KY - Bill Sparkman, census worker, found dead in Clay County cemetery

[Missizzy]

OneLostGirl--I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am that you and your Mom had to go through the pain of losing your step-dad to suicide. (((hugs)))

 

[jjenny]

And I suspect he was smart enough to know of better, less humiliating ways to make it look like an accident which would have paid the life insurance, so why make a suicide look like a homicide. He wasn't an attention seeker.

If it doesn't make sense, one should question it. jmo

To me, it doesn't make sense for the guy to kill himself because he was sick considering autopsy didn't show any evidence of cancer.
If he was afraid the cancer might come back, one would think he could have waited until it actually did before killing himself.
And if he wanted to kill himself so his son would get life insurance money, staging it like murder doesn't make much sense. Murder will be investigated. Wouldn't it make more sense to stage it as an accident?
The whole thing is strange.

 

[jjenny]

jjenny, that's not always true about not receiving insurance payout if death is a result of suicide. I think it depends on how long the policy is in force. If this man had life insurance polices that he had bought way before he had cancer (cancer can cause it to be difficult to obtain insurance without paying a large premium), it might still have paid his family.

People can convince themselves that they are ill. Speaking from experience once you have cancer, it always seems to be in the back of your mind whether it will come back or not. Maybe he didn't want his family to go through him having cancer again, emotionally or financially. Suicide is never the answer, but there are those that feel they have no other option.

One of the motives suggested for making a suicide to look like a murder is that he wanted his family to get the insurance money. If his insurance would pay for suicide, I fail to see why would he need to stage it as a murder. And how would he convince himself he was ill when he was not? He had lymphoma in the past, and he was getting regular check ups to see if the cancer had come back. So he would know if it did come back or not.

 

[jjenny]

jjenny--I'm unclear on the cancer diagnosis. Mr. Sparkman had been treated for Non-Hodgkins lymphoma, correct? It was my understanding that it was in remission at the time of his death. Is that what you are referring to? Read a little bit about lymphoma. It can be insidious. It is an interesting cancer. Some of the most common types can be put into remission but will always come back, often in another part of the body. That's what I was referring to.

I also think that the elaborate staging was intended by Mr. Sparkman to point away from suicide. Surely, he had carefully researched his policy coverage. He, it seems, wanted his death to be recorded as a murder so that his family could make a claim. I honestly do not believe that he would have ever committed suicide in such a way, knowing the pain it would cause his family. I believe he truly wanted it to appear as a murder related to the work he was doing for the Census Bureau. JMO

So he plans to kill himself and stage it as murder, but before he does it, he tells it all in detail to the guy he knows?
If he did it so his family could get the insurance money, it doesn't seem like a good idea to tell of his plans to his friend, does it? He'd have to realize there would be an investigation, did he expect his friend to just keep quiet that it was actually a suicide?

 

[mysteriew]

I once volunteered as an EMT and was on the scene of one suicide. That one the victim was nude. Suicides are odd. They choose where and how they wish to be found, they usually give it a lot of thought and actually they can be pretty thoughful (ITOM.) For instance people who slit their wrists will often be found in the bathtub. It is thought that they don't want to make a mess for their loved ones, so they do it where the blood can drain. Others will be nude, it is thought that is because they fear their body fluids getting on their clothing, and don't want people to have to remove the clothing with fluids on them. I think there is also something symbolic about we come into this world naked, and they choose to exit it the same way. Also he had a scenario set up in his mind about how he wanted to be found and what he wanted people to think when he was found. Undoubtedly being nude worked into that scenario somehow. He may have chosen to commit the suicide there because it went with the scenario he had planned, and because it solved the problem of making sure his family wasn't the ones who would find his dead body.

 

[jjenny]

I once volunteered as an EMT and was on the scene of one suicide. That one the victim was nude. Suicides are odd. They choose where and how they wish to be found, they usually give it a lot of thought and actually they can be pretty thoughful (ITOM.) For instance people who slit their wrists will often be found in the bathtub. It is thought that they don't want to make a mess for their loved ones, so they do it where the blood can drain. Others will be nude, it is thought that is because they fear their body fluids getting on their clothing, and don't want people to have to remove the clothing with fluids on them. I think there is also something symbolic about we come into this world naked, and they choose to exit it the same way. Also he had a scenario set up in his mind about how he wanted to be found and what he wanted people to think when he was found. Undoubtedly being nude worked into that scenario somehow. He may have chosen to commit the suicide there because it went with the scenario he had planned, and because it solved the problem of making sure his family wasn't the ones who would find his dead body.

I believe people slit their wrists in the bathtub because they can fill bathtub with hot water. Then it makes for a more comfortable death. How many suicides have you been to that were staged to look like a murder? I am going to take a guess that staging a suicide to look like a murder is a very rare thing.

 

[Missizzy]

Does anyone know anything more about this comment:

"In the days preceding Sparkman's death, a wrecker driver reported to police that he had been behind a pickup truck with several people in the cab and noticed what he "believed to be a pair of hands bound together rise out of the bed."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100116...uX2hlYWRsaW5lX2xpc3QEc2xrA3BvbGljZWt5Y2Vucw--


It's unclear to me, in the way it is written, whether the report of someone seen with bound hands in the back of a pick up was reported before or after Mr. Sparkman's body was found. It's clear that the wrecker driver saw the hands before the discovery of the body. I'm just wondering when the report was made.

 

[OneLostGrl]

Does anyone know anything more about this comment:

"In the days preceding Sparkman's death, a wrecker driver reported to police that he had been behind a pickup truck with several people in the cab and noticed what he "believed to be a pair of hands bound together rise out of the bed."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100116...uX2hlYWRsaW5lX2xpc3QEc2xrA3BvbGljZWt5Y2Vucw--


It's unclear to me, in the way it is written, whether the report of someone seen with bound hands in the back of a pick up was reported before or after Mr. Sparkman's body was found. It's clear that the wrecker driver saw the hands before the discovery of the body. I'm just wondering when the report was made.

Whoa, I hadn't seen that before. Musta been a freaky thing to see!