Solve a Murder Mystery With Us – Baraboo Mystery Weekend

Greetings Fantasy Nerds, this week we have an exciting post for you! It’s that time of year for the Baraboo Murder Mystery Weekend! We’ll provide you with all of the clues and evidence we collected, that way you can try to solve it as well! We look forward to hearing your theories and guesses, so be sure to let us know in the comments, and happy investigating! You can also visit https://www.baraboomysteryweekend.com/ for more details, and find the recording of the reveal once it is posted! 

Coroner’s Report

On a cloudy and cold day, befitting the mood, the town’s clock struck 12. As the twang of the final bell echoed in the gatherers’ ears, the coroner read the report. It is detailed below:

The Baraboo Times

The local newspaper contains details of the murder and clues throughout. 

Suspects

If you scan the QR code on the suspects page, it’ll take you to some videos of our suspects that contain clues! If you have trouble, here is the direct link: https://www.baraboomysteryweekend.com/allaboutpaige

Clue Stops

A lot of the local businesses have clues you can collect by stopping at each location! There are quite a few, so we have created a shared Google Drive folder where you can find all the clues, the Baraboo Times, and a recording of the coroner’s report if you’re interested! 

Our Theory

Don’t continue reading if you want to formulate your own theory before you hear what we make of the evidence.

There were a couple of clues that led us to our theory of the murder. The first thing we considered was motive: pretty much every suspect had some motive, but which ones did we believe were strong enough to kill over? We quickly ruled out the cosplayers, even the one with a restraining order, as we believe true fans wouldn’t want to kill the author. We also immediately eliminated the Van Klaus’ because it seemed clear that Sierra trusted her husband, and we don’t think anyone would kill over harmless flirtation. Another group we easily ruled out was the neighbors. Sure, we’ve all had neighbors we don’t get along with, and HOAs are sometimes quite a headache, but we’ve never considered murder!

However, there was one HOA member that we kept in the running because the motive was much stronger than bad neighbor squabbles…Noah Way. It seems he had invested quite a lot of money in the new neighborhood expansion, and Paige was messing that up for him.

We also figured out that Paige was Les’ mother, but didn’t think that would give him reason to kill her from what we had learned. We briefly considered his Uncle Joe as a suspect, as he could have murdered her to protect his nephew from learning a sad truth. In the end, we took into account that Paige was a private person and would likely keep her relationship a secret, especially at Joe’s request. We thus don’t believe he needed to murder her.

Lastly, we considered the movie deal motive. We didn’t believe either of the actors was likely to kill for the movie part, especially Barry Tone, as he wasn’t originally that interested in the part. It was his agent who pushed him to try it. Even Hugh had no guarantee he would get the part if Paige were murdered. We did consider briefly that the last suspect video showed he had access to the weapon, but we believe that was a red herring. After considering all the motives, we believed the strongest again came down to money…and the two agents who would likely make a ton of it from a movie deal.

The last video in the suspect videos showed that Paige was not willing to consider a movie deal, one that her agent, Robin Umblind, and Risky Bett had already considered set in stone. And it was also clear that Paige Turner was done writing her hugely successful series, so Robin had nothing left to lose.

Finally, we thought about opportunity. Robin had the easiest access to the murder weapon, which appeared to be locked in a safe. He was in charge of presenting it to Paige during the celebration. We believe he plotted with Risky to instead stab her with the sword, so they could have their windfall from the movie deal. In fact, the author’s murder would likely only make the movies more successful.

…

Who do you think committed the murder? Would you attend an event like this in your area? Let us know in the comments below, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

You can also visit https://www.baraboomysteryweekend.com/ for more details, and visit this link for the solution!

Thank you so much for reading! 

–Clever&WTF