Betrayal

In the case files, we can see that a Facebook ID is of interest: 100090541127618. So to navigate to the user behind the ID, we just need to visit https://www.facebook.com/100090541127618. That gives us the profile of Rhett Blackwood, Victor's weird brother who likes cars.

Reviewing his profile description, we can see that there's the potential for motive here:

All a man need is a good car, a shotgun, something good to drink and a loyal woman.

If his brother's wife was cheating, he would be the one who would take offense and see fit to rectify the situation. We have an alibi for the son and brother, but so far we don't have any information about Rhett. Something else strange on his profile is the only life event he has listed, which is being "Reborn" on 18JAN2021.

The site for Victor's law firm, "Somerset & Blackwood LLC", is https://www.kaseportal.com/somersetblackwood. The site has bare-minimum functionality, including an unimplemented contact form and payment button, so the technology itself obviously isn't of significance in this case. That being said, a link labeled form found here points to a MEGA share with an intake form; there is nothing of interesting there, but the fact that it was included is interesting itself.

A 3D model of the house in question is available for exploration at https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=1STmN3PixNG. The police officer mentioned a security system, but I can see that if I were someone looking to gain unauthorized entry to the house, I would use the screen door on the back porch that has no security outside of a flimsy flip lock. While there are no vantage points in the model good enough to be 100% positive, I am confident that there are no security cameras monitoring that entry vector, or the backyard/dock at all for that matter.

Bringing us to the first question section:

Scene Of The Crime

Question 1

"I need to note down the brand name of the alarm system"

The case report says no alarms were triggered but doesn't state whether one exists. I need to doublecheck if there is an alarm system in this house and what the brand name is.

In my experience, alarm systems are ususlly visible in a less-trafficked area of the home, such as a closet or a high-up kitchen cabinet. I can see that there is a panel in the laundry room that would be a suitable location, but since it is closed it is certainly out of scope. Unfortunately the scan doesn't include the front yard, and the vantage point in the room to the right of the main entrance doesn't show any security company signs like ADT in the front yard. The one vantage point of the side yard by the garage also doesn't contain any clues.

I found something that could be a security system outside one of the upstairs bedrooms, but changes are it's a temperature control system because there are no physical buttons:

I did some digging into security systems online and was unable to identify any with a logo similar to the one pictured, and I was able to reverse search the image with Google Lens and determine that the pictured device is a Trane thermostat. The two computers in the front library room made me investigate closely in case either of them was hooked up to monitor potential front-facing external cameras, but no dice.

Eventually I was able to locate it by looking a bit higher than my normal FOV, it is above the key storage and below the picture of the lion in the hallway exiting the kitchen:

real_security_system

Answer: Protection One

Question 2

How many computers are there in the house?

I heard forensics didn't remove any devices from the house for some reason. I need to check for any computers and make a note of that in my report.

There are 2 on the first floor and 1 on the second floor.

Question 3

What is the password to the flash drive?

Violence does, in truth recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit where he digs for another

Searching up the text shows that it is a quote by Arthur Conan Doyle, in his famous work "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes". The specific story is The Adventure of the Speckled Band, and in the story, Dr. Roylott uses a venomous snake to murder his stepdaughter, Julia. The snake is a fictional Indian swamp adder that kills its victim within 10 seconds. Holmes uses a dog-lash to capture the snake and place it back in the doctor's iron safe. The wicked stepfather is dead, and Helen Stoner is free to marry and receive her inheritance.

We can see above one of the computers that there are two Sherlock Holmes books on display:

Reading over the Wikipedia page for the novel, one line caught my attention pretty quickly:

Helen had heard her sister's dying words, "The speckled band!" but could not decode their meaning.

Since the subject is decoding, this made me think that the password could be related to this line of the story. I tried various combinations of story tidbits, and was eventually able to guess the right password from this section of the page:

"It is a swamp adder!" cried Holmes; "the deadliest snake in India. He has died within ten seconds of being bitten."

Answer: swampadder

Question 4

Using the ruler, I need to measure the stairs from top to the bottom. Round to the nearest whole number in US imperial system (feet).

Using the measurement tool, I was able to determine that each stair is approximately 7 inches in height:

There are 16 stairs in total, but as we can see from the picture of where the corpse was found, she only fell down to the second to last step. The final answer there of 10-11 feet was incorrect, so I decided to take a different interpretation and measure the diagonal distance to factor in the x dimension:

Answer: 17