Who Murdered the Lady in the Lake?

coniston water

Coniston Water, Lake District, England – © Google – July 2017

Simon sighed as he read of Gordon Park’s suicide in Garth Prison. He’d been convicted of murdering his wife Carol Ann six years ago, but continued to declare his innocence, claiming that she left him for another man.

The last threat to exposing Simon died with Park.

“Poor Carol Ann. You shouldn’t have kept trying to find your birth family.”

He could still see the look on her face as he smashed it with the ice axe. If he’d piloted the boat further out onto the lake, her body would have vanished in the deeps, instead of being discovered by amateur divers on a ledge.

“I became your lover to prevent you from finding out that your mother was a prostitute and your father was a drug smuggler. Daddy’s dead, and as his only son, I’m running the family business. Sorry, dear sister. You simply got in the way.”

I wrote this for the What Pegman Saw writing challenge. The idea is to use a Google maps street image and/or location as the prompt for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 150 words long. My word count is 149.

Today, the Pegman takes us to Coniston Water, Lake District, England. Naturally, I looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered, among other things, that it was the site of the famous Lady in the Lake murder.

Carol Ann Park went missing in 1976. However, it wasn’t until her body was discovered in 1997 in the lake on a shelf seventy-five feet under the surface by amateur divers that murder was suspected. You can click the link I provided to read all of the details, but among the other facts of the case, Mrs. Park was adopted and had been attempting to locate her birth parents. When she disappeared, her husband Gordon did claim she ran off with another man. She was murdered with an ice axe, and Gordon did hang himself in prison in 2010.

Of course, I made up everything about Simon and am not suggesting that the wrong man was convicted of the crime. In writing this, I am not intending any disrespect to the Park family, and particularly not of the deceased.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

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