A Head-scratching Whodunnit (Basking Ridge Week 7)

9:00 AM. A busy hallway in a crowded school. A young woman paces at the top of the stairs, tears coming down her face. She is too busy looking at her phone to notice the figure stepping out of the shadows behind her. A shove. A scream. An ambulance. Someone, somewhere in this school knows who did it. Where do you start?

This is the (fictional! don’t worry!) scenario that faced the students in our Murder Mystery Creation class on their first day. It was up to them to gather the clues and interrogate the suspects (all played by their teacher!) in order to find the culprit. After a few red herrings and lost leads, they were able to gather the evidence and point out the killer before the first day was over!

This was not the only case our super-sleuths took on — in fact, they had a chance to read, watch, and even play a number of murder mysteries, honing their skills of perception and deduction to a point as sharp as the edge of a murder weapon. After learning the basics of settings, characters, description, and narrative design, they got to write their own interactive murder mysteries for each other (and our bumbling Site Director) to solve!

While one of our campers went with a modern-day sports-themed love triangle as the setting for their villain’s plots (complete with notes and gossipmongers), the other decided to set hers aboard a spaceship, changing answers based on what division and rank each sleuth decided to take on. It’s no mystery that these students became fantastic writers — we can’t wait to see them on the big screen some day!