Royal Murder Mystery

“One of those royal bastards is a murderer! If they aren’t stopped they’ll kill again,” claims Detective Inspector Reg Strangler, who is alleging a massive cover-up by the authorities with regard to the body recently discovered near the royal estate at Sandringham. “That’s why I’ve been pulled off the case – I was obviously getting too close to the truth!” According to a spokesperson for Norfolk Constabulary, Strangler was removed from the murder investigation and suspended from duty last week, following complaints from both the royal family and police colleagues over his irregular approach to the case. “To be frank, he was behaving like a bloody nutter – he pulled Prince Philip in for questioning and tried a good cop-bad cop routine with him. Except that Reg played both roles,” a source within Norfolk CID has told The Sleaze. “One minute he’d be offering him a cup of tea, the next he’d be banging his fist on the table screaming ‘You bloody killed her, you bastard, just admit and I’ll go easy on you!’. We finally had to go into the interview room and stop him when he produced a length of lead-filled rubber hose and started smashing it into the table top! Prince Philip was clearly highly traumatised – I mean, he’s over ninety and had just come out of hospital! I’m surprised he didn’t have a heart attack!”

Strangler’s ‘investigation’ didn’t stop there. After his interview with the Duke of Edinburgh was abruptly halted, the furious police officer drove to Sandringham House, where he attempted to interrogate Her Majesty, the Queen. “He just barged in, using his warrant card to get past security, and proceeded to accuse Her Majesty of providing a fake alibi for her husband for the time of the murder,” says our police source. “He was shouting at her to tell the truth – calling her a ‘lying old cow’ and a ‘duplicitous bitch’. When she refused to confess, he pulled a gun!” Strangler then allegedly proceeded to fire his weapon at various paintings and sculptures in the royal residence, destroying them. “Every time the Queen refused to change her story, he destroyed some priceless object. When that didn’t work, he held the gun to the head of one of her corgis,” sighs the source. “It was at this point that armed officers burst into the room and disarmed him. He was subsequently suspended pending an investigation and psychiatric report. To be honest, most of us reckoned he must have been drinking, either that or he’d been sniffing stuff from the drugs squad evidence locker.”

Colleagues remain mystified as to the source of Inspector Strangler’s obsession with pinning the murder on the royal family. “It’s not as if the body was actually found near the house, or that the victim had any connection with the royal family,” the police source told us. “She was a Latvian student missing from her home in Cambridgeshire – what possible motive would any member of the royal family have for murdering someone like that, an ordinary person? Not only that, but there’s no history of murder or violence there. Unless you are a fox or a grouse, that is.” There is a strong suspicion amongst some of the Inspector’s fellow officers that he had been unduly influenced by portrayals of the police in film and TV. “He was always saying that we were too parochial and plodding and needed to take a more action-orientated approach to policing,” opines retired Detective Sergeant Mike Bludgen, who worked closely with Strangler when they were both constables in the Traffic Division. “I remember him getting bloody excited once at the prospect of a high speed car chase when we were notified of a stolen vehicle heading toward King’s Lynn. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a farm tractor.” Indeed, Strangler is said to have been particularly enamoured of TV’s all-action two-fisted Detective Chief Inspector Wexford. “He modelled himself after Wexford,” recalls Bludgen. “He tried to emulate Wexford’s racy investigative style of wearing a trilby hat and growling at suspects in a west country accent. I’m certain he was attempting to copy Wexford’s muscular investigative approach when he shot up the Queen’s living room.”

For his own part, Strangler, despite being suspended from the Norfolk force pending a disciplinary hearing, has been telling his local newspaper – The Eastern Daily Farmer’s Digest – that he intends pursuing his investigation privately. “I’m damned if I’m going to be intimidated into silence – I’ll march up to Sandringham and make a citizen’s arrest if I have to!” stated the fifty three year old CID investigator. “It’s absolute nonsense to claim – as some of my erstwhile colleagues have – that there is no history of murder in the royal family! Everybody knows that Jack the Ripper was actually Queen Victoria! Driven temporarily mad by grief after Prince Albert’s death from a filthy venereal disease he’d contracted from an East End prostitute, Her Majesty carved up several Whitechapel slappers in revenge. It was all hushed up, of course, and she regained her sanity after treatment by the royal surgeon, Sir William Gull.”

Strangler also claimed that Prince Philip had been implicated in at least two other murders, those of the Queen Mother, (see Murder Most Regal), and Princess Diana, (see Prince Philip Killed My Wife!). “I’ll grant you that his previous victims have been royalty themselves and that killing a commoner would be a significant change to his modus operandi, but there is a limited supply of potential royal victims,” he told the newspaper. “If the urge to kill suddenly came upon him, and he didn’t have time to consult Burke’s Peerage to try and find some distant minor member of the royal bloodline, then it is perfectly possible that he might be forced to murder some unfortunate ordinary person who crossed his path.” Despite the Duke of Edinburgh’s alleged murderous track record, he apparently isn’t Strangler’s prime suspect. “My money is on either Prince Charles or Prince Andrew,” he opined in the local paper interview. “I mean, all that talking to trees and philanthropic nonsense the Prince of Wales indulges in doesn’t fool me. It’s obviously just a cover to hide his true nature – all that pent up anger and resentment at not yet being King. It’s entirely possible that he vents his frustrations by murdering people, specifically women, as they’ve always dominated his life. As for the Duke of York, a failed marriage, no hope of ever ascending to the throne and seen as a joke by the media – what more motivation would he need for turning psycho?”

Strangler also revealed how he had planned to culminate his investigation by calling together the entire royal family in the drawing room at Sandringham, before revealing the culprit. “I would have confronted each of them in turn, exposing their lies and laying bare their darkest secrets,” he explained. “The real murderer would have given themselves away by making a run for it, or pulling a gun, just as I got to them. It was fool proof!” However, denied this opportunity by his suspension, the detective has been forced to try and confront his suspects personally. Indeed, only a few days ago, there were reports of a trilby-hatted middle aged man shouting “You’ve got blood on your hands, haven’t you?” at the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as they attended the opening of a community centre in Norwich. The man was quickly bundled away by security guards, still shouting that the grounds of every royal residence should be searched for bodies. Both Buckingham Palace and Norfolk Constabulary have refused to comment on the incident.