26+ Ways to Kill: E is for Ectopia and Electrogenesis

Welcome to my blog! Since I write culinary mysteries, “Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary Time” deals with food topics and with mysteries. This month I am sharing ways to kill people—in your mysteries, of course—and some tips on getting away with it! To avoid the pronoun problem, I’ll use heesh (he or she), shis (his or hers), and shim (him and her) throughout the entries.

 

I considered eccoprotic for one of my E words today, but having just done dwale yesterday, I thought eccoprotic, a purgative or laxative, not unique enough. An eccoprotic is mildly cathartic so you’d have to use it over time. 

In Mission Impastable, my killer used a tea made from a plant. Over time, the body broke down and death resulted. Eccoprotic and dwale are different, but in the same family of methods.  Eccoprotics are a slower killing method. It might be too close and not different enough for you.

I thought of using an elsin as a murder weapon. An elsin is a shoemaker’s awl, but I thought that was too close to drail mentioned yesterday as well. Sigh! This is not an easy task, coming up with innovative killing methods!

I finally selected Ectopia and Electrogenesis for today. One is very bloody and the other bloodless. What fun!

Ectopia is the displacement of one’s internal organs. Now that could kill ya! Of course, a surer method is eviscerate (removal of an organ), but we are trying to conceal this, right? I can see you going at least two ways with ectopia. In a medical thriller, you have a fake doctor operating in an emergency situation. Heesh moves some internal matter and the patient dies. Lawsuit ensues. The fake doctor is unmasked, so to speak. Or, you could have the intentional displacement of organs by a butcher doctor who knows that the cause of death will be harder to determine and lets sepsis set in. Or perhaps the organs are displaced when the surgery is for some other purpose and they’re in the way and get moved around resulting in accidental death.

Ectopia would be a very painful death for the victim. Research the symptoms for liver or kidney displacement. What would it be like to have the intestines looped around the heart? You could have some fun with this one. Consider ectopia for your killing method.

E is also for Electrogenesis. Cells produce electricity to function. In an electrogenetic death, you would have deprived the cells of that ability, resulting in a breaking down of the cells and leading to death. Depriving cells of calcium and/or aluminum would have that effect.

In an autopsy, the coroner might find that the cells lacked the essential elements. But heesh would have to be looking for that, right? Seems to me this kind of death might be hard to track down in both the cause and the killer. Who’d be looking for cell death due to deprivation of elements? How do you deprive the body of those elements? Well, now there's a mystery for you to solve in your book.

And that could be a great plot point for you. Who is this ambitious forensic scientist who figures it out? And why won’t heesh let it go? Maybe the electrogenetic death is one close to home justifying the persistence.

Have you killed off characters with an E word?

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#Mystery writer need ideas to kill? E is for Ectopia or Electrogenesis. Many killer tips this month #atozchallenge http://bit.ly/1REgdDj

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Blogging from A to Z Challenge offers a wide range of topics. If you want to kill someone (in books of course), check out killing with Ectopia or Electrogenesis on “Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary Time” at http://bit.ly/1REgdDj

Please come back tomorrow to see how to kill with F words!

 

Check out Sharon Arthur Moore’s culinary mystery, Mission Impastable