A man leaps from a ten-story building intending to end his life. On the way down, he’s struck mid-air by a shotgun blast through a ninth-floor window. What sounds like the most improbable forensic mystery ever recorded was never a real case at all—but that didn’t stop millions from believing it.
First told as a hypothetical scenario at a 1987 forensic science banquet, the Ronald Opus story spread for years as a true tale of bizarre causality, tangled motives, and legal ambiguity.
A Shocking Death with a Legal Puzzle
The fictional account begins with Ronald Opus jumping from a building. As he passed the ninth floor, he was shot and killed. A suicide note was found, but a safety net on the eighth floor—unknown to Opus—would have prevented his death.
The shot had come from a shotgun fired by an elderly man arguing with his wife. He didn’t intend to shoot Opus, and neither he nor his wife knew the gun was loaded. The weapon was usually kept unloaded, used only to make threats during arguments.
A Twist That Redefined the Case
Further investigation, in the story, revealed that the couple’s son had secretly loaded the shotgun weeks earlier. Angry that his mother had cut off his financial support, and knowing his father’s habit of threatening her, he had hoped she would be killed.
That made the son criminally responsible for Opus’s death. But then came the final twist: the son who had loaded the gun, hoping to cause his mother’s death, was Ronald Opus himself. Despondent after his failed murder plan, he had jumped to commit suicide—only to be shot mid-air by the very scheme he set in motion.
Invented by a Forensic Expert
This complex story was first told by Dr. Don Harper Mills, then president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, during a banquet in 1987.
Mills later clarified that the entire tale was fictional and created to illustrate how legal conclusions can change with each new piece of evidence in a forensic case. He used it as a teaching tool for legal and forensic complexities—not as a report of a real incident.
An Urban Legend That Refused to Die
Despite Mills’s clarifications, the story began circulating online in 1994, often misattributed to real news sources. It was widely shared in email chains, online forums, and printed in magazines as fact.
The scenario was later referenced or adapted in multiple TV shows, movies, and video games, including Magnolia, Law & Order, and CSI: Miami. Mills confirmed receiving repeated inquiries about the case for years and said he was unsurprised by its continued circulation.
A man jumps from a ten-story building, only to be shot mid-fall by a shotgun blast from a window.
This story of Ronald Opus, full of improbable twists, has circulated for decades.
But it never happened—it was a fictional case told by a forensic expert…🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/f6TrjgfL6e
— Detective Tiger's Stories (@TigerDetective) July 25, 2025