Thoughts on Murder #4: A True Crime Cozy Mystery Story

Thoughts on Murder is Matt Ferraz's column on Grandma Bertha Interviews

It's been such a long time since I last posted here! What could have brought me back? Just a simple and fitting image: a cat's pawprint made on the blood of a burglar who invaded my house not that long ago. Something straight out of a Grandma Bertha book!

That particular night I went to bed late, with a lot on my mind. Ever since the pandemic started, I've been staying with my mother in the house I was raised in. It's a big house with a big backyard, and we have a dog and two cats. One of the cats, Fantasma, decided he belongs to me, so who am I to disagree?

It was about two in the morning when I took a hot shower and went to bed. I had just finished the first draft of my new cozy mystery novel the previous morning and was still overwhelmed. Just as I put my head in the pillow, a moan c frame om the living room:

Please, help me! Help me!

My first thought was that the voice was coming from my mother's room. She might be having a nightmare. But, no, that was someone else's voice, and it came from the living room window. My mother and I got there and saw a man, a complete stranger, standing in front of our window, holding the bars and yelling:

Please, help me! I'm hurt! Help me!

So many thoughts crossed our minds, and the first one, of course, was to call the police. We hid inside my study and dialed the emergency number while the dog kept barking and the man kept moaning. By the time the police arrived, the man was already gone. We waited until the cops were in our backyard before we walked out.

There was blood everywhere. That man was a burglar who jumped inside our backyard and cut himself doing so. By now he had already jumped to the neighbor's house. A police helicopter soon arrived, and it didn't take much time for them to get the burglar. After all, he was leaving a trace of blood behind him!

When things calmed down, I thought of how this resembles the plot of my first Grandma Bertha book, The Convenient Cadaver. My granny, who was the main inspiration for the character, used to live in this same house with us until she passed away last year. What would she have done in a situation like this?

The next day we had to clean all the blood that was left in our backyard. There's still a little souvenir of that night: the pawprint left by Fantasma when he stepped in the burglar's blood. It doesn't get more cozy mystery than that!