Tom Riddle - Riddle murders

[Wanda Sherratt]

No: HPFGUIDX 106182

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67" <justcarol67 at y...>
wrote:

> But the incident happened the summer before Tom returned to Hogwarts
> as Head Boy, so he could quite easily have been seventeen already--a
> fully qualified wizard who had passed his O.W.L.s and had his
> apparating license. No one would have been watching him.

Ah, now, this is the question I'm trying to settle for myself.  Is it
certain that the killings took place between Tom's 6th and 7th years?
 Is that in the books somewhere?  I haven't been able to pin it down
in the text.  It's been suggested that they might have been killed
AFTER Tom's 7th year, just after leaving Hogwarts. (Maybe a graduation
present to himself?)  I don't know if it makes a great deal of
difference; it just seems creepier to me to think of a kid committing
these crimes, then going back to school as if nothing had happened.  
> 
> A more important question to me is how Tom got away without being
> suspected as the murderer by the Muggle authorities. Unless he was
> disinherited, he'd have been heir to the estate, and if he was
> disinherited, he'd have a motive (revenge). Also, the Muggle gardener,
> Frank Bryce, claimed to have seen a pale, dark-haired teenage boy near
> the house on that day (GoF Am. ed. 3). If the Muggle authorities knew
> that Riddle Sr. had a (disowned) son and knew where he lived, why
> didn't they suspect him and come after him? [SNIP] The marriage
> itself may not have been a secret, but Tom Sr. would have washed his
> hands of his wife through a divorce or dissolution (what's the word
> for a marriage that's wiped from the record as if it never existed?)
> and arranged for the baby to be born far away.

I've always thought it would have been a stronger plot if Tom had been
illegitimate, but alas, as someone pointed out to me, the word "wife"
was indeed used, so we have to assume that a lot of cumbersome legal
machinery and paperwork went grinding away in the background to result
in a legitimate son and heir somehow being obliterated as if he'd
never existed.  Of course, we only have Voldemort's word for it that
his parents WERE married, but I think if Rowling had intended for us
to think that Tom was illegitimate, she would have written it that way
before now.

Wanda