With questions like these, I always point to Alexandrian's Three Clue Rule essay.

http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule

As Alexandrian says, have at least three clues per thing that you want the players to figure out. And as Bankuei says, make at least some of them obvious. Generally I use two tiers when making a mystery. There are three first tier clues that point to the person/location/thing that the players need to run into. But when the players enter the mystery, what they find first are second tier clues to the first tier clues or places they can find other second tier clues.

So lets say we have a murder mystery. We come up with three first tier clues: the guy who acted as lookout while the murder was committed, the murder weapon, and the fact that the two victims knew the murderer.

We decide that we have three second tier sources of clues: The two crime scenes, and the CCTV network that one player has access to.

At the first crime scene are stab wounds that will match the murder weapon, a witness who saw the lookout and can describe him, and the matchbooks that the lookout dropped at his lookout point, which points to his favorite bar.

At the second crime scene are stab wounds that will match the murder weapon, a witness who saw where the murderer disposed of the murder weapon, and a series of emails between the murdered and murderer which shows they had business ties.

The CCTV network will show the outlook at the second crime scene, and the fact that the murderer frequently visited both victims. He looked very angry when he visited the second victim before the day before the murder.

To shore up the outlook clues, we'll also decide that the outlook is a petty crook, so his name and address can be found by finding him in the criminal database (if they know what he looks like).

Finally our first tier clues: The murder weapon has the murderer's finger prints and his initials on the grip.

The outlook can be made to spill the beans. He knows exactly who the murderer is.

And digging into the emails and other records will reveal that the three were engaged in shady business deals, where the murderer was getting the short end of the stick.

How can I learn how to lay out an "evidence scene"?
been trying to get data from the facebook payments reports API, since they say on november 7th no more reports will be sent by email.
tried php and got an error - "SSL connection timeout".
this is the php curl code i'm using:

$set_action_url = "https://paymentreports.facebook.com/".$company_id."/report?date=".$date."&amp;type=".$type."&amp;access_token=".$company_token;
$ch = curl_init($set_action_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,5);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT ,0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
$result = curl_exec($ch);


i logged the url and query string just before the call, and if i use it in a browser
i do get the file.

what am i doing wrong?
