleep alone so as not to disturb Lee.
Mr. Orsini had set his alarm clock for 4 a.m. so he could get up early enough to beat the traffic jams. On the following morning when Lee realized that her main bedroom was locked from the inside, she surmised that her husband had overslept, and she rapped on the door and said, "Roy? Roy, are you all right?" Because there was no reply, Lee Orsini naturally became anxious and called on her next door neighbor, Glenda Bell. Together, Glenda and Lee managed to force the door open. When Lee saw her husband lying lifelessly on the bed she let out a scream.
Sergeant Farley asked Lee, Tiffany and the neighbors if they had heard the gunshot during the night, but none of them had heard a sound. This led Farley to conjecture that a silencer had been used, but he was still at a loss to explain how the killer had left a room which had been locked up from the inside. The detective and his officers made painstaking inquiries into every known relative and business contact of Roy Orsini, but it only reinforced the claims that Orsini had been a popular and much-respected member of the community, because no one had a bad word to say about him. The murdered engineer hadn't had a single enemy in the world. A discreet check was even made on Lee Orsini, but she was obviously a dedicated mother and wife who had a blameless life. The case is still unsolved, for it seems that not only did the killer of Roy Orsini have no motive for the murder, he or she must have been able to walk through solid walls! The final comments by Sergeant Farley summed up the bizarre aspect of the unsolved murder: "I have been involved with many homicides, but never anything like this. Any way you look at it, the Orsini murder belongs in a book, not in real life."