I enjoyed the column on butlers as killers:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030926.html
Still I wonder - in German the saying is “the killer is always the gardener.” Does this variant exist in English too? There is a German hit from the 1970s by singer-songwriter Reinhard Mey “Der Mörder ist immer der Gärtner” (the killer is always the gardener) which might have gone to popularise the saying, still I don’t think it originated it - yet I couldn’t find any conclusive evidence.
I’ve never heard that saying, but then I don’t speak German, so that’s hardly surprising. Maybe there is a German author, or several, who used the gardner in the same way as their English counterparts?
My knowledge of German whodunnits could fit in a small book of matches without removing the matches first.
A quick google found this link, but it does look like it might have been written in German (Austria?)
http://www.geocities.com/patriciawhitton/TheMysteryOfChestnutHill.html
One strange story, that I didn’t have the patience to read.
I’ve never heard of any equivalent saying in English regarding a gardener. I contributed to the thread that commented on that column, taking it apart line by line, and nobody there mentioned a gardener either. Guess it’s just parallelism.