From Harper’s Weekly Review:
A woman in Germany was sentenced to life in prison for attempting to fake her own death by killing her doppelgänger, and two people in Spain were arrested for murder after police found an image on Google Street View of one of them loading the victim’s body into the trunk of his car. A man in New York pleaded guilty to running a secret Chinese police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown; a police officer in Peru dressed as the Grinch to carry out a drug raid, seizing bags of cocaine; a disciplinary panel in England banned a police officer from the profession for life for filming himself masturbating while in uniform and sharing the video on WhatsApp.
We all know what a doppelgänger is, right? Oh, aside from the ghostly wraith who looks like you. A doppelgänger is a look-a-like. So — aside from killing a ghostly wraith — how did this woman find her doppelgänger? Did she just run into her at the supermarket while contemplating the price of a dozen eggs and then think, “Gee, I could fake my own death by killing this lady! What a great idea!”? Or did she make her plans to fake her own death first, and then look for the doppelgãnger on Match.com or wherever one would look for doppelgängers?
Is there an agency, maybe an offshoot of a murder-for-hire internet site, which will search for your doppelgänger, without asking for your purpose in locating someone who looks just like you? And maybe the person who has put her image on such a search site is looking for her own doppelgänger for narcissistic and nefarious purposes.
A conflict!
I feel a mystery/thriller novel coming on. Which must include a getting-rid-of-the-body-of-the-dead doppelgänger scene detected on Google Street View, as well as a police inspector who botches the case by masturbating on WhatsApp (in plain clothes, but someone recognizes him anyway), because he’s become erotically drawn to either the killer or her doppelgänger (providing one of them has survived), and has gotten all confused. Could be a happy ending. Of sorts. Which could lead to a sequel.