Weirdness
Last Updated: Sunday, October 22, 2000 04:26 PM

These are true stories taken from the "News of the Weird" column that's printed in various newspapers. I only post the ones that I like, but the ones I like are usually the funniest -- in my opinion. For more complete articles go here.

1998

Latest Child-Sales News: In May, a Frederick, Md., man allegedly sold his 1-year-old son for $100 and an unspecified used car. And in April, authorities in Tuscon, Ariz., found a homeless 14-year-old girl who reported being sold twice last year, to a California family for $10,000 and then, when she couldn't get along with them as was returned to her mother for credit, for $5,000 to a Phoenix family. And a Jacksonville Beach, Fla., woman was charged in May for selling her 2-year-old daughter for $10; she came to police attention when she called the Belleview, Fla., Police Department to ask for a background check on the buyer.

In April, engineer Suhrid Ganguly, 22, hanged himself in Calcutta, India, after becoming despondent at attempts to have his telephone fixed without paying a bribe. Wrote Ganguly in his suicide note, "(T)here is no other way to change the system and get an honest right to live."

In February, police in Bemidji, Minn., raided a methamphetamine lab and discovered that several of the workers making the drug were local jail inmates on a work-release program. The alleged meth kingpin was also a local contractor and had requested the inmates for his legitimate business, but then diverted them.

Cheung Tat-kwong, 76, was found guilty in March in Hong Kong of murdering his roommate, Mr. Wong Fai, 75, after Mr. Wong had complained one time too many about Cheung's habit of scratching his butt around the house. And in a two-week period in March, a 20-year-old man was shot and killed in New Orleans, allegedly by his brother, and a Baton Rouge, La., man was sentenced to 10 years in prison in the murder of a friend, with the cause of both fights over the TV remote control.

[Humpty's Note: This story isn't from the News Of The Weird column, but it's just as funny so I'm including it anyway. It originally appeared in the June 29 - July 3 issue of StarWatch newspaper. As a side note, News Of The Weird also appears in the paper as well.]
Jennings says he's not dying, just tired
Waylon Jennings says that the rumor mill is killing him. Since he decided to quit touring, the country star said, he has gotten tired of hearing rumors that he is about the die. "I don't need a wheelchair. I don't use makeup, Viagra, Geritol or Haticol!" he said. "I just don't want to be on the road as much as I was." Jennings sold his guitars, tour bus and other road gear last year when he chose to stop touring after 30 years.

Five Philippine treasure hunters were killed in March in Rizal province after they found a live World War II bomb and tried to pound it open with a crowbar. And a Philippine naval officer died in January in Zamboanga City while renovating his home when he used a live mortar shell as a hammer.

In January, Hipolito Vega, 30, was arrested in Holyoke, Mass., and charged on a previous warrant for driving without a license.   He asked to make his one phone call from the police station and spoke in Spanish, believing no one at the station could understand him and that he could tell his friend where to pick up a stash of cocaine he had just hidden. However, Vega failed to notice Officer Manuel Rivera, who heard Vega talking and alerted officers, who were waiting by the stash when Vega's friend arrived.

1997

In March, three men in Ogden, Utah, were arrested for rape, and according to police, two admitted their roles in the crime. However, the police said, Alberto Salgado, 18, gave a different story: While his buddies held the woman down, an unknown person pushed Salgado on top of her, and he "accidentally" penetrated her because his fly was open since he had just returned from using the restroom. As he kept trying to get up, according to the police account reported in the Ogden Standard-Examiner, the unknown person pushed him back down, again and again, until he had a sexual climax.

The Sleepwalking Defense to homicide finally made its way to the U. S. in February after having achieved success in a famous case in Canada 10 years ago. Phoenix, Ariz., inventor Scott Louis Falater said he was sound asleep during the time he stabbed his wife 44 times and during the time neighbors watched him hold his wife's head underwater in a backyard swimming pool. Just as the Canadian defendant had supposedly driven 14 miles to his mother-in-law's home while asleep and beat her with a tire iron, Falater managed to put on gloves, kill the woman, bandage a cut, and dispose of his bloody clothes, all while asleep. Not impossible,said an expert on sleep disorders.

In November, Oregon State University physics professor John Gardner had a federal grant application rejected, apparently solely because it was not typed double-spaced. (Gardner, himself, is blind; he was applying to work on technology for the disabled.) And in December, the Georgia Court of Appeals turned down, irrevocably, an appeal by the state in a $2.7 million personal-injury case because the state's paperwork was submitted in New Times Roman typeface instead of the required Courier.

In Pittsburgh, Pa., in September, Francis Glancy, 41, with a blood-alcohol reading more than three times the legal limit, fell off his bike, knocking himself out, and was charged with DUI under a1993 ruling that makes a bicycle a "vehicle." However, the statute permits first-offenders to avoid a conviction if they get counseling and agree to a 30-day driver's license suspension. Glancy had no driver's license so the judge told him to apply for one, then allow it to be suspended for 30 days so he could get the conviction erased.

The latest man to shock mourners by walking in to his own funeral, according to a March Reuters report from Bahia Blanca,Argentina, was Robinson Gonzalez, 21. (His mother had mistakenly identified a shooting victim as her son.) Unlike in at least one of the previous instances, in which the mother of the "deceased" died of shock upon seeing that her offspring was still alive, Mrs. Gonzalez merely suffered an anxiety attack.

Brothers Geoffrey and Aaron Kuffner were arrested in New Orleans in June and charged with terrorism as the ones who had recently mailed or hand-delivered suspicious packages to local government and news media offices. The packages were harmless (but nonetheless frightening enough that two offices had to be evacuated), and each contained a four-page manifesto, "Violent Acts of Consciousness Have Only Begun." According to police, the men's goal was to call attention to public ignorance of poetry and that among their demands was that all state inaugural speeches be written in iambic pentameter.

In December 1996, Phillip Johnson, then 32, was hospitalized in Prestonburg, Ky., after shooting himself in the left shoulder with his .22-caliber rifle "to see how it felt," he told ambulance personnel. The sheriff described him as "screaming about the pain, over and over." On October 2, 1997, an ambulance crew was again called to Johnson's home, where he was bleeding from another left-shoulder gunshot. According to the Inez Mountain Citizen newspaper, Johnson said the earlier shooting "felt so good," he had to do it again.

The New York Daily News reported in January that a fire hydrant had recently been installed at the busy intersection of Tremont Avenue and Boston Road in the Bronx but that it was installed in the street, five feet from the curb, requiring all traffic to go around it. A city spokesman said the hydrant was installed properly and that eventually a sidewalk would be built in what is now the curb lane, but because of engineering delays and bad weather, construction has not yet been scheduled.

On April 3, less than 24 hours before he was due to be executed for beating three people to death with a bowling pin in 1991, Phillip Wilkinson was taken off North Carolina's death row and sent for mental evaluation because guards found two suicide notes in his cell. (Apparently, prison officials believe that a person scheduled to die the next day but who wants to kill himself the night before might be insane and therefore cannot be executed.) And on April 1 in Texas, convicted murderer David Lee Herman slashed his throat a day before his scheduled execution, but he was patched up and, a day later, given his lethal injection.

1996

Police in Fort Worth, Texas, arrested a man in December just after he robbed a NationsBank branch. Cops were waiting because a bank customer had walked next door to police headquarters to summon them after becoming suspicious that a man was waiting in a bank line wearing a ski mask.

Former Orange County (Calif.) Treasurer Robert L. Citron, who is awaiting sentencing for fraud in mishandling the county's finances, said in December that the reason his investment decisions plunged the county into the biggest local-government bankruptcy in history in 1994 was the bad advice he had received on interest rates from a mail-order psychic. The good news for Citron, according to Anaheim, Calif., channeler Barbara Connor, is that Citron told her that he learned during two trances last year that he would receive community service but no jail time for his conviction.

In Burbank, Calif., in February, a 55-year-old man who had placed an ad in a local bondage and discipline magazine arranged a liaison in his home with another man. When the man answered his door, the date forced him to crawl through his house to his bondage room, where the man was tied, nude, to a "proctologist table." According to police, the date and his accomplice, waiting outside, then stole the man's sofa, leather chair, TV set and other items.

On Oct. 3, self-described virgin Doreen Lioy, 41, exchanged vows in San Quentin prison's waiting room with 13-time murderer Richard Ramirez (California's notorious "Night Stalker"). It is the first marriage for both. She wore white; he wore blue. She was raised a Roman Catholic; he is a Satanist.

In June, after an investigation, Montreal, Quebec, coroner Teresa Sourour criticized the Fleury Hospital for its judgment in January not to come immediately to the aid of a 75-year-old man who had suffered a heart attack just outside the building. Hospital employees reportedly discussed whether to go out in the minus-20-degree weather to help the man but finally decided just to call an ambulance. The man died a few minutes later.

In May, the San Diego Union-Tribune profiled Pete Springer of Encinitas, Calif., and his 3-year-old firm, Rats R Us, that breeds food for reptiles. Wholesale prices range from 60 cents for the "pinkies" to $3 for a jumbo rat. Springer disclosed that he is sometimes disturbed by the nature of his business but pointed out that, at times, he gives mouth-to-rat resuscitation to keep frail babies alive.

In April, Ms. Gabriella Villa was finally discovered, dead of natural causes, in Monza, Italy, approximately seven years after she died at age 47. She had passed away in her home, but neighbors and her estranged husband had assumed that she had simply moved to another town. (Seven years appears to be a new record for an undetected death in the home.)

Diana J. Nagy filed a lawsuit in Charleston, W. Va., against the manufacturer of the golf cart from which her husband fell to his death after he had been drinking during a tournament at the Berry Hills Country Club. She claimed the cart ought to have had seat belts and doors. Mrs. Nagy's son was driving the cart, so she also sued him.

In July in Dadeville, Ala., Mr. Gabel Taylor, 38, who had just prevailed in an informal Bible-quoting contest, was shot to death by the loser.

A 32-year-old man was buried under several tons of sand after falling into a sand-washing machine in Volant, Pa., in June. And a 50-year-old construction worker died after being hit on the head by a three-ton jackhammer in the Bronx, N.Y., in July. And a recycling center worker was crushed to death in the aluminum can crushing machine in Sewanee, Tenn., in August.

1995

In June in Van Nuys, Calif., Raphael Dale Rodriguez, 24, was charged with beating his girlfriend (maximum fine in California, $1,000) and strangling her pet rabbit (maximum fine, $20,000). In December, two Oklahoma police officers faced charges one of beating his girlfriend so badly she suffered a ruptured eardrum (maximum jail time in Oklahoma, 90 days), and the other of kicking a cat at the Oklahoma City airport (maximum prison time, five years). And in Tallahassee, Fla., in May, sheriff's deputies charged Aaron Moore with bludgeoning his mother to death and were set to charge his friend, David Baity, with having sex with her corpse when they discovered that there is no law in Florida against having sex with a corpse.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in July that the Orange County, Calif., taxpayers had to pay for special private schooling for a high school student suffering from "attention deficit disorder," despite his alleged extremely disruptive behavior. School officials said the boy peddled cigarettes on campus, set fires, threatened to kill classmates, and kicked his pregnant mother in the stomach (sending her to live outside the family home for several months purely out of fear of her son). Said a state education official explaining the court's ruling, "What really matters is the individual needs of the child."

Testifying at her murder trial in November in Arlington, Va., Monique Mullen said she endured her abusive three-year marriage to Kenneth Mullen despite his having struck her, choked her, raped her, stalked her and threatened to shoot her. However, in March 1994, she stabbed him to death with a butcher knife because he threatened to kill the family dachshund.

In trial testimony in July, the former mayor of the 1980s cult-dominated town of Rajneeshpuram, Ore., said he used various schemes to keep the noncult townspeople from voting, including making them sick by tampering with the food at a restaurant and by coating courthouse doorknobs with an chemical irritant as election day approached.

In March, eight Connecticut legislators, and almost three dozen other guests, became ill, with diarrhea and stomach cramps, from eating food at a reception sponsored by lobbyists for the Connecticut Food Association. Meanwhile, in Maine, a legislator introduced a bill to force lobbyists, while on duty in the State House, to wear oversized name tags of the same orange color as deer hunters' vests.

1994

Mireya Funair, 30, was hospitalized in February in Austin, Texas, after being trapped for 40 minutes in her car buried up to her neck in concrete. A cement truck had tipped over, and the truck's funnel had punctured the top of Funair's car, pouring concrete directly into it.

Recent candidates for office included: Leslie Elaine Perez, 56, the leading vote-getter in the March primary to head the Texas Democratic Party organization in Houston, is a convicted murderer whose death penalty was stayed at the last minute in 1963 and who ultimately was paroled in 1971. (Perez is the former Leslie Douglas Ashley, having switched genders shortly after being released.) And ex-state Sen. George Hohman, 61, who still owes $9,000 of the $20,000 fine he was assessed on a 1981 bribery conviction, said he was running again for the Alaska Senate because it was the only way he knew to get enough money to pay off the fine.

Darpan Patel, 20, was arrested in Glastonbury, England, in August after he had gone to the local police station to ask a question about his driver's license. According to police, when they asked, Patel freely gave his name. However, he also told officers that there might be a warrant currently outstanding for his arrest, that he didn't have time to deal with it right then, but that he would come back later to take care of it. Officers checked, found the the warrant, and promptly arrested him.

On July 16, a 21-year-old man was fatally stabbed in the chest in a New York City subway train. Witnesses said he was stabbed because he was apparently victorious in a staring contest with the man who killed him.

In August, Margaret Jean Burke was cited by police in North Haven, N.Y., for driving while intoxicated after a crash involving a car driven by Bruce T. Davis. Davis, a lawyer, operates the New York City-area personal injury service advertised widely on television, 1-800-LAWYERS. Said Davis, "[Burke] certainly hit the wrong person."

In January and February, respectively, inmates escaping from prisons in Lancaster, Calif., and Immokalee, Fla., by hiding in garbage trucks, failed to get out of the trucks before they were compacted into bales of trash. The California man survived, but the Florida man, who was serving a life sentence for kidnapping, was found dead, badly mangled, in a landfill, where the truck had deposited him.

Customs officials, aided by drug-sniffing dogs, arrested Mary Gray, 43, of Chicago at O'Hare Airport in June as she returned from Jamaica with 27 pounds of marijuana in her suitcase. She said she thought the marijuana would be undetectable because it was sprinkled with a "magic voodoo potion" that she had bought from a witch doctor in Jamaica.

On May 11, two death-row inmates were executed at separate times in Varner, Ark., and Department of Corrections officials said they were considering scheduling more such multiple executions because they save money on preparations and overtime pay and cause less stress to employees. Said the department's Alan Ables, "Nobody wants to get up in the morning and go kill somebody."

According to police in Calgary, Alberta, a local pizzeria contains a dungeonlike "trick pad" where teen-age girls are forced to work as prostitutes and whose catacomb of rooms is littered with sex magazines, liquor bottles and used condoms. However, health officials who inspected it in December refused to close it down, with Dr. Paul Hasselback saying, "There is no reason to be concerned about the food being served." According to Hasselback, police business and health business are separate matters.

A Philadelphia Inquirer analysis in December questioned military rulings that suicide was the cause of at least 40 recent deaths of U.S. servicemen. The newspaper quoted former military investigators who said they were "stunned" or "astonished" at how shoddy some of the 40 investigations were, and how the military often calls hard-to-solve cases suicides just to close them out. In one case, a military policeman's death was ruled a suicide two days after he was found shot to death in the head with his hat stuffed in his mouth, his handcuffs attached to his wrists, his holster wrapped around his ankles, and a car radio cable tied around his neck.

In St. Louis in October, according to police, Robert Puelo, 32, stole a hot dog from a 7-Eleven and left the store, cramming it into his mouth as he ran. Minutes later, Puelo choked to death on a 6-inch piece of the hot dog that lodged in his throat.

In April, a 40-year-old woman was mauled to death by a cougar on a mountain trail in northern California, leaving her two children, aged 8 and 5, motherless. After the cougar was tracked down and killed a week later, the Folsom City Zoo set up a trust fund for the cougar's cub, and as of mid-May, the cub's fund had received $21,000, vs. $9,000 for a trust fund established for the woman's children by family friends.

1993

David Bridges, 24, was arrested in Grapevine, Texas, in January and charged with stealing a television set from a home. That getaway had been successful, but he was caught and arrested after he went back to the home because he had neglected to take the remote control.

Testimony in February of an undercover District of Columbia police officer, who "agreed" to murder a woman on contract from her husband but who then saw the husband change his mind: "He realized he still cares for her. So he said he'd rather have her severely beaten." And in Tampa, Fla., in October, Richard G. Hale testified that the shot he fired into his wife's forehead, killing her, obviously was accidental: "I wanted to shock her without hurting her. If I wanted to kill her, I would have shot her in the heart."

In January, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to allow the five delegates representing the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories to vote on bills for the first time ever but only if their votes didn't matter. If those five votes were critical to the outcome, the House would vote again, allowing only the 435 members to cast ballots.

1992

LATEST NEGATIVE CASH-FLOW ROBBERY: A man held up a Circle K store in Waco, Texas, on Nov. 29 after first diverting the clerk's attention by putting a $20 bill on the counter and asking for change. When the robber pulled a gun and demanded the entire contents of the cash register, the clerk put everything in a bag and handed it to the robber all $15. The robber left the $20 bill on the counter as he fled.

In December, Washington State Reformatory officials admitted they had erred in obliging a 53-year-old inmate's job preference to work in the prison's printing plant. He was serving time for forgery, and officials uncovered, during a routine inspection of his quarters, forged birth certificates, marriage licenses and a paycheck stub. An official said the prison tries to get inmates jobs "based on their interests."

From the Police Reports column of the Glen Ellyn (Ill.) Press of Dec. 19: Eric Hoyt, 21, and Peter A. Thordason, 25, were charged with stealing Christmas trees from a food store lot. However, the two denied they intended to steal the trees: "Thordason allegedly told police he wanted to see how long it would take him to run around the building carrying the tree while Hoyt timed him."

1991

James Allen Manuel, 23, was arrested in Baltimore in June after walking into a police station and asking for help in getting his money back from a drug dealer so he could go pay for a prostitute. Cocaine residue around Manuel's nose provoked police to search his pockets, where they found more.

Buschco Inc., owner of three massage parlors in Austin, Texas, billed the city $2,800 for 27 nude massages given to 19 undercover police officers in 1988 and 1989. The police chief said that, since prostitution arrests were made each time, the city does not owe the money. A Buschco lawyer said each massage was given in its entirety before any arrest was made and therefore that the bill must be paid.

Police in Doylestown, Pa., arrested Alfons Kessler, 47, in March for attempting to murder his girlfriend's husband. It was Kessler's fifth attempt at the man. He had been unsuccessful using a gun, a truck, a Molotov cocktail and a crossbow, and this time was unsuccessful using a pipe bomb.

Stories copyright © 1991-98 Chuck Shepherd

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