A Real-life Dungeon?

This Daily Torygraph story about the Belgian pensioner killed by his own booby-trap sounds too much like an RPG scenario to be true. Was he a fan of Gary Gygax's "Tomb of Horrors"?

At first Belgian police assumed that the 79-year-old had committed suicide and bled to death from a gunshot wound to the neck after finding him at his home near the town of Charlerois.

It was an assumption which nearly cost one detective his life as he searched the house and opened a booby-trapped wooden chest. A shotgun hidden inside went off, missing the policeman by inches.

The detectives beat a hasty retreat and called in military mine-clearance experts who, after unravelling a series of enigmatic clues left in the engineer's scribbled notes, uncovered a total of 19 death traps, among them an apparently harmless but lethal pile of dinner plates, the television and even an exploding crate of beer.

"We have never come across anything like it before. It was all fiendishly clever. The house was booby-trapped from top to bottom. We've had to take everything apart," said one of the explosives experts.

It was all a plot, it seems, to get back at his ex-wife.

he set about installing the traps, most of them using concealed 12-bore shotguns triggered by barely-visible nylon threads or fishing line.

His thinking appeared to be that if he were evicted, he would ensure that the new owner would not live long enough to enjoy the benefits of the house.

The military engineers found that Dethy had numbered and catalogued each device and left coded notes for the whereabouts of each.

I'm sure some GM, somewhere, is going to make use of this...