Voldemort killed personally?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 157167

Mike wrote:
> <snip> BTW, DD said that Tom killed his relatives "in the summer of
his sixteenth year" not when he was sixteen years old. (I made this 
> mistake myself) This puts their murders in 1942, Tom is 15 and about 
> to start his 5th year at Hogwarts. This makes their murders Tom's 
> first murders AFAWK. Sorry, I don't like the timing either, but 
> canon is canon.
> 
> Mike, who scoured CoS for any mention of Tom wearing a ring, any 
> ring, but didn't find it. But then, Harry wasn't much interested in 
> jewelry, was he?
>
Carol responds:
Actually, "in his sixteenth year" is the error, which a copyeditor
should have caught and corrected or queried. (JKR, as we know, is bad
at math and may not know the difference between "sixteen" and "in his
sixteenthe year.") Tom was already sixteen (and therefore in his
*seventeenth* year) when he killed Myrtle and preserved his
"sixteen-year-old self" in the diary, and given his December
31/January 1 birthday, he would still have been sixteen when he killed
the Riddles and when he returned for his sixth year. He may still have
been sixteen when he asks Slughorn about the Horcruxes. (That's the
scene in which he's wearing the ring; Harry understands that he's
already killed the Riddles. It's not mentioned in CoS is.)

In the diary memory where he confronts and frames Hagrid, he's at the
end of his fifth year and wearing a Prefect badge. He wouldn't be
wearing the ring because he hasn't yet killed his parents. The only
person he has killed at that point is Myrtle, if we count her death as
a murder (and I do, for reasons already given).

Just a side note regarding Myrtle's death: When Wormtail kills Cedric
on Baby!mort's orders, he's acting as Voldemort's *agent*, a person
who acts on another's orders and carries out that person's will, not
as his *instrument* (the weapon used to bring about the death). The
wand is the murder instrument. But when the Basilisk, which is not
human and therefore can't be an agent (it has no free will or ability
to reason), kills Myrtle, it serves as his *instrument* in lieu of the
wand. Ergo, Wormtail murdered Cedric (in a court of law, I believe
that he and LV would both be considered guilty, but for the purposes
of Horcrux-making, Cedric's murder wouldn't count because Voldemort
didn't perform it). But Tom Riddle murdered Myrtle using the Basilisk
as his weapon, with no human agent carrying out his orders, and I'm
quite sure that he considered her death a Horcrux-worthy murder.

There's nothing anywhere in canon that says the murder victim has to
be killed by the murderer's *hand.* (You may be thinking of the
Prophecy--"either must die at the hand of the other--" and even there,
"hand is used figuratively. Otherwise, the only kind of death that
would qualify is death by strangulation.) 

Carol, with apologies for oversnipping (see upthread for the rest of
Mike's argument)