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The Lottery Ticket
An old Italian man stops by a drug store on his way home from work and buys a lottery ticket. That night, he checks the numbers and is ecstatic when he finds that he won millions of dollars.
He calls up all his family and friends and shares the exciting news with them, then puts the ticket under his pillow and goes to sleep.
The next morning, he doesn’t show up for work or answer the phone so a friend goes over to his house. The friend discovers the man dead, hanging from a ceiling beam with a suicide note next to him.
The friend calls the police immediately.
The police show up and find that the lottery ticket under the man’s pillow, along with a will leaving all his fortune to his brother, his nephew, and his sister. A little research shows that this is the only existing will the man has ever made. This leads the police to believe that this was not suicide but murder.
The police have all the heirs come down to the scene of the crime with suspicion that one of them is a suspect.
The police talk with the three suspects and immediately conclude that the suspect is the nephew.
How did the police know it was the nephew?
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Discussion
That’s the lamest answer ever. How are we supposed to know what language he speaks, what language the notes were written in, what country he’s in, etc.? Also – how do the police know that the brother and sister aren’t pretending not to know English? According to your answer, we’re supposed to know this somehow – but even if that’s true, how do the police know? If either the brother or the sister actually does know English, they could frame the nephew by pretending not to know English since they know he only speaks English.
Probably most importantly, if the nephew understood both English and Italian, then why did he make himself a suspect by writing in English when he knows that the brother and sister both know Italian? By definition, one of them is either his father or his mother. How could he not know that his own parent doesn’t speak English?
And if he only understands English, then how did he know about the ticket? His mother/father didn’t know English so they couldn’t tell him, and his newly-deceased uncle didn’t know English so he couldn’t tell him.
If the brother isn’t the nephew’s father and the sister isn’t the nephew’s mother, then there’s a problem with your wording because “his brother” and “his sister” are both singular.
A somewhat better explanation might be that the man only called his immediate family and friends, so the nephew didn’t know about the lotto ticket (assuming that nobody else called him) – he just wanted part of the man’s fortune, so he wrote the notes and killed the man not knowing about the lotto ticket. If whoever did this knew about the lotto ticket, they would’ve taken it – in fact, they might’ve not even killed the guy. The brother and sister told the police that they talked on the phone with the guy about the lotto ticket, but the nephew had no idea and was totally surprised (maybe even happy) when they told him about it.
Full of loopholes, but I still think that’s a better answer.
Why are you all being such bitter pissants? God forbid you should use your noggins a bit for a lateral thinking riddle.
that is completely illogical. how can you come to such a far fetched conclusion given the above info? fail
really good lateral thinking puzzle! nice one
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