Weird News: Volume Five
OH BABY!!
- John Dawson, 26, was arrested in South St. Paul, Minn, in February after the failure of his alleged elaborate scheme to have sex. Police say he broke into a young woman's apartment just before she arrived, left her a note on the kitchen table, then undressed, put duct tape over his eyes, and handcuffed himself to her bed. In the note were instructions that she was to go into her bedroom immediately and have sex with him because a man with a gun had kidnaped him and was waiting to kill yet another person if she refused. Instead, she ran to the police, and Dawson, who had left the key to his chains on the kitchen table, could not free himself before they arrived.
PEOPLE WITH NO LIVES OF THEIR OWN
- The San Francisco watchdog organization Consumer Action warned in January that adult 900 telephone services often defraud their customers by promising more explicit sexual conversation than they deliver: "Despite highly suggestive titles and pictures of half-naked women in many ads," wrote Consumer Action, "the services provided tame, non-sexual conversation."
- The week of April 26 thru May 2 was Sky Awareness Week in Pennsylvania. The sponsoring legislator said the week is intended to recognize all that goes on in the sky, including rain, wind, light, temperature, and the "interrelationship between phenomena in the sky and the Earth's landscape."
- Conceptual artist Linda M. Montano performed at the University of Texas for three nights in November by sitting on a sawhorse next to some campus horse statues from midnight to 7 AM.
She said she was fulfilling a wish she had as a child to run away to Texas and ride a horse while listening to Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier.
- Actress Melanie Griffith, 34, telling an interviewer about how her role as a Jewish secretary during WWII in the movie Shining Through opened her eyes: "I didn't know that 6 million Jews were killed. That's alot of people!"
- Last year, a Buena Vista Pictures production executive bowed to pressure from the Humane Association of Los Angeles and had a scene cut from a movie version of White Fang, in which a wolf attacked a man. Said a Humane Association executive, "I was very concerned about that [attack scene] being an anti-wolf statement."
- Magician Doug Henning, on announcing plans that he and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi were planning a 1,500 acre theme park near Niagara Falls, which would also emphasize "awakening human consciousness," explained to the New York Times why this theme park would be different than others: "Most theme parks are superficial."
GIVE ME A BREAK!!
- Dr. Samson Dubrin, 28, responding to evidence against him in the murder of a 20 year old woman in Vista, Calif, in March, told a judge that he had not chloroformed her into unconsciousness; rather, Dubrin said, she must have passed out when her car passed a chemical truck somewhere on the highway.
- Latest Reporter Claiming Immunity from Prostitution Arrest: Robert H. Wilds, 39, a TV reporter in Knoxville, pleaded no contest to soliciting a prostitute in November but said, "What was in my mind was [not to have sex but] to interview her for a story."
MON STUPID
- Robert Austin, 33, was suspected by Minneapolis police of being the "gorilla gunman" who robbed local retail stores in January while wearing a gorilla mask. Police got their biggest lead when a maskless Austin robbed the MGM liquor store Warehouse: Austin forced the clerk into the office to get money and only halfway through the robbery remembered to put the mask he was carrying on.
REAL WEIRD
- Elmwood Park, NJ, principal Samuel R. Bracigliano, 49, recently on trial for molesting teenage boys, repeatedly denied the charges in spite of mounting evidence. He denied that the extensive collection of pornography the police seized from his home was for his sexual pleasure, even though a jar of Vaseline was found with the materials, along with pieces of paper, discovered in videotape boxes, containing numbers which corresponded to the VCR counter numbers at the which sex scenes began. Bracigliano said he is a serious photographer of nudes and planned use nude Polaroids that police found of teenage boys for a display collage and to bring it to school as an example of his work. "I was doing my best work yet when I was arrested."
OUCH
- Georgina Thompson, 37, was charged in Wellington, Kansas, in March with soliciting two men to murder her common-law husband. Her promised payment was her husband's collection of baseball cards. The two men reported her to police and turned over the down payment she had made of 10 of the cards. Said the deputy sheriff about the offer of baseball cards, "That's about as mean as a wife can get. The only thing lower would have been if she offered his hunting and fishing gear."
