The teacher opened the suggestion box he kept in his classroom. His students used the box to share ideas for their class, but also to correspond with him about issues that they felt were too embarrassing or controversial to discuss openly in class. There was only one note in the box. It said, “I know who did it. I know who killed her, but I am afraid.”
The teacher, understandably disturbed by this note, assumed it referred to the recent murder of a former student, a 23-year-old woman he had taught about a dozen years earlier. He had to figure out a way to get more information from the person who wrote the note without scaring the daylights out of the kids in his class.
He told his students, “Boys and girls, someone put a note in the suggestion box. I can’t tell if the note is a joke, or if it’s serious. Take out a piece of paper, and copy this sentence, from yesterday’s lesson on pangrams, the one about the quick brown fox, remember? If you wrote the first note, give me more details so I can figure out what to do.”
While the kids copied the sentence the teacher sat nervously at his desk, pretending to read his email. He noticed the boys and girls looking at each other quizzically, exchanging raised eyebrow messages and nodding at one another, but this was not unusual. His students always did that kind of stuff.
The teacher collected the papers. None of the newly copied sentences matched the handwriting on the note that disturbed him so much. None of them offered any additional details related to the note.
He realized that the note must’ve come from one of his former students, a girl in high school who visited him the day before with a couple of her friends. Like many former students, she showed up after school to update her old sixth-grade teacher on how she was doing. At one point during her visit, the teacher got up from behind his desk to get a drink of water from the water fountain on the other side of his classroom. He concluded that was when she put the note in the suggestion box.
At first, he thought he should try to contact his former student via social media. He decided against this course of action. The local teachers’ union advised teachers to NEVER contact students on social media. Doing so could lead to complications that could bring one’s teaching career to its end.
He called the police. He met detective Lisa Abercrombie in the parking lot across the street from the school and told her about who he suspected put the note into the suggestion box. She typed a couple of sentences into an app on her phone and thanked him for the note. Before she drove off, she rolled down the car window and said, “Honey, tell the kids I have to work late today, so you’re in charge of dinner. I’ll be home by eight.”