The Effect
It is seven in the morning on 25th January 2018 and, in the peaceful city of Palm Beach Gardens Florida, a dog leaps from a golf cart and makes a horrible discovery. On the lawns of a country club gated community, a man is lying on his back. His torso is surrounded by blood, and there is a telltale hole in the centre of his blue sweatshirt. It is instantly clear what has happened: the man has been shot.
Locals are immediately shocked by the event, as Palm Beach Gardens is known as one of the safest places in the state. The area in which the body is discovered, in fact, is made up of neat lawns and manicured topiary, bordering respectable family homes.
The deceased man is identified as 71 year-old former businessman, husband, father and grandfather Alan Abrahamson. His family, understandably, are both stunned and devastated by what has happened.
Linda, Alan’s wife, tells officers that her husband was probably going to meet his friend at Starbucks that fateful morning. It had become a recent routine of his, she says, to start his day by taking morning strolls to the nearby shopping centre for coffee.
Using this information, as well as Alan Abrahamson’s Google maps history and local CCTV recordings, detectives begin to piece together his final movements on the morning he died.
They discover that, at 5:42 am, Alan left his house for the final time. Minutes later, he reached the entrance of the gated community in which he lived, passing out of sight of the community’s security cameras at around 5:53 am. Then, after thirty-seven more minutes of the CCTV footage had passed, they heard it: a single gunshot ringing out on the video. Alan had been tragically shot and killed while out on his morning walk.
And when police attended the scene, they found further clues to reinforce this theory. Though Alan’s phone and wallet were still in his pocket, as they might expect, there was no sign of the watch he normally wore, or the hundreds of dollars he was known to carry with him. Furthermore, the gun that had been used to kill him was nowhere to be seen. All of this supported the probability that Alan had been murdered with a single gunshot, and his valuables stolen by his killer. And since there was no indication of a struggle at the scene of the crime, it must have been quick.
Because of this collection of evidence: the missing valuables, the single shot to the chest, and the lack of a murder weapon, the incident is ruled a homicide, and Palm Beach Gardens police launch a murder investigation.
But those closest to Alan, reeling from these sudden, tragic events, remain confused. He didn’t have any enemies, they say, and he wasn’t in any trouble; professional, financial, romantic or otherwise. Alan and his wife Linda were soul mates, they’d a long and happy marriage, and Alan was well-liked. As one of his friends told police: he was just the kind of personality that ‘everyone would gravitate to’.
Yet, despite all the apparent evidence pointing to a homicide, something about this appalling event just didn’t add up. In fact, something about it didn’t look like a homicide at all.
The Method
A week after being called to the scene of Alan Abrahamson’s death, police are still none the wiser as to exactly how the tragic events had played out, where the murder weapon may be or who might have committed this dreadful act.
They had interviewed Alan’s wife, his two children and his friends. They had walked around the country club looking for vital clues or evidence, like the missing gun, or the casing of the bullet that pierced his chest. But, despite all this, plus a $3000 reward offered for any information relating to the murder, there were still no leads forthcoming.
When detectives turned their full attention to Alan’s home computer, however, it was a different story.
Checking through Alan’s emails, detectives discover a message in his inbox regarding an order he placed less than a month before he died. And it wasn’t for a golf club or a new shirt. The order stood out precisely since the item purchased was so completely out-of-the-ordinary. Just weeks before his death, Alan had bought a $55 weather balloon.
Using this strange email as a new lead in the investigation, police then search through Alan’s other recent purchases. Two days before his death, they find, he had bought another odd item. This time, from an industrial gas store. It was a helium tank.
At this point, detectives are mystified. After interviewing Alan’s friends and family, they are certain he didn’t have any hobbies that would cause him to make such purchases. So why had he made them?
There was also a further piece of the puzzle that the authorities couldn’t explain. According to that CCTV video they watched, Alan had walked past the gatehouse a whole thirty-seven minutes before the fatal gunshot was heard, but in those thirty-seven minutes, he hadn’t managed to make it further than the edges of the country club.
When detectives retrace Alan’s route from the gatehouse to the location at which his body was discovered, it takes them a total of four minutes. So what had Alan been doing for the other thirty-three?
It was at this point that Bryan Broehm, one of the detectives working on the case, came up with a wild theory. Maybe, he speculated, Alan Abrahamson’s death wasn’t a murder, after all. Maybe it was a suicide.
The longer detectives consider this theory, the more sense it starts to make. If Alan Abrahamson had tied a gun to a helium-filled weather balloon before he shot himself, the weapon would have been carried up into the sky after it was fired. And police have to admit, as far-fetched as the whole thing sounds, it was perfectly plausible.
This train of thought leads detectives to return to the information stored on Alan’s computer, and a long trail of Google searches dating back at least ten years. As early as 2009, they discover, searches had been made for the words ‘suicide’ and ‘how to commit suicide’. And another internet search Alan had made for ‘life insurance suicide’ prompted police to become more certain than ever they were heading in the right direction.
Most American life insurance policies have a suicide clause, which stipulates that a death benefit won’t be paid if the insured person kills themselves within two years of taking out the policy. Might Alan have tried to find a way around this clause? Might this have been behind the peculiar details of his death?
A March 2016 Google search for: ‘undetectable suicide methods’ seemed to offer the strongest proof yet. And by August 2017, six months before he was found dead, Alan had apparently started to narrow his search and formulate a very specific plan. He’d typed: ‘how many cubic feet of helium do you need to raise one pound?’
On 4th January, Alan had sent an email to High Altitude Science, the company he’d bought the weather balloon from, asking a series of questions about how much helium it could be filled with before bursting, and at what altitude the balloon would burst with an 800 gram load. The 800 gram load being the gun he intended to tie to it.
His last search, made the day before his death, read simply: ‘Dawn and dusk times.’
Weather conditions in Palm Beach Gardens on the 25th January had been extremely windy, and detectives deduced that the helium-filled balloon carrying the gun had probably been blown as far as the Atlantic, bursting in the ocean somewhere north of the Bahamas.
The last part of the tragic story finally clicked into place. Alan Abrahamson hadn’t been murdered in a sudden robbery gone wrong. He had killed himself. The whole thing had been clearly and meticulously planned, by a man who must have been in deep mental anguish.
Alan’s obituary was published by the Palm Beach Post on January 28th, 2018. It read: ‘Alan was an avid golfer, enjoyed traveling and had a zest for life. He was known for his extraordinary smile, contagious laugh and the twinkle in his eyes. Wherever Alan was, he made it a “happy hour.” He woke up each morning with a smile on his face and was adored by all.’
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
