Society for Aesthetic Deletions

I heard about this on the Today show on Monday morning. The first thing I thought of, being an Amber player and GM, was "This guy just tried to pull a Caine!

For those not in the know, in the Amber books by Roger Zelazny, a character named Caine fakes his own death by going out and finding a "shadow" of himself (basically a duplicate) and killed him, then planted the body and everyone thought Caine was dead, until he showed up at the end of the series, very much alive.

Since I didn't actually make a blog entry yesterday, I had to do some web searching to find this story, but the Sacramento Bee came through for me.

Meadows spent weeks searching the Internet for someone who would be mistaken for himself, Davenport said. He was seeking men who were 5-foot-6, about 150 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes.

Fortunately for the victim, Stephen "Jeremy" Bowen, Meadows was not as thorough as the fictional Caine was, and he managed to pull the knife out of his throat, cut the ties holding him, and go to a neighbor's house for help. Jeremy's alive, though no doubt emotionally a wreck, and Meadows has turned himself into police.

The strange thing is that Meadows really thought that he'd get away with it by burning down the house. Has he never heard of dental records?