About The Murder Mystery Company

Killing it in this economy, local entrepreneur Scott Cramton has been turning whodunnits into big business. Founded in Michigan, The Murder Mystery Company now operates nationwide, performing weekly interactive mystery shows. With over 300,000 tickets sold to audiences at public venues in 18 states, The Murder Mystery Company has become one of the largest dinner theaters in America.

About the Fair Play murder mystery method

At The Murder Mystery Company, we’ve spent years designing mysteries that can be solved using our Fair Play system. Fair Play means that the murder CAN be solved and the ending WILL NOT change.

Our job is to make sure you get a chance to solve our murder mysteries, so every show is designed to let you, our detectives, have a chance to figure it out. This will be accomplished as a team or individually with the clues and hints provided.

Why perform Fair Play murder mysteries?

The Murder Mystery Company believes you should get out of an experience what you put into it. If you work to solve the mystery, you should indeed be able to solve it. With our mysteries, the murder happens before your very eyes, with no clues or evidence held back. Using your skills of deduction and interrogation, you can uncover the clues and solve the mystery, as it was crafted for you to do so.

What do the “other guys” do for murder mystery shows?

The average murder mystery event that you would attend is likely not Fair Play at all. You solving the crime is similar to winning the lottery; it’s completely random and, frankly, improbable. The secret behind murder mysteries is this: if no one correctly guesses the killer, the show is too hard, but if EVERYONE discovers the correct killer, the show is too easy. Rather than taking the time to craft the perfect crime, the “other guys” wait until the audience guesses the killer, and then they switch it up and change the culprit! That means that all your hard work didn’t matter, and since the clues you rightly discovered didn’t matter, it’s an overall random event.

Why doesn’t every group perform Fair Play murder mysteries?

It’s VERY hard to do. Properly performing a Fair Play murder mystery requires a carefully crafted script and highly trained actors. Most actors in other companies might participate in one rehearsal, but likely don’t rehearse at all, and perform more improvisationally than from a script.

Quite simply, The Murder Mystery Company would NEVER participate in something that would be so ultimately disappointing to their audience.

The Murder Mystery Company uses the Grimprov Method, which is the most advanced teaching method in America for murder mystery theater. Our actors need to know how to guide the audience in a way that reveals the correct clues at the correct times. Our actors spend countless hours learning how to carefully unravel the mysteries so that they are neither too hard nor too easy, making for the perfect crime. In other words, we play fair.

Scott Cramton, CEO

Scott Cramton was born in 1980 in Detroit, MI with a severe cleft palate. Scott’s parents were told that he would have incredibly limited communication, and that it was unlikely that he would be able to be understood over a telephone. After several surgeries and hundreds of hours of speech therapy, Scott recalls a pinnacle turning point in the fourth grade.

“I remember one of my speech therapists talking to my parents and expressing the progress that I had made. My speech therapist was elated, saying that I had the whole world in front of me. She told my parents I could do anything. She then paused to laugh and say except be an actor or public speaker or something. She explained that she wasn’t a miracle worker. I remember to this day hearing that and thinking I could be an actor. I could do it.”

Now, Scott is the CEO of The Murder Mystery Company, an interactive whodunnit comedy show so popular that it has sold over 300,000 tickets to its public shows. By the numbers, Scott had seven surgeries, took 18 years of speech therapy, and he now runs the number one most popular dinner theater company in the United States. He has even played the lead, Detective Peter Ness, over 1,000 times.