Water Demon Drowning Case (719-721?): Vote for the culprit!

[GinRei]

KOGOROU = BOURBON
KOGOROU = B.O. BOSS
KOGOROU = SAILOR MOON
KOGOROU = INUYASHA
KOGOROU = GANDHI

Kogorou = Hakuoro (Utawarerumono)

[mangaluva]

KOGOROU = BOURBON
KOGOROU = B.O. BOSS
KOGOROU = SAILOR MOON
KOGOROU = INUYASHA
KOGOROU = GANDHI

Kogorou = Hakuoro (Utawarerumono)

Kogorou = Goro (he's secretly a catboi)

[kirhidemi]

i vote for tokubi he's most likely the culprit to me...

[YumeTakato]

KOGOROU = Jiraiya
KOGOROU = Kingdom Hearts
KOGOROU = Pokemon Master!

-dies-

[Abs.]

What's this?  Almost no one voted for Afro-fodder?  Just because no characters of his type have ever turned out to be the culprit?

[Misztina]

XD Yeah. Unless he used his afro to suck in water like a sponge.

Btw. sponge, do you think that something similar could have been a container? Like a a cloth? What if the teacher fell in to that creek/river on purpose to get wet and then he could say later, this cloth is wet because I fell into the creek, not because I went to the pond eaírlier and soaked my other clothes?

[Chekhov MacGuffin]

XD Yeah. Unless he used his afro to suck in water like a sponge.

Btw. sponge, do you think that something similar could have been a container? Like a a cloth? What if the teacher fell in to that creek/river on purpose to get wet and then he could say later, this cloth is wet because I fell into the creek, not because I went to the pond eaírlier and soaked my other clothes?

My guess is the solution will hinge on the watercolors originally being in dry form which were all packed into one container while the rest of the bottles were used to carry water. I assume the origin of the green stain on the shoe is going to be from the paint. Conan seemed to be thinking in this direction at the end. I am going to wait until the release to present a solution because I don't want to miss something. Edit: And also that is a clever idea about falling in on purpose to wash off the scent of the nasty water from before. It would also provide an excuse to do more washing at the ryokon to "clean off the bags".

[Misztina]

- father was making his son dress up as the kappa

Now that I think about it, this could be an explanation why the kid wore shoes and swimming trunks. He maybe had a costume on himself too, which was removed by his murderer.

@Chekhov: Hm... your theory seems more likely. He is the most talkative and suspicious too.

[Chekhov MacGuffin]

- father was making his son dress up as the kappa

Now that I think about it, this could be an explanation why the kid wore shoes and swimming trunks. He maybe had a costume on himself too, which was removed by his murderer.

@Chekhov: Hm... your theory seems more likely. He is the most talkative and suspicious too.

The kid's suit was probably removed by the father who didn't want it revealed that he was disguising himself and his son as kappas to attract publicity for his ryokon. The father may have planted the shoe too, but that isn't necessary for this theory - it depends on whether the kappa costume requires the actor to wear shoes or not. My guess is the boy's death was truly an accident rather than a murder, since the kid was working in the dark and in bad conditions, but the recent murderer blames it on the father for putting the kid in the situation where he would have the accident. It would explain the attitude of the father as well: he doesn't want people to investigate such that he seems to disrespect his dead son yet also patrols the river to keep people from meeting the same fate. He strongly disavows the myth because he feels guilty about how it caused his son's death.

One thing I was thinking about is that maybe two people could have worked together to bring the water up. I should have added that option in the poll, but it could be possible that his former classmate and the teacher were working together and each brought a little of the water...

[Tommyclaw]

Umm.... Is it really 100% sure that the water was from the pond?

[mangaluva]

Only just read the recent chapter. I suspect that the father was kicking over the grave deliberatly to drive people away so that they wouldn't drown; I suspect that the teacher was involved in the drowning somehow, accidentally or not, and there's some proof in the grave that he doesn't want the father to find if he keeps kicking it over. I think that 100 mill bottle might be involved; if you made plenty of back-and-forth trips through the night or similar to fill the bucket, it might work. I wonder about the green stains on the shoe. Algae stains from the rocks? Hmm... (knowing this will probably all be wrong, knowing me...)

[Schillok]

Yeah, I agree, that Kappa story is something from the past and directly connected to the death of the kid. His father was somehow involved in it and the murderer probably wants to take revenge.

The question remains: Who had done it and how did he transport the water.
So far I have two theories:

1. It was the Araiwa, the classmate with the Agasa-like nose. He used his water-proof vinyl bag to carry the water. Conan, Kogoro and Yamamura didn't check the bag at all when they were in his room.

2. Someone collected water from the pond a long time ago, evaporated all (or some) of the water and stored the highly concentrated solution somewhere. Then, before drowning the father he rediluted the pond water to the normal concentration with normal tap-water from the pension until he had the original volume (and thus the right concentration of all the waste from the pond).
In that case the prime suspect is the artist/teacher since he is the only one with a suitable empty water container. Even more convenient it has a scale to measure the volume exactly so he could make the right dilution.


Although 1) seemed more realistic to me it doesn't fit to the things Conan said at the end of the chapter. But number 2) fits quite well, so I will go with that theory.

[kirite]

Superstition...

It could be that the culprit's son disguised himself as a Kappa to attract more customers.  But while doing so he died- either getting trapped, or getting mistaken for a Kappa by someone and knocked unconscious.

However the father doesn't like the publicity...he probably discovered what his son was doing afterward.  It doesn't make sense for him to be clutching that shoe unless he was the one who took the Kappa costume from his son's body. 

Would a face mask make you look like a Kappa I wonder.   

[Chekhov MacGuffin]

Here is one way to make about a liter of water.
There are 16 of those 15 mL bottles. 16*15 mLs = 240mLs
There are 9 of the 60 mL large bottles. 9*60 mLs = 560 mLs + 240 mLs = 800 mLs
The 100 mL squirt bottle can hold water without emitting a stench. (Squirt bottles are often used in laboratories to hold ethanol or acetone which you can smell easily if they are free to vaporize - when stored in these bottles you can't smell them.) 100 mLs + 800 mLs = 900 mLs.
The white container used to hold paint: remember the shoe had green stains on it, and the shoe wouldn't fit in the jar, so the paint must have been stored next to or perhaps inside the shoe while that container was being used to ferry water. I am going to guess the jar has about 75mLs of room. 75mLs + 900 mLs = 975 mLs total ≈ 1 liter.  

Still, it seems hard to imagine you can drown someone in only a liter of water, perhaps the culprit scooped only the smelly oily surface of the water and then diluted it with more water from the ryokon to increase the volume yet maintain the essential nasty character of the Hell's Pond water. If that's the case, do you really need 1 liter of Hell's Pond water? Could you do it with 500 mLs? What if you evaporated the water to concentrate the nasty goo and then resuspended it in more water later? You could carry enough concentrated ickiness to make several liters that way, but it would definitely require getting there ahead of time and using something like pans or plates to hold the water while it evaporated - which could be disposed of in Hell's Pond since the place is full of garbage anyway. Also the weather was dingy so evaporation by sun would be slow in those conditions. Perhaps if you started the day before...

Since it hasn't been brought up, I'm going to assume no one found any trash relevant to the case in or around the ryokon. I'm going to think some more about how the other suspects could have brought in enough water and if their alibis can be cracked. I will take my time since we have a week off before the solution file.

[Abs.]

Introduction of tap water into the solution would affect the composition such that it wouldn't match the pond water.