State Trooper1956

[first lines]

Lt. Rod Blake:
Oh, hello. I'm Rod Blake, chief investigator for the Nevada state troopers. I never met the man who wrote this - I saw him once, but he was dead then - but he said something in here that stuck in my mind. I'd like to have talked to him. He said, "It isn't when a man's heart stops beating that he really dies, it's sometime before that - a month, a day, maybe only an instant, like when a doctor tells him he only has two months or when a truck's coming head on and there's nothing that can be done, or when he sees hand pulling a pistol trigger." Henry Dupenz didn't die in any of these ways, but there was an instant just before it happened when he knew his life was ended. We call this case, "The Talking Corpse".