When Scholarship Meets a Murder-for-Hire Plot

You might recall the classical story of Solon of Athens once going to visit Croesus, King of Lydia. Croesus asks Solon to name the happiest man he has ever known, believing that Solon would pick himself, but instead Solon -- being Solon -- picks a random low-born nobody. Surprised, Croesus asks why. In short, Solon replies, "Well, he's dead now, so we can safely judge his life. ... let no man count himself happy until the end." And, indeed, King Croesus's own end ended up being an unhappy one.

So I was reminded of this tale while researching some background information for Jere Fleck's magnificent praise poem, a coronation ode for King Aonghais Dubh MacTarbh, a person in the Society for Creative Anachronism beginning his second term as king of the East Kingdom. As you might expect from a praise poem, Fleck speaks quite highly of Aonghais, and he borrows many of the traditional themes and motifs from the skaldic tradition in Old Norse literature. 

Being the naturally curious type, however, plus the ever-assiduous composer of footnotes, I did some googling .... and discovered some rather astounding (and surreal) things.

Apparently, Aonghais's real name was Paul Hamwi, and he was quite the polarizing figure within the early SCA ... someone who "inspired a combination of unaccountable devotion and accountable hate." Unfortunately, his problems didn't stop with simply having a divisive personality. About eight years after Fleck wrote Aonghais's coronation ode, Hamwi hired two men to murder his wife, Susan Hawmi. They had recently been divorced, and a judge ordered him to pay alimony. Somehow, the police missed the obvious motive. Instead, in a sadly all-too-common scenario, they went after Hamwi's mentally challenged neighbor, John Purvis, a 42-year-old man with schizophrenia. Even more horrifically, because Susan had just been murdered, her 18-month-old daughter ended up dying of neglect before anyone could discover Susan's body.

A decade later, a tip finally led new detectives on the case to release Purvis and arrest Hamwi instead. Having gotten away with the crime for ten years, Hamwi finally went to jail in 1993. He died in prison from a heart attack in 2004. The case even made some significant headlines. Shortly after Hamwi's arrest, the show Unsolved Mysteries aired an episode about the the whole affair on March 10, 1993.

Quite the disturbing little rabbit hole to have fallen into.