Alan Sawyer was a severely mentally ill college student and the murder of former janitor Greg Franklin.
Background[]
Alan’s father Fred worked as corporate lawyer. Alan studied at Hudson University as a history major, Fred inspiring him to research big business causing environmental disasters and volunteered in the mailroom. He also briefly dated chemistry student Xuan-Lan Nguyen, who he kept nicknaming “Little Orchid”, her name’s translation into English. Students constantly hated him, for cooking various substance in his dorm room that stank and blaring his music too loud.
He answered an ad for a psychotropic drugs study led by Dr. Christian Varick. Alan was originally diagnosed by schizophrenia due to complaints of voices in his head, but outside his obligations as a psychiatrist, Dr. Varick delayed Alan’s PET scan to rule out extraneous factors. One was identified by a scan weeks later: Alan was instead afflicted with a brain tumor. Varick buried the results and kept forging the records for research sponsorship, while Alan was growing worse from the cancer eating his mind. When his symptoms kept presenting, Varick just rebuffed every report and concern from his colleagues and even Alan’s family.
Double Blind[]
Overtaken by religious paranoia from his brain’s deterioration, he stalked Greg Franklin, believing ancient and deceased religious figures and saints said Franklin was in the Knights Templar and needed to die. He started by stealing drugs from the universality labs to get him fired, hoping the disgrace would leave him vulnerable to be killed. Taking cues from passages in a copy of The Assassin's Technical Manual, which Alan bought under Franklin’s name, or he stole from Franklin, Alan jimmied Franklin’s bedroom window open to get in and cut his power. Alan shot Franklin dead with a pillow as a silencer, wore a shower cap to not leave hair, walked on a drop cloth to not leave shoe prints, glued the lock to Franklin’s apartment to buy time for an escape, collected his materials, and escaped back out the window.
Alan was tracked when the detectives knew Franklin quit working at Hudson. Knowing the killer worked in the mailroom, the detectives got Alan’s name from Xuan-Lin. Alan came up with true and false arguments to deny his guilt, as well as a flimsy alibi. But it was found out he drained mercury from his dorm room thermostats to coat the tips of his bullets, his prints found on the equipment. Alan argued his insanity defense, which eventually came back to the studies Varick was conducting, as he diagnosed Alan with schizophrenia. When a patient of Varick was found to have committed suicide, the prosecution goes through his records, which they realize are forged. Tracking down Alan’s brain scan reveals the tumor, which supports Alan’s incompetence and makes Varick criminally liable, for Franklin’s murder and Alan’s medical endangerment.
Alan was institutionalized after personally confronting Varick with his crimes. The prosecution promised to try Varick after Alan died, which he presumably did from his tumor in the hospital, as it was too severely progressed to treat.