Before we dive in here, I would like you to keep in mind that, though it may not seem like it, the following sentence is, in fact, the correct selection of words arranged in the correct order to convey the correct information: Russia’s Sausage King was murdered in a sauna with a crossbow.
Reread that as many times as you’d like, but as I told you before, although it sounds like the solution to an off-brand version of the board game Clue, that sentence and the information contained therein is factual and correct.
As the BBC reports, Russian oligarch Vladimir Marugov, who was nicknamed the Sausage King because of the large meat-processing plants he owned, was sitting in an outdoor sauna with a woman at his countryside estate outside of Moscow on Monday when two “masked assailants” attacked. They tied Marugov and his partner up and demanded cash. The woman managed to escape through the window of the sauna and call the police, but when detectives arrived at the scene later, they found Marugov’s dead body in the sauna alongside the crossbow that was used to shoot him.
The investigation only got more bizarre from there. As officials searched the home of a possible suspect later, they found an elderly man handcuffed to a bedpost. Investigators say he was being held captive and extorted so that he would sign over the rights to his apartment. According to the Guardian, police have arrested two suspects in connection with the murder of Marugov, and believe the attack to be the work of a wider criminal ring.
The motivation behind the attack is so far unclear. According to the Moscow Times, since 2019, he has been in a “highly publicized property rights conflict with his ex-wife, poet Tatyana Marugova, which became an issue nearly five years after their divorce.”
Only time will tell who steps forward to claim the sausage crown.
This post has been updated.