The story I am going to relate is absolutely true. At least, it’s as true as my memory, and since this only happened 8 years ago, I hope it’s pretty accurate. I promise to refrain from embellishing; trust me, it’s weird enough. It’s about my family. See? I told you it would be weird enough without my embellishment.

I’m going to tell it in parts, because I know many people can’t read the long, long posts at work, and others don’t have the patience. But here is Part I of Auntie Julie: Murdered? It’s a bit of background.

My grandma (buschia, if you recall) had two sisters and two brothers. Only she and her littlest sister (Aunt Mim) married; the other sister and two brothers remained living together, unmarried and childless, until their deaths. They pooled their resources and lived very simply.

My two great-uncles, Uncle Ray and Uncle Stanley, died first, within a couple years of each other. My aunt continued on, outliving my buschia by a few months, until she died under questionable circumstances. We’ll get to those circumstances later.

It wasn’t until Auntie Julie’s death that we discovered that she and my uncles had amassed quite a fortune. While we were unaware of the money, Aunt Mim’s only son had been doing Aunt Julie, Uncle Ray and Uncle Stanley’s taxes for a couple of years. He certainly knew. As did his father, who had remarried not long after Aunt Mim had passed away in the early 1980’s, and his second wife.

Curiously, scant weeks before Auntie Julie’s death, her will was amended. Despite the fact her original will was decades old, neatly typed and signed by a reputable lawyer, these hastily-scrawled changes were hand-printed on notebook paper by someone else’s hand, with my Auntie’s feeble signature at the bottom.

These new changes heavily favored Aunt Mim’s husband and his second wife, despite the fact they were not blood relatives, and the tax-preparing cousin.

I think you know where I’m going with this. That’s just the motive; we’ll get to means and opportunity later.