'Heroes in Crisis' #5 Reveals a Major Clue in the Murder Mystery

A potetially game-changing revelation came today in the murder investigation that drives much of the story for Heroes in Crisis.

The revelation comes from Booster Gold, who has been trying to figure out a defense against what seems to some the obvious allegtation that he was the muderer at Sanctuary, a mental health facility for superheroes where a massacre left an as-yet-unknown number of heroes and villains dead. Now, it looks like there is at least some new evidence.

Spoilers ahead for Heroes in Crisis #5, on sale today.

In the issue, Booster Gold reveals that one of the bodies at Sanctuary (that of Wally West) is too old -- that time travel had seemingly played a role in at least this death, and likely the others as well.

He explains to Blue Beetle that he knows this because of his history as a time-traveler: the use of time travel can be detected by examining the half-life of the body's RNA and comparing it to their birth date (and, presumably, their known history of time travel).

The amount of time is not particularly large -- the body was five days too old -- but it suggests that the relatively straightforward narrative of either Booster or Harley physically attacking the helpless patients is unlikely to be true.

Since "Flash War" took time travel by speedsters off the table, it seems unlikely that this elevates Wally as a suspect himself -- something that likely would have been an obvious direction for the investigation to go otherwise.

By the end of the issue, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Batgirl, and Harley Quinn are all in the same place at the same time, armed with this new information from Booster. This seems like where the story really becomes what it was always meant to be back when King was teasing Harley and Booster as co-stars way back before the series launched.

It could be that the use of time-travel was something intended to further implicate Booster Gold; not only is he a time-traveler, but Booster himself once faked his death (in the event series 52) by traveling to the future and stealing his corpse from its final resting place in order to fool those who might question whether the death was "really him."

Heroes in Crisis #6 will be in stores on February 27.