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On the morning of January 25, 2018, officers from the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department were summoned to a mystifying scene involving the death of 71-year-old Alan Abrahamson.
Abrahamson, a resident in the affluent Ballen Isles neighborhood, was discovered lifeless in an open field close to the community’s golf course, with a gunshot wound to his heart, as detailed in a November 22 episode of Oxygen’s Accident, Suicide, or Murder.
“It was strange how he was lying face up,” remarked Colleen Machado, a senior crime analyst with the Palm Beach Gardens Police, “almost as if he had collapsed in a meticulously arranged manner.”
The warmth of the body indicated that Abrahamson, a man fondly remembered by friends as the “life of the party,” had passed away shortly before authorities arrived on the scene.
The precision of the wound, located so close to his heart, led detectives to consider the possibility of suicide. However, the absence of a firearm at the site left them puzzled.
As retired Palm Beach Gardens Detective Rick Moretti noted, “When you don’t have a gun and you’ve got a deceased person right there in an open field with a single gunshot wound to the chest, it looks like a homicide.”
Abrahamson’s wallet was found in his back pocket. Detectives also found a strange set of other items nearby including the victim’s cell phone, earbuds, a pair of scissors, rubber bands and a binder clip.
Alan Abrahamson’s Wife Linda Provides New Clues
While authorities continued to process the death scene, detectives set out to notify Abrahamson’s wife Linda. It turned out at the time of the death, she was thousands of miles away in Boston visiting her daughter.
Upon hearing the news, Randall Anderson, Assistant Chief of the Palm Beach Gardens Police, described her as being in “complete distress.” According to her, Abrahamson had also been along on the trip, but grew bored and decided to return home to West Palm Beach on Jan. 21. He told her he’d fly back to Boston to finish out the visit on Jan. 28.
“Linda described Alan, her husband, the deceased, as the life of the party. He was always having a good time,” Anderson explained. “He seemed to be happy and everything seemed to be going well and he loved living in that community because he could play golf with the many friends that he had there.”
They learned that Abrahamson usually took an early walk through the neighborhood every morning and regularly carried between $300 and $500 in cash in a binder clip in his pants pocket. After noticing the money and Abrahamson’s expensive watch were missing, authorities began to suspect that the 71-year-old may have been killed in a robbery gone wrong.
Yet, there had been no signs of a struggle and Abrahamson died in a safe neighborhood.
Autopsy Reveals Close Range Shooting
During the autopsy, the medical examiner noted that along with the gunshot wound to the left chest, there was a small streak of blood traveling from the wound upward toward his shoulder.
“(It) appeared to us that something dragged through the blood post being shot,” Moretti noted. “From what? We don’t know at this point.”
Unburned gun particles found on the victim’s sweatshirt also suggested that Abrahamson had been shot at very close range.
At the time of this death, Abrahamson had been estranged from both his adult children—who he shared with his first wife—but neither could imagine any reason why anyone would want to kill their father. They were both hundreds of miles away at the time of the killing and had solid alibis.
Alan Abrahamson Makes Odd Purchases Before Death
As detectives tried to piece the baffling clues together, they retraced Abrahamson’s movements the final days of his life.
They discovered he went to two separate suppliers to purchase two 40 cubic feet helium tanks.
“Why is he buying 80 cubic feet of helium?” Moretti asked. “I don’t know.”
The night before he died, investigators also learned he drove to the exact spot where he’d later die and spent 55 minutes there, before going home.
“It was very unusual. What was he doing in the field the night before his death?” Anderson remarked. “And there’s nothing there. It’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s in an open field.”
The morning of Jan. 25, Abrahamson was captured on surveillance footage leaving out the gate of Ballen Isles at 5:53 a.m., carrying something in his left hand. Then, 37 minutes later, investigators could hear the sound of a gunshot go off, although the shooting itself was not captured in the footage.
When investigators walked the same path themselves, it took them only 4 minutes to get to the spot where Abrahamson’s body was discovered, leading them to question what he did for the extra minutes before the shot went off.
They also learned that Abrahamson had purchased a weather balloon about a month before his death, something that was an unusual purchase for him.
How did Alan Abrahamson Die?
Investigators developed a “wild theory” that maybe Abrahamson had committed suicide by tying a string to the weather balloon and attaching the gun to the string, so that when he shot himself the weapon would then be carried up into the air with the balloon. The theory would explain the string and rubber bands found at the scene, along with the small blood trail on Abrahamson’s sweatshirt near the gunshot wound, but there wasn’t nothing definitive to confirm their suspicions.
Then, Machado did a deeper dive into Abrahamson’s phone and discovered that he had conducted searches related to suicide, dating back to 2009.
“He was contemplating this, not for a week, not for a month. He was contemplating this for 10 years,” Moretti said. “And then we learned many of the searches were in his own voice.”
Abrahamson made voice command searches on the phone, asking “Do life insurance policies pay for suicide?,” the “lifting capacity of a 3-foot balloon,” and “shot in the heart. Do you die instantly?”
“Oh my god,” Anderson said of hearing the messages. “It was like he was leaving evidence from beyond the grave.”
Investigators concluded that the outwardly jovial Abrahamson had been hiding his mental health struggle from his family for years and didn’t want them to know he’d taken his own life.
“He wanted everybody to believe that he left happy,” Anderson said. “He didn’t want to reveal to his family and his wife that he was sad.”
Detectives believed he filled the weather balloon with the helium tanks and then disposed of them in a nearby dumpster, before firing the fatal shot and having the balloon carry away the evidence. They believed the balloon likely burst somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean about 40 miles north of the Bahamas.