How can the suspect be charged with "being a fugitive of justice"? As far as I understand, according to the Fifth Amendment nobody has to incriminate herself. And with a murder charge, there's no statute of limitations.

Do you want to get the student interested in programming or do you want to show what freshman CS students have to put up with? Because I think these are two pairs of shoes, and personally I would get bored after doing even just one sorting or text conversion problem. My suggestion would be to choose something that has a nice visual result, either directly on the command line or after visualizing it with something like gnuplot/matplotlib. One of my favorite "beginner's problems" for potential research assistants with little to no programming experience is to code up a simple diffusion-limited aggregation simulation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_aggregation). The algorithms are simple (less than 100 lines of Python), there is plenty of documentation around, and the results are nice to look at.