Playing with things incorrectly

Today trial opened in St. Paul in the “sex death” of Maceo Frank Broadnax. The trial asks the question “did he jump or was he pushed?” in the context of rough homosexual sex. According to the prosecution, Stephen Howard Bailey (a/k/a “The True Master”) killed Broadnax in the course of sadistic sex; according to Bailey, Broadnax “caused his own death by playing with things incorrectly.”
One of the pieces of incriminating evidence against Bailey is traditional in a Hitchcockian sense. Police apprehended Bailey “after a neighbor spotted him dragging Brodnax’s naked body through the apartment building parking lot. Bailey was arrested while loading the decomposing body into his car.” Another is the e-mail in which Bailey shared his taste for violent sexual games, “especially if it ended in the slow, brutal death of one or more of the men involved.” According to Bailey, it is apparently coincidental that Broadnax died in that manner; he (Bailey) was an innocent bystander.
Bailey has waived a jury and is trying the case to the court. The Pioneer Press story is “Trial begins in sex death.”