Voldemort Murders

[jodel at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 42736

Richelle brought up the question of the timing of the conversation in the 
Riddle House which Harry witnessed. And, Yes, she is right. The conversation 
took place in the summer, before the World Cup. At this point, Crouch Jr. was 
still in his father's custody.

It is clea from the text that that particular conversation took place on 
Riddle's first night back in England after Wormtail was able to give him a 
rudimentary physical form. Or, in other words, the night that Frank Bryce 
"dissapeared" is the evening that we can pinpoint Riddle's return to England 
and the point at which he came into close enough physical proximity that 
Harry is able to pick up his "signal". We saw this before in the dreams that 
Harry had in his forst year durring the Squirellymort incident. Bt Riddle did 
not have a true physical manifestation at that point, and the dreams were not 
direct transfers of what was actually happening.

At the point that Voldemort and Wormtail returned to England, they knew, from 
Bertha Jorkins that Crouch Jr. was alive and after being kept a prisoner by 
his own father for the past decade was just about guaranteed to still be 
loyal. At this point Voldemort was still working out the details of the plot 
to be set in motion for the upcomming school ear. He knew that Crouch was a 
brilliant actor, so an impersonation of some kind was being worked out. 
During his time with the Weasleys Wormtail had managed to pick up the 
information that there was a move to revive the Triwizard Tournement, which 
would involved Crouch Sr.'s Department. This offered possibilities.

At this point, the comment about "one more murder" is throughly nebulous. 
They were not talking about Harry's murder, since they state clearly that 
this one murder would clear their way to Harry. In the following action which 
takes place, there are two murders that we are told of. That of Crouch Sr. 
and that of Cedric Diggory. Diggory's murder was unplanned. That of Crouch 
Sr. was inconvenient to everybody.

What I think is that the murder to which Voldemort refers is one which did 
not actually take place, or which did not take place acording to its part in 
the original plan. 

Crouch Sr. was much more useful under control than dead. But they may have 
been resigned to killing him in order to neutralize the fact that the 
Crouches had an elf. House elves have powerful magic and it is at their 
Masters' command. Once Crouch Sr. was dead, Crouch Jr. would be Master, and 
the elf would need to do as he commanded. 

I sugggest that the original plan may have been that Winky would be delegated 
to caring for Voldemort in the Crouch home while Wormtail impersonated Crouch 
Sr often enough to keep people from realizing that he was dead, bringing as 
much of his work as possible home, and delegating most of the duties of the 
Tournement to his assistant. Given that there are several thousand hairs in a 
normal human scalp they would have been able to harvest enough to keep 
Wormtail in Polyjuice for a few months worth of appearances and stage another 
'disapearance" at some point during the year. At this point in the 
proceedings they did not know that Crouch Sr. would play right into their 
hands by freeing his elf. Conversely, they may have been planning to kill 
Winky. although we do not know whether DE mindset classifies the killing of 
another wizard's House Elf as murder.

Another thing they did not know at the time of the conversation in the Riddle 
House is that Alistor Moody was designated to be the next DADA teacher at 
Hogwarts. When Wormtail made his escape to seek out Voldemort, Remus Lupin 
was still DADA Professor, and so far as he knew, due to return in the 
following year. It is possible that the original plan was to capture one of 
the existing Hogwarts staff in order to facilitate Crouch's impersonation. 
The fact that Moody was replacing Lupin would have come from the Crouches. 
This would make everything much easier, since only Dumbledore appeas to have 
known Moody well, making mistakes less obvious to the general audience. 

-JOdel