Two Threatening Letters
A man read a threatening letter and laughed.
A few days later, a letter with exactly the same wording arrived for him.
This time, he turned pale and rushed to the police.
The first letter had not been a mere prank, either.
What did the man realise when he read the second letter?
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Hints
Use as many hints as you need, one at a time.
Hint 1
When he read the first letter, the man was not worried about his own safety or his family’s.
Hint 2
The question does not say that the first letter had arrived for the man.
Hint 3
The person who wrote the first letter and the person who received the second were the same man.
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Answer
The man had written the first threatening letter himself.
He laughed as he reread what he had written, thinking he could use it to extort money from someone.
But the person he threatened discovered who he was and sent a separate letter with the same wording to his home.
The man realised that the identity and address he thought he had concealed were known, and that he or his family were now the targets of the threat.
Terrified, he rushed to the police for help, even though that meant admitting what he had done.
Explanation
The man was trying to extort money from someone.
He wrote a letter threatening to harm that person’s family unless they paid.
As he reread it, he laughed at the thought of the frightened recipient handing over the money. Then he sent it without revealing his name.
A few days later, a letter arrived at the man’s own home.
Its wording was identical, word for word, to the letter he had sent. The person he had threatened had tracked him down and sent the same threat back to him in a separate letter.
The man had not expected that person to discover who he was.
But the letter arriving at his home showed that they had found out where he lived as well.
The threat he had aimed at someone else’s family was now aimed at his own.
Fearing retaliation, he went to the police, explained the circumstances and asked for help.
When he read the first letter, he was its writer.
When he read the second, he was its recipient.
The wording was the same, but its meaning for him had changed completely: he had gone from making the threat to being threatened.
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