From The Oxford Murders.

Does the perfect crime exist?

For years writers have speculated on this idea... and murderers too. Some even managed to put the idea into practice. Like the case of Howard Greene in London.

Greene was a humble tailor, well considered socially. He kept a diary in which the police found in his own house. In the diary, he analyzed in great detail fourteen ways of murdering of his wife. To whom he professed a deep and secret hatred. Some of the procedures were ridiculous, others brutal. One or two, were really brilliant.

But what Greene understood at once was that the main danger for the criminal was not the possible investigation of the facts in the past... but the problems that might arise in the future. Every alibi contained an element of falsehood which with patience, can be discovered.

His conclusion: was that the only perfect crime that exists, is not the one that is remained unsolved... but the one which is solved with the wrong culprit.

Does he kill her in the end? No. She kills him.

One night she found the diary. She ended up stabbing him with the kitchen scissors. The jury, horrified by the reading of the diary, judged the murder to have been in self defense... and declared her innocent.

How is it the perfect crime?

It was discovered recently that the handwriting in the diary is not Howard Greene’s.

So who wrote it then?

His wife’s lover, a forgerer of works of art.