CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2010 - Solutions
3B. Reports
These look like police incident reports. The cover note from the "Chief" indicates that we want the name of the person who wrote the reports - presumably a police officer.
There are a few things to notice about the reports. Firstly, the descriptions in some of them might sound familiar. In fact, the incidents described are all identifiable as the premises and plots of various TV shows produced from the 1950s through to the 1980s. A bit of Internet searching with the right search terms should provide the names of any of the shows you might be unfamiliar with.
Secondly, the first letter in each report provides an ordering (hinted at by the Chief's memo), since they are unique letters from the set A through H.
The third clue is that the word "family" appears as, or close to, the last identifiable word in each report. This is a clue that it is the families from the TV shows which are significant.
Putting all of this information together, we have:
| Report | First letter | TV Show | Family |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | F | The Addams Family | Addams |
| 2 | A | The Beverly Hillbillies | Clampett |
| 3 | D | Happy Days | Cunningham |
| 4 | H | Dallas | Ewing |
| 5 | G | I Dream of Jeannie | Nelson |
| 6 | B | My Favourite Martian | O'Hara |
| 7 | C | Mister Ed | Post |
| 8 | E | I Love Lucy | Ricardo |
Ordering the reports by their first letter and then reading down the first letters of the family names reveales the message "COP CRANE". This refers to a TV police officer by the name of Crane. The answer is MARTIN CRANE, a retired cop from the popular TV show Frasier, and whose active career would have spanned the TV shows in the reports. Since "CRANE" is already supplied in the final clue, we also accepted MARTIN as a valid answer, as well as variants based on his nickname, MARTY and MARTY CRANE.