Seton School in Manassas held its ninth annual Murder Mystery Dinner Jan. 30. Attendees filled the junior high building with accusations and clues, and finally a murderer was revealed.
The event was started by Seton’s Literary Arts Club in 2007. The first dinner was held in the home of the club’s president, and it has expanded since then into an event held in Seton’s Corpus Christi Center.
Preparations for the event began last summer.
“We have to decide on a setting, come up with a plot, create a cast based on the original Clue characters, and write the entire script. And that’s just the easy part,” said senior Marielle Cuccinelli, head of the event committee.
About 90 audience members participated. Dinner was served buffet-style while the seven costumed cast members interacted with the audience and introduced themselves in character. This year, the characters included: seniors Marielle Cuccinelli and Vivian Zadnik; sophomores Joseph LaVigne, Regina Terreri and Brendan Santschi; and eighth-grader Christian Ceol. As dinner finished, one character was found “dead,” and the other characters began to accuse each other of murder.
This year’s setting was a wedding between Miss White and Mr. Green, the children of two rival mafia bosses in the 1950s. Motives were revealed and the scene ended with the game’s moderator, Mr. Gray, played by English teacher Timothy Heisler, sending all the suspects to classrooms that had been transformed into sets.
The audience formed teams and headed to the suspects’ respective rooms, where they completed challenges in order to question the suspects about the motive, weapon, location, and time of the murder. Each suspect knew one of the six pieces of information the teams had to discover.
At the end of the night, everyone gathered in the cafeteria and discussed the possibilities for the murderer based on discovered clues. The actors performed a closing scene where evidence was revealed and the murderer was cornered. The climax of the night was a dramatic two-on-two fistfight and ended with the murderer being captured and led away to face justice.
