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Was his death Pretend that professor David Harwell has a powerful enemy who wouldn't mind if he's dead.
a sinister plot?
Prof invites public
to solve whodunitBy Suzanne Tswei
Star-BulletinPretend the professor is a massive heart attack waiting to happen. He doesn't eat right, he doesn't exercise and he's got a history of heart diseases.
Pretend the professor dies suddenly in his University of Hawaii office while researching a chemistry puzzle worthy of the Nobel Prize.
A massive heart attack, as everyone had feared? Or was it foul play?
The mystery is open to the public to solve on March 11.
"I want to emphasize that you don't have to have sophisticated knowledge of chemistry to solve my death. Anybody can do it," Harwell said. The whodunit is a fund-raising event for the university's student chemistry club, American Chemical Society Student Affiliate.
Solve the CheMystery
What: CheMystery
"All I have to do is die. The students are the ones who are coming up with the plot and the characters, everything," said Harwell, advisor to the student club.
More details will be released when participants play the game, CheMystery. But here are some advance tips on the mystery:
Harwell, the main character, is an expert in the making of artificial teeth, bone and blood. He keels over with an apparent massive heart attack, although he was taking the heart medication digitalis.
A lab assistant hears the commotion from his office. She finds the professor lifeless and calls for an ambulance.
The professor cannot be revived and is pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.
It turns out the professor had been a thorn in the side of a powerful pharmaceutical company that makes a cancer-curing drug but may be falsifying research data on the drug.
The professor had been hounding the company since his mother died a year earlier of side effects from the experimental drug.
His wife is distraught over his sudden demise, but she also stands to collect a multimillion-dollar life insurance policy.
The other characters in the plot are a lab technician and his wife, both friends of the professor and his wife, and the janitor who sees and knows all about the goings-on at the lab.
Participants will be provided more information at the event, such as autopsy and laboratory results.
They also will be able to interview the characters.
Last year, Harwell played an evil professor in another murder mystery to raise money for student chemists. Two Sacred Hearts Academy students, Charlene Tran and Ashli Taguchi, took first prize.
Tran and Taguchi were the first to figure out that Harwell did not die in an explosion at his chemistry laboratory. Instead, he was poisoned by the disgruntled wife of his assistant.
Unhappy that the greedy professor fired her husband so as not to share lucrative returns from a patent, she baked a mango bread laced with thallium, a lethal chemical, and gave it to the professor for Christmas.
Ka Leo O Hawaii
University of Hawaii
