Her sister really should have told her his name.

God, not another Sarah Palin thread....

My sister asked me this question. She is in a graduate program, pursuing a degree in ABA therapy. I assumed it was a question from one of her classes. I answered the question and she told me I wasn't a psychopath. Yay! What a relief.

I answered along the lines of, "She was overcome with grief and she saw the man as a savior..." and some other nonsense.

Evidently, a psychopath would answer "She killed her sister so she could meet the man again at her sister's funeral."

I thought it was a neat question. She said she read that the question was developed my an American psychologist to determine whether a person was a psychopath. I posted it here. We got to talking more and I found out she actually found it on WebSleuths. We looked it up on Snopes. It's a hoax.

How could I be so naive? :-)

Why do you think this is not a riddle? Because it's a brain teaser?

(I know the answer, and I know that's supposed to diagnose me as XZY personality disorder, too.)

There's got to be a baby daddy involved somehow. There's always a baby daddy.

Well, if he showed up at one funeral, odds are good he'd show up at another.

Oh darn, nevermind. Should have previewed.
It reminds me of this book of "lateral thinking puzzles" I had when I was a kid. They encouraged you to think outside the box, but a lot of them were just flippin' impossible.

rainbaby, bogus or not, it's not meant to be a brain teaser or a riddle.

Because the man was a plumber.

And there I was thinking, "This is a silly question. You haven't given us enough information for us to guess a motive."

But the funeral! That's brilliant.

It's what CitrusFreak just said, a word puzzle - "lateral thinking puzzle" or whatever. Puzzle equals brain teaser for me. Like "He's afraid to come home because there is a man with a mask waiting for him" and it's the catcher in a baseball game at home plate, yeah?

I see what you're saying, rainbaby. I didn't view the question as a riddle because it is intended to be a, albeit bogus, diagnostic tool, not a trick question. There is no right answer.

Since it's bogus, I can view it as a riddle, and CF got it.

I've got my eye on you, CF.

The man addresses her at the funeral with a certain degree of surprising familiarity, stating that "now she can finally move on" and that "some things are just meant to be"; she feels that he somehow intimately understands her conflicted relationship with her weak yet demanding mother, and wonders if he is the shadowy father that her mother always claimed died before they were born.

Before she can ask his name, he begins to walk away. "You will never see me again, Laura," he says so quietly that nobody else can hear, "but you always know how to find me... if you ever need someone for another job like this."

But Laura is her sister's name... her older sister by two minutes, and by family tradition it is her older sister Laura who will inherit the lion's share of their mother's estate. And it is Laura who has the cold, controlling, even sociopathic nature that has made Emily's life a living hell in the absence of any intervention from their fragile invalid mother. It is Laura that will now completely control everything in Emily's life unless she finally acts...

Aiieee, I got it too. Oh dear.

One of the most dysfunctional relationships I've known was that of a guy and a girl, who met at her sister's funeral after the sister had an aneurism during a one-night stand with the guy. He picked her up in a bar and took her home, she carked it then he made with her sister at the funeral. The relationship lasted two years (and no children, thank the dog) before he took out a restraining order on her. Nasty shit.

I'd wager the answer is some kind of walking clock.

Dude, have you ever killed your sister? IT'S FUCKING AWESOME. You don't even need a reason.