A British pub in Greater Manchester has become the scene of what the landlord jokingly called "the crime of the century" – a whodunnit involving pints, songs, and a sneaky group.
The Barking Dog pub transforms into a trivia battleground every week, regularly drawing 70 to 80 people to claim the coveted prize – a £30 (NZ$70) bar tab.
Everything ran as usual until a new team showed up about a year and a half ago – a group of middle-aged women who seemed, at first, simply brilliant, says quiz master Bobby Bruen.
They answered obscure questions, nailed every round, and became unbeatable to the point it drove others away, he says.
"We started getting a bit fishy because we had complaints about them cheating, but we never saw anything," Bruen told RNZ’s Morning Report.
The doubts grew during the music round, where contestants have to identify 10 song titles and artists, based on the intros, and find the secret connection between them – maybe all songs that hit number two on the UK charts, or tracks that share a producer.
Bruen came up with a tactic to throw curveball questions that no one would get, "especially not a team like that".
"From '80s hip hop to '50s rock to 2010s pop music, they’d get everything… even with the producer's titles which aren’t even mentioned on Spotify – I didn’t have no clue of the connection – that’s when I thought 'right, you really are cheating now'."
To level the playing field, the pub banned phones about six weeks ago, which mellowed suspicions. Yet somehow, the same team kept winning. So the staff decided to investigate.
One staff member began peering over their shoulders, sure they were cheating, but couldn't figure out how. Another slipped outside to spy through the window – and caught the team whispering into their smartwatches and using an app to guess the songs, he says.
"They just stayed silent, they didn’t even deny it. They just sat in silence and turned away."
The team has been banned from the quiz but remained anonymous, "for our sake and their sake", he said.
But news of the scandal spread fast after the pub’s landlord, Mark Rackham, shared the story on Facebook.
He told the BBC the anonymity sparked a "massive whodunnit".
"Everyone's desperate to know who's done it. I was at a council meeting the next day and people were coming over and asking me about the quiz," he said, labelling it as "the crime of the century".
Despite the drama, Bruen said there's no need to change the rules.
"Because of how much media frenzy that this story has got that no one would dare to cheat in this pub again, because you’ll end up in the news in New Zealand."
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