Roberto Rottengrape, the dead man who looked suspiciously like the entertainer David Cassidy from the 1970s television show The Partridge Family, was found in the wine cellar of the Almaden Winery Community Center on Feb. 13. When the official in charge of the investigation asked center gerontology specialist Torie O'Reilly to help him distribute a photo of Rottengrape to the group of diners, she responded by whacking him atop his head with the fliers.

It was an inside joke, wrapped up in an inside job—a job headed up by O'Reilly and two accomplices, Beverly Temkin and Susan Tam, both members of the Almaden Seniors Program.

The trio collaborated on writing the script for a murder mystery dinner held at the community center where Rottengrape was their fictitious victim, and the diners—and audience members—were the detectives.

"We started with some facts and embellished it from there. It's a mix of truth and fiction," O'Reilly says.

The scheme for holding a Murder Mystery Dinner at the center was hatched months ago and O'Reilly says that Tam began a fact-finding mission to bring some reality to the production. Tam studied books and read documents to uncover details about Almaden Valley, the winery itself and its history.

"We are doing it to highlight the past of the building that we will be in for the next year," O'Reilly says. The Almaden Senior Program has been temporarily displaced from its permanent location on Camden Avenue while a larger and updated facility is under construction.

Originally, O'Reilly says they ordered a boxed version of a hosted murder mystery game with a winery theme from an Internet source, but when the game didn't arrive quickly apprehension set in and they decided to write the whole thing themselves.

It took just a few weeks to pull the whole script together, but the women say they may have pulled out a few hairs in the process.

"The murderer has changed twice," Tam says.

But they wouldn't be able to pull off the murder with just the three of them, and they knew they need accomplices. In a effort to recruit a collection of would-be killers to pull off the job, they rounded up some usual suspects—members of the senior program who would also be attending the dinner—to act as characters in the mystery.

O'Reilly, Tam, and Temkin say they swore secrecy to one another and insisted the performers take a blood oath not to reveal the murderer.

On the afternoon of the murder, more than a hundred diners and amateur sleuths sat down to decorated tables and a glass of wine and readied themselves for a good old fashioned mystery set in the Valley of Hearts Delight.

Throughout the afternoon, a pair of characters would wander up to the bar to seemingly collect a refreshing beverage but would find a microphone in hand instead of a glass of wine. This is when the clues and motives were revealed.

Rottengrape, the imaginary dead guy, had been killed after news leaked that he planned to sell the winery and land to a developer, played by Don House, who received vociferous but playful "boos" from on-lookers when he proclaimed he would "tear the place down" to make room for his development.

Rottengrape had inherited the winery and the surrounding land through questionable means leaving Hedy Chablis—played by Genise Phillips, the only non-senior member of the performers, and daughter of member, Venus Phillips—the rightful heir, with nothing. But when Evelyn Environmentalist, played by Judith Brynda, revealed that she saw Chablis and Rottengrape looking cozy together, the grapevine became even more tangled, especially for the sashaying Marilyn Merlot—played by Chicki Nemeth—who was Rottengrape's main squeeze.

As the mystery unfolded, the food servers, Nicole Ptak and Matthew Miyake—both seniors at Pioneer High School—were dropping clues themselves as they passed out the entrees.

Detective diners were given programs that included all the characters' names and a brief background of each—which provided hints to their motive for killing the greedy Rottengrape—and an space where notes could be jotted down.

As the cheesecake was being served, time was up and everyone had to guess who did it. Some thought it was the city planner George Baccarat, played by George Woehleke who had taken a bribe to push through plans for the development. Others, such as Dick Reed, liked Marilyn Merlot as the killer, because she was a "woman scorned." June and Jerry Clodius agreed with Merlot theory, adding: "She was a jilted love. What cold be worse than that?"

Yvonne Hall deduced that Evelyn Environmentalist murdered Rottengrape, because Environmentalist had already poisoned her whole family. By process of elimination, James Sauter said he thought Environmentalist, too, because she was "nutty enough" to have committed the dastardly deed.

And in the end, when the dirty truth was finally revealed by the chief of police, played by Bill Egan, Environmentalist—a member of the SLA—Snail Liberation Army—was blamed. She wanted to save her snail "friends" who lived on the land from destruction so she slipped Rottengrape some of the insecticide he had planned on using to rid the property of the slimy creatures she loved.

"I did do it," Environmentalist confessed.

Events such as the Murder Mystery Dinner and more are open to members of the Almaden Senior Program. For more information about the program and its benefits, visit the web site at www.almadenseniors.org, or call 408.268.1133.