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Detective Story

By The New Republic

June 29, 2009

Via TPM, what is surely the finest first sentence of a news story I will read all year:

A former mayor found sitting naked and holding a beer at a Rabun County campsite told police he wasn’t the same naked man seen walking around earlier.

The moment at which the suspect, former Gainesville, Georgia mayor Mark Musselwhite, protests his innocence only to find himself ensnared in a web of Holmesian deduction is pretty delightful as well:

Musselwhite then asked why he was being visited.

“I said the complainant had specifically said his campsite, and the fact that he was still nude made me think it was him,” [Ranger Brandon] Walls wrote.

Elementary.

--Christopher Orr

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