1.3. A man sitting on a park bench reads a newspaper
article headlined “Death at Sea” and knows a murder has been committed.
(from How Come?)
1.3 answer: The man is a travel agent. He had sold someone two tickets
for an ocean voyage, one round-trip and one one-way. The last name of the
man who bought the tickets is the same as the last name of the woman who
“fell” overboard and drowned on the same voyage, which is the subject of the
article he’s reading. This may have derived from a story done by Alfred
Hitchcock, if the following Hitchcock quotation is accurate: “If you take
your wife on a sea voyage, buy her a round-trip ticket no matter what your
plans may be.” According to How Come?, it’s loosely based on
the real-life case of a killer named Henry Landru.