Weird News: Volume Six
TAKE THE FIFTH!!
- Bruce Damon, attempting to work a plea bargain in February to charges that he knocked off a bank in Whitman, Mass, argued to the judge that the eight to fifteen year term suggested by the prosecutor was way too long. First of all, Damon said, when he robbed a bank in 1987, he only got three to five years. Secondly, he said, citing an article from the Brockston Enterprise newspaper, the bank had enjoyed record earnings despite the robbery and expected to do well in 1992 also. Said Damon, "I didn't hurt this bank at all." When the judge asked Damon if he would rob banks again if he were free, Damon replied, "I'd like to plead the Fifth Amendment on that." The judge refused to accept the plea and scheduled Damon for trial.
DOES IT EVER END??
- Columbian garbage collector Oscar Hernandez claimed in March that he was kidnaped by security guards during the Carnival in Barranquilla and taken to a lab at the Free University of Barranquilla, where a syndicate planned to kill him for his body parts. A police investigation then turned up 11 bodies, and parts of 22 others, and a report that body bounty hunters received $200 per person. Police identified most of the victims as being garbage collectors.
- The International Amateur Athletics Federation recently changed its procedures to perform gender checks on female athletes. For 25 years, the Federation had used a chromosome smear test but decided late last year it will merely make visual inspections. The Federation explained that the chromosome test was "ethically unacceptable."
- The official Iran news agency announced in March that men who left the country before 1989, and feared returning home because they would be drafted, could buy a military exemption for about $16,000 (representing about 30 years work at the minimum wage in Iran). Officials promise that if a man pays and then volunteers to serve, he'll get his money back.
- A rush-hour traffic jam in Kansas City, Mo, in March caused when a truck carrying remaindered pornographic magazines to a recycling center overturned on a busy street. about 2,000 magazines were scattered about, and drivers stopped their cars to gather as many as they could before moving on.
- In February, a court in Versailles, France, overturned an order banning dwarf tossing, permitting 3'11" Manuel Wackenheim, 24, to return to work at the Eclipse nightclub in Morsang-sur- Orge, from which he had been banned by the mayor in October. Though the minister of the French Interior had called such exhibitions "an intolerable attack on human dignity," the government finally acquiesced because the ban would deny a "physically different" person a chance at a livelihood.
- An 81 year old woman died of severe burns in Columbia, Mo, in December, after a 15 mile ambulance ride took too long to save her life. The hospital's emergency helicopter was not made available because it was being used on a public relations assignment, with one of the crew members dressed as Santa Claus.
- The Manitoba, Canada, Natural Resources minister apologized in February when news got out that her government had saved $1,800 in postage by mailing a fishing survey through the US mails rather than through Canada's. Clerks had gone to Grand Forks, N.D. about 100 miles from the border, to mail the surveys to several thousand US anglers who use Manitoba waters.
MON STUPID
- Paul Gamboa Taylor pled guilty in December to murdering his wife and four others near York PA, six months earlier. He told police he had tried to take his own life five times before turning himself in. He had slashed both his wrists with a hacksaw; drunk lighter fluid; plunged a knife into his chest; filled a bathtub with water, hoping to pass out and drown; and brought a hair dryer into the tub with him. Said Taylor, "I love my family; that's why I plead guilty."
REAL WEIRD
- In April, Richard Dickinson, 25, was allowed out of prison in Hobart, Australia, on an evening pass with two chaperons, to attend a concert by his idol, Bob Dylan. Dickinson is in a prison for the criminally insane because in 1987 he stomped his mother to death to the tune of Dylan's song "One More Cup of Coffee for the Road," after she told him to turn down the music. He said he thought his mom was an evil character from the song and even sprinkled instant coffee over her body after she died.
GAME TIME!!
- Isbrain Marquez Pacheco, 53, was indicted in March for attempted murder of his wife of three weeks, in East Windsor, NJ. According to police, Pacheco said he beat her with a baseball bat after she refused his demand that she not attend a friend's baby shower. Said Pacheco, "If I had killed her, I would have no regret" because he was "offended by what she said to me."
