Outside the Steiger Haus Bed and Breakfast, the cobblestone streets of St. Genevieve, Missouri, are silent. Late afternoon sunlight filters through lace curtains onto hardwood floors, illuminating an antique buffet and several bright landscape paintings.

The stillness is broken as the door opens and a small crowd of people filter in, filling the front room and moving back into a dining area with separate groups of tables and chairs. Dave Thompson, one of the first to enter into the sunlit sitting room, laughs and gestures to the staff, saying, “I’ll give someone 100 bucks to tell me who done it.” A few mysterious smiles light in response, but no one can answer.

Within the next few hours, he and the other guests at the bed and breakfast will take on different personas, enact a fictional art auction and witness deception, drugs and murder. By lunchtime the next day, they will have explained it all.

For the last 18 years, more than 55,000 guests from around the world have taken part in one of more than 72 murder mysteries written by the owner of Steiger Haus, Rob Beckerman, who writes under the alias J. Masterson.

Beckerman, who grew up in the original Steiger Haus location (at its peak, the murder mysteries were run out of three separate houses), converted the house into a bed and breakfast and was searching for a way to increase winter reservations when he heard of another hotel running murder mysteries for guests. So he wrote a mystery and tried it.

“Having never seen one — but I always loved mysteries anyway — I wrote one and we started doing them, and the first year we did 20, the next year we did 40, the next year we did 60 …” The rising trend continued, all the way to the bed and breakfast’s peak of 257 mysteries a year.

Through it all, Beckerman’s format has barely changed from the first time.

His template is heavily based on creating a persona for each guest. Each participant gets a background sheet with three categories of information: who you are, what you know and what you won’t tell. Aside from that, guests have free rein in creating their characters.

Beckerman uses a variety of themes for his mysteries, from beauty pageants to movie auditions. He tries to keep the various characters reasonably simple, though.

“I want people to be able to dress their parts from their own closets,” he said.

Beckerman has, however, established a few ground rules, the first of which is never to tell the killer who he is.

“Another B&B [bed and breakfast] in town did a murder mystery, except they told the killer and about six o’clock she confessed … she couldn’t take it anymore,” he said, laughing. “Things always go wrong.”

This hasn’t stopped Beckerman from being ambitious.

Typically, murder mysteries are written for a group or as a dinner theatre, where a small number of people perform for an audience, who then tries to solve the mystery. For one event, Beckerman wrote a mystery for 96 people.

“I had to carry the script around,” he said. “We divided them into three groups, but I had to talk to all three groups … it was really confusing.”

Once guests assume the identity on the sheet, the pace of the mystery is largely in their hands, guided only slightly by the help of Beckerman and his staff.

“The dead body has to happen,” he said. “Other than that, we let the guests do what they want.”

An evening at Steiger Haus begins with a trip to the local Anvil Restaurant and Saloon, where guests, all in costume, are seated around one large table in the middle of the upper floor. Conversations become heated as guests begin to explore each other’s characters and occasionally even switch seats, pausing often to peer beneath loaded plates of green beans, fried chicken and baked potatoes at their character sheets.

Plot and confusion often go hand in hand amidst the clamor of Friday night dinner traffic.

In a sudden burst of activity, Lois Thompson, posing as the accountant wife of art auctioneer Ben Justin, stands, calling down the table, “Ben, I need my medication. I need my medication!”

In the noise of the busy restaurant, all heads turn toward her in confusion. Patrice Stockmann, posing as exporter/importer Elayna Cortofino, leans in toward her husband and asks, “Am I Beth?”

“I think she said Ben,” her husband replies, and after consulting their respective names on their information sheets, both laugh at the confusion. Meanwhile, a container of mints, passed off as medication, is handed down to the disturbed accountant, who smiles gratefully and comments loudly to everyone around her about the wonderful medical products of Xeno Prince, who sits, smiling, at the other end of the table. Several eyebrows raise, and dinner continues.

The rest of the guests at the restaurant are used to the odd behavior and costumes every weekend and even enjoy it, according to Anvil waitress Candace Williams. “There’s always crazy stuff going on,” she said. “We sometimes have to act in it.”

After the meal is over, it’s only a short walk back to the bed and breakfast, where the plot continues with an art auction. Guests have already been told, based on their characters, how much they are supposed to bid, but that doesn’t stop the verbal parrying. Dave Arborgast, dressed in black as the slightly suspicious Xeno Prince, gestures casually to the stuffed owl being auctioned as a priceless sculpture and states coolly, “One hundred and fifty bucks for that crap,” prompting derisive comments from all. But no one outbids him.

The questionable buy leads to a search for clues, and soon people begin breaking off from the group to search each of the suites for suspicious items belonging to various characters. A closer examination of the paintings auctioned yields a map leading back out into the city. Suspicions begin to rise, and suddenly the attention shifts as someone calls out from a side room that a dead body has been found.

The blond figure of Steiger Haus staff member Stephanie Rector lies motionless on the ground, arms outstretched, with a syringe just inches from her hand. The guests crowd around the body for a second before the search for clues is resumed with renewed energy.

At the Steiger Haus, every mystery is different because of the people. Beckerman said the various actors are the most exciting part of running the mysteries.

“We think the guests are the show,” he said.

In the end, amidst a variety of clues and maybe even more than one dead character, guests always come up with entertaining explanations for the mystery, staff member Cassie Kreitler noted.

“Lots of people like to say Colonel Mustard with the wrench in the library. That’s a common one,” she said.

As the evening draws to a close, Rob Beckerman offers to reveal the answer to the mystery early. His guests, however, are still engaged in sorting out clues and bargaining for secrets. Joe Spencer, alias Victor Stanhouse, turns him away with a touch of irony:

“We’re not through beating it up yet.”

Photos by Ashley Richards