For me I think it was the repo man for they could not pay there bills and the repo man took the ladder as part of the payment.

Now that I think about; yeah, it could've been him/her, but does it appear in Brandi's memories that they did get a visit from the repo person?

We all know not all memories were brought over from the beta game.

Well, not from the BETA game, but you know... Eitherway, its no surprise to me that they didn't include a memory of it, since they either forgot about it (like with many other (messed up) memories) or they didn't include it on purpose just to create suspicion and all that.

Dustin Broke and Angela Pleasant.

With risk of sounding (unintentionally) rude... I don't care To me, the answer is "It's intentionally not certain because that way you can decide yourself and make your own story. There is no answer. Whats to discuss?"

Now, don't get me wrong. Discuss away. It's a good thing that not all people are as boring as I am in terms of not wanting to put effort on discussions with no answer.

A different person in every hood. Or maybe the ladder was old and rusty and broke.

Maybe there was no ladder and in the beta-version, sims could walk off of cliffs. o.o Therefore, he sleep-walked himself to his watery grave.

Maybe Brandi owed money to someone,and instead of her,they killed Skip? <— kidding xD
I seriously don't know.There is said that he died in a pool accident.Maybe that was suicide,lol xD

Who knew Skip before his demise? And has shown a wanton disregard for safety , and has a track record of (enabling)killing off entire hoods with the click of a button? Who showed a callous disregard for all simmers game stability and survival?

Since Idi Amin was dead by then , I'm going with that all time villain, EA.

Why? What's their motive?

In my game I didn´t put much effort into coming up with a backstory. It was a tragic accident, plain and simple. Skip wanted to climb out of the pool, but the ladder came off and hit him on the head. He fell unconscious and drowned before help could arrive.

I always thought that he fell in and when he tried to get out, he slipped on the ladder, got stuck, fell back, and drowned. I mean, come on. That pool is TINY.

In my game he did it to himself and he installed the little pool for that purpose.

I don't know what Dustin's age was, but since he works in the criminal career (and is friend with some nasty thief that will show up in Nina & Dinas house) it might have been someone that Dustin owe money too.
I don't think it was Brandi, she does not seem to be that kind of a person.

Maybe it was Bella Goth? I know it sounds stupid, but what if she killed Skip (and Skip had an affair with Bella, since Bella is a sim with the ambition romance) and then ran away to Strangetown (she just ended up there) and someone made up the whole UFO scandal?

Well, my entirely personal take on it for my current game: I started out with not the slightest idea, since nobody in town ever seemed to have a reason to kill him. However, in my (semi-realistic) megahood, I've slowly gotten the idea that Skip was working for the Capp mob, and...something happened. Maybe he was taking a late-night dip after planting Brandi's bushes out front, reached for the ladder, and found himself looking at a Capp pointing a gun at him...and he begged for his life as the Capp (Consort? Regan? Tybalt?) coldly told him how very silly he was to try to double-cross them, and how very lucky he'd be if they didn't kill his family as well...while all the while, the ladder was being unscrewed from the side of the pool by the Capp's flunkies. Then, when they'd unscrewed it, a muscular Capp flunky picked it up and wacked him over the head with it, knocking him unconscious and allowing them to watch him drown; they took the ladder just to cause more confusion on the part of the local police, and it worked. His body was found by the paper-delivery kid early next morning, and his death was brushed under the carpet as an "accident".

This fits with the memories in the clean hoods I use (the Capp in charge left before he died, so they don't have the memory, and they don't consider assisting in the the execution of a traitor to be "meeting him") and explains how Dustin got his job, which is working for the Capps in my megahood (or was, since he was fired for failing school!). They're not entirely heartless, after all... Oh, and Consort Capp is now a fugitive vampire using the trailer as a hide-out, which is what actually inspired this backstory for me!

The CIA. Someone put a hit on him.

God did it.
And by God I mean the player before us. We all know Gods enjoy the "take the ladder" trick.

My surmise:

Skip was a secret drunk. Brandi suddenly came up pregnant quickly after Beau's birth, and Skip was mulling over the problems attached to having a new baby, a toddler, and a teen all at the same time.
He'd just been fired from his job (after only 5 months!) due to having missed work once too often.
Got a couple of six packs after getting fired, stormed off to sit by the tiny pool (that he had been planning to expand once he made enough money) and then decided that he'd take a swim.
Wrong move. He found out he couldn't swim very well while drunk, and when he started to go under, he yelled for ages for someone to help him..nobody heard him because Brandi had taken Beau to the playground, and Dustin wasn't home yet.
He didn't realize the ladder wasn't there until he went under for the last time.
Brandi came home to a horror show of Dustin screaming and crying, and the paramedics feverishly trying to revive her husband.

So it was a true accident-but Dustin always blamed himself for having taken out the ladder because he thought that it was too rusty to use, and that nobody would ever miss it.

Skip was a notoriously bad handyman. He made Tim Taylor look suave and professional.

My pet theory is that someone stole the pool ladder for scrap when it was dark, not noticing that someone had gone for a night-time swim due to the Brokes not being able to afford such niceties as pool lights with working bulbs (and, presumably, the theif lacking any kind of awareness of surroundings... ...which given that the last burglar I had walked past the homeowner and an off-duty police officer twice without batting an eyelid, seems quite plausible). Brandi was busy putting the children to bed at the time, and therefore could not provide a positive ID to police.

As for who did it, that's a very good question. I suspect several of the Sims I've created in addition to some of the pre-mades, but no conclusive evidence has been found and nobody's confessed. Given that Skip has since been resurrected and died again, it's unlikely the case will ever be solved.

(I sense a Dustin/Angela fan...) Dustin and Skip got into an argument, as family members sometimes do. Maybe the argument was about Angela. Who knows. They didn't mean to kill Skip, they just meant to torment him by removing the ladder, but he drowned before they could put it back in place. They say a good portion of murders are committed by the victim's own lover or family member. Truth is, I'd never really given it much thought. Don't know that I like the idea of poor Angela and/or Dustin potentially being locked up in prison for life (or executed, though I doubt that would happen due to their age, even if tried as adults) if they were ever found out.

The repo man theory actually makes sense though, considering his name was "Skip."

I just think he drowned. Sounds a little boring but I really don't think Brandi would kill her own husband.

Olive Specter, however, is a more interesting theory for another time.

I love the stories! Especially; he must have been drunk, or it was foul play. After all, don't you agree that it's just STUPID that a sim can't climb in or out of a pool that has no ladder?

I never put much thought into it when I played my game. It was just a tragedy and nothing could be done about it. I do like all of your stories though. I was always uncertain if it was suicide, murder, or an accident. Who would've murdered him though? Maybe someone who he owed money to, but definitely not anyone in or friends with the Broke family. Suicide seems to be the most obvious answer to me though, I love the story by FranH about him being an alcoholic. Although I don't think he tried to escape the pool, I think he lost sight of what was important (his family) and worried about everything that was wrong, causing him to finally take his own life.