Kennith Backmen Report

The following is from the notebook of Kennith Backmen, a man working for a private detective firm from New York. Mr Backmen disappeared shortly after investigating a fire at an orphanage in Wyoming. His body was later found in the trees surrounding his hotel. Cause of death was later ruled suicide.

1

A new start, that’s all I need right now. After the last case I’ve been pretty fucking wiped out, working kid cases just isn’t right, no one should have to see them like that. No one. But I guess someone has to do it, so here I am again.

The case is pretty straight forward, an orphanage in Wyoming burnt down, 23 kids dead and the local police are either too inept or too lazy to come up with a reason for the fire, so the guys up top are sending me in. So I’m starting a new diary, new case, new state, not that I mind leaving this cesspool but Wyoming isn’t exactly a cultural hotspot of entertainment and life. Still this should be a pretty easy case, fire was probably electrical and soon as I get that squared away I can take a little break from all this.

You know it wasn’t all that hard in the start, investigating kids deaths, sure the pictures and the relatives would break your god damn heart but the cases always seemed pretty easy. Usually its a relative the kid really liked, and usually the suspect will be the one shouting the loudest.

Not that any of that matters, there’s a huge fire and a bunch of kids died, pretty open and shut. That’s all for tonight I think. My plane leaves at 8am tomorrow so I’ll write some more tomorrow night.

2

Well I’m here now, Plane flight was terrible as usual but drive here wasn’t too bad. This room is a heap of shit though. Bugs and stuff everywhere and the trees tap against the window all god damn night. Anyway I went to the orphanage yesterday and had a look around, mostly normal, fire damaged or destroyed pretty much everything and most of the signs point to electric fire.

A couple of strange things though, first of all the fire spread patterns in some of the rooms don’t match the corridors or wire patterns, like the kids decided to start fires in their own rooms for some reason. Most likely something in those rooms lit on fire due to the heat but it means a whole investigation into that shit for me.

Second, I found some drawings and bits of paper. Looks like kids handwriting and its pretty obvious its kids drawings. Most of them are too burnt to read but the drawings are weird as hell, they all have this tall faceless guy in them in a suit, someone’s dad was a weird looking motherfucker.

Lastly I had a talk with the only survivor of the fire, some little girl they are keeping at the station and man if i ever seen a case of abuse, girl wasn’t saying shit, just sat their shaking the whole damn time. Poor girl.

DIRECTORS SUPER FLASH COMMENTERY: Because I can not shut up about my horrible story, I will post anything I feel like discussing here after every story section I post.

This is obviously a scene setting intro, Backmen is a comination of many noir style detectives, a style I really love and tried to intergrate without making too silly. The result is a skeptical angry man who curses alot even in his private notebook to himself.

I intended to include more about the girl but ended up running out of insperation for this story. I intend to use her in another account.

One last thing, I actually have the drawings described here, and a "picture" of the orphanage that I will endevour to upload soon.

Edit:
The images spoken about in the story, as promised