The Police Blotter Shakespeare

Via Superfriend Greg Bunch comes this link to The Police Blotter Shakespeare by Burke Hilsabeck on McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Some samples:

At approximately 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, a Verona man ingested a fatal dose of arsenic inside his lover's family's mausoleum. He was later identified as Romeo Montague, 22. A second victim, later identified as Juliet Capulet, 17, also of Verona, was found dead next to him. Capulet sustained a self-inflicted stab wound and was pronounced dead at the scene of the crime. Wanted for questioning are a local apothecary and an obese Catholic friar. 

John Macduff, 32, of Fife County, decapitated his long-time acquaintance and political rival, William Macbeth, of Cawdor County, last Sunday at the latter man's home in Dunsinane. Police are looking into the perpetrator's claims that the assassination was the result of a series of murders committed by Macbeth and his once institutionalized and recently murdered wife, Emily. 

Officers responding to calls of an assault in process arrived to find the results of a quadruple murder-suicide. King Claudius, 46, of Elsinore, died of stab wounds to the chest with a piece of poisoned fencing equipment. Another Elsinore man, Laertes, 25, passed from similar wounds. The third victim, later identified as Gertrude of Denmark, 45, was mute and unresponsive at the scene. She was later pronounced dead of acute respiratory failure. The fourth victim, Prince Hamlet of Denmark, 22, appeared to have died of a self-inflicted wound from the same épée that killed victims one and two. Hamlet is also suspected in the recent deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (earlier attributed to a freak sailing accident) and in the recent stabbing of a Danish councilman.

Exit pursued by a bear.