News of the Weird

-- Latest Ear Technology: In November, police in Independence Township, Mich., arrested a 45-year-old man and charged him with peeping into windows at the Clarkston Motor Inn, basing the arrest on the earprints he allegedly left on the windows. And one month later, in Vancouver, Wash., Judge Robert L. Harris ruled that the prosecutor could use an earprint found on the bedroom door of a murder victim in the trial of his suspected killer.

-- Actress Anya Pencheva announced in November a plan to divert her fellow Bulgarians' attention from grim economic problems: She would have a plaster cast made of her breasts, to display in the National Theater in Sofia. Said Pencheva, "It is a pity to focus everything on (budget cuts) when there are such beautiful breasts around."

-- According to a September report in Toronto's Globe and Mail, the University of Toronto's medical school employs actors and other people for $12 to $35 per hour to be practice patients for its students. Bob LeRoy, 45, commands the top pay because he is a rectal-exam patient. Said LeRoy, "I always hope the student with the biggest finger goes first."

-- The Wall Street Journal reported in September that about 100 "laughing clubs" had sprung up in India in the last year based on the philosophy of Dr. Madan Kataria, who says the ancient yoga breathing and laughing exercises can help people shed inhibitions, build self-confidence, stop smoking, alleviate high blood pressure and arthritis, and stop migraine headaches. After conventional stretching, adherents engage in silent laughs, out-loud laughs with their lips closed, and the roaring "Bombay laugh." Dr. Kataria worries only that some day the government might try to tax laughter.

-- Suicide Chic: A September story in London's Sunday Times described Venice, Italy, as a new trendy site for unhappy Europeans' and Americans' suicides, inspired by the movie "Death in Venice." (About 50 people attempted suicide in the past year; all but a half-dozen were unsuccessful, usually because the canals into which they leap are deceptively shallow.) And the San Francisco Examiner reported in September that 11 people in the previous 18 months had rented handguns at local gun ranges and killed themselves on the premises.

-- According to an August dispatch by Britain's Guardian News Service, the family of Chiang Kai-shek (the Chinese ruler who was chased out by the communists, to Taiwan, in 1949 and who died in 1975) is growing weary of the "temporary" storage of his skeleton in Taiwan, where it has been kept in preparation for its triumphant return to the mainland upon the fall of the communist government. According to practitioners of the art of feng-shui, the spirits are upset that the skeleton is kept in a box in the living room of the family estate instead of being buried in China.

-- Students rioting in August at South Korea's Yonsei University apparently found weapons in short supply and used whatever was available. When police finally quashed the protest, the geology department faculty discovered that about 10,000 rare rocks, collected over 30 years and considered irreplaceable, were missing. A few were recovered from the streets, chipped or broken.

-- In September, David Cook of Caledonian University (Glasgow, Scotland) told the British Psychological Society's annual conference that his three-year study shows that politicians have significant behavior patterns in common with criminal psychopaths. Cook said that criminals were relatively easy to analyze but that he did not have as much data as he would like on politicians: "(They) don't like to be studied."

-- In October, Miss Canada International, 20-year-old Danielle House, was removed from further competition after being charged in St. John's, Newfoundland, with punching out her ex-boyfriend's current girlfriend in a bar. Ms. House said she had been in counseling recently for "low self-esteem."

-- In Santa Fe, N.M., Christine Bodman announced in November that a group of massage therapists has formed the Massage Emergency Response Team to minister for free to stressed-out firefighters, police officers and paramedics.

-- Latest Bobbittizations: On the evening of November 17, Ms. Renu Begum, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Ms. Raquel Nair Lucio, in Tiete, Brazil, at about the same hour on the clock (but 10 time zones apart) severed their respective husbands' genitals in jealous rages.

-- In August, a federal judge in Springfield, Mo., dismissed the lawsuit of Jennifer Stocker Jessen, now 24, who had claimed that repressed memories of childhood abuse by her step-grandfather returned to her in 1988. The triggering mechanism, she said, was her hitting an opossum in the road with her car.

In September in East Orange, Vt., Christie's auction house sold almost $2 million worth of automobiles (including 33 Stutz Bearcats) that belonged to eccentrics A.K. Miller, who died at 87 a few years ago, and his wife, Imogene, who died in 1996. The couple left millions more in gold and silver and other valuables but lived like paupers, sometimes eating dog food or bread made of flour they had swept off the floor, sometimes shopping at yard sales, sometimes dressing in rags. As treasurer of his church, Mr. Miller had once refused to accept a small increase in electricity rates and converted the entire church to kerosene lamps. The Millers paid property taxes but no other ones, and the federal and state governments are now claiming $8.2 million.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (13) The gun expert who accidentally shoots himself while demonstrating safety techniques, as did Constable Randy Youngman, who took a shotgun blast in the leg while teaching a safety class in Medicine Hat, Alberta, in December. And (14) the periodic warnings about global warming caused by excessive methane production by flatulent livestock, as was announced in a European Commission strategy paper released in November in Brussels.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)

-- On Dec. 5, for the 17th consecutive year, hundreds of Thai men underwent free vasectomies to honor King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 69, on his birthday. The day-long festivities included free food and drink and a condom-inflating championship. The king has been praised by family-planning organizations for cutting Thailand's population growth rate by two-thirds over the last 25 years.

-- The Sanctity of Heterosexual Marriage: In September, Painesville, Ohio, judge Fred V. Skok issued a marriage license to Paul Smith and Debi Easterly, even though he was aware that Paul describes himself as a lesbian, usually dresses in women's clothes, and is on a three-year regimen toward a complete gender change. Judge Skok, mindful that he could not under Ohio law approve a female-female marriage, merely required a doctor's certificate that Paul currently still has male sex organs.

-- In the Tasmanian Supreme Court in November, Martin Bryant pleaded guilty to the April murders of 35 people at a tourist attraction in Port Arthur, Australia, but he couldn't stop laughing. Wrote the Associated Press, "Bryant laughed so much he had trouble saying the word 'guilty' and had to be hushed by his own lawyer." And convicted child molester Francis Robinson, 76, at a September bail hearing on a charge of sexual abuse of an infant in Markham, Ill., had to be admonished by the judge because he chuckled while prosecutors described how Robinson allegedly fondled the girl.

-- In October, a court in Kerrville, Texas, granted Darlie Router's request (she's on trial for the Susan Smith-like murder of her two small children) to have her hair done in jail at taxpayer expense. Router had convinced the judge that if she arrived for her trial with dark roots, the jurors might infer that the reason she hadn't taken care of her hair was because she is locked up, and thus they might not give her the presumption of innocence.

-- At an October retrial in Leeds, England, jurors took about an hour to acquit police officer Andrew Whitfield, 30, of stealing a calculator worth about $4. The cost of the trial, plus the original mistrial, plus keeping Whitfield on paid suspension for 14 months as required by law, was about $158,000.

-- In September, Barbara Monsky filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in Danbury, Conn., against local Superior Court Judge Howard J. Moraghan for permitting his dog to roam the courthouse, especially since Moraghan should know that the dog habitually sticks his snout under women's skirts and allegedly did so to Monsky. Monsky's attorney, Nancy Burton, said the dog had sniffed her, also. Burton analogized to the traditional "one free bite" rule for determining whether a dog is legally "vicious," arguing that Moraghan long ago knew that the dog had had his one free sniff.

-- Rodney L. Turner, 55, called his office on Oct. 2 in Kansas City, Kan., and said he wouldn't make it to work that day as a result of his 2 a.m. arrest for DUI that resulted in his detention until 5 a.m. Turner, a lawyer, is a part-time municipal judge and on Oct. 2 had been scheduled to hear a full day's docket of DUI cases.

-- At the trial in his racial harassment lawsuit against Pitney Bowes in Los Angeles in September, black salesman Akintunde I. Ogunleye testified that he had been addressed by one co-worker as "Akintunde, ooga-booga, jungle-jungle." The co-worker, who is of French-Canadian ancestry, later testified that he was misunderstood, that what he said was "Bonjour, bonjour." The jury awarded Akintunde $11.1 million.

-- In September, Roy T. Moore was convicted of exposing himself while seated in his car at a gas station in Goderich, Ontario, despite his explanation that what a witness saw was actually only a half-eaten cookie from a bag he was holding in his lap. The judge refused to admit the cookie as evidence but did allow Moore's lawyer to wield a tape measure to illustrate to the jury the size of the alleged cookie.

-- Philippines army logistics officer Brig. Gen. Rolando Espejo told a senate hearing in Manila in September that the 4,500 weapons captured in coups against then-President Corazon Aquino have been stolen from two armories and can never be recovered because all documents referring to them are missing. The general said the documents were all eaten by termites.

-- Orlando, Fla., Juvenile Court Judge Walter Komanski was caught by office workers making printouts of pornography in the courthouse in October and of keeping pornographic videos and magazines in an office cabinet. He said he kept them at work only because he had teen-age boys at home and that, as a responsible parent, he didn't want them to find his stash. Also, he said he had surfed Internet sex sites only to research how to restrict them from his kids. (He was reassigned to finance cases.)

-- According to a report in the Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star in November, a dog was briefly, though improperly, admitted to the local Kenan Auditorium with its owner to take in a performance of the opera The Barber of Seville. (The owner took the dog away after it started to bark.) Manager Don Hawley said one of his staff members had allowed the woman to bring the dog in after she said she was hearing-impaired and that the dog was a "hearing-ear dog." In retrospect, said Hawley, "That was silly."

-- Singer Stevie Nicks' lawyer told the Internal Revenue Service in November that the reason she spent (and tax-deducted) so much for clothing in 1991 was that she had to throw away each outfit after one use because of "the energy levels of her performances and the heat generated on stage from lights and physical exertion."

Imprisoned Kentucky child molester Lou Torok announced in July 1995 that he had persuaded the governors of six states to proclaim Oct. 7 of that year as "Love Day." Despite the attention that Torok's petition drew from News of the Weird and other news outlets at that time, Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton OK'd the "Love Day" designation again for Oct. 7, 1996 (though he later said he should not have). Torok complained that America is "not a forgiving country" and said that he is "in a cesspool of negativism" (in prison) and is just "trying to make the world a little better."

SOUNDS LIKE A PRETTY SEVERE CALCIUM AND IRON DEFICIENCY

In Lamar, Mo., a pre-trial hearing took place in February on Joyce Lehr's lawsuit against the county for injuries suffered in a 1993 fall in the icy, unplowed parking lot of the local high school. The Carthage Press reported that Lehr claimed injuries to nearly every single part of her body. According to her petition: "All the bones, organs, muscles, tendons, tissues, nerves, veins, arteries, ligaments ... discs, cartilages, and the joints of her body were fractured, broken, ruptured, punctured, compressed, dislocated, separated, bruised, contused, narrowed, abrased, lacerated, burned, cut, torn, wrenched, swollen, strained, sprained, inflamed and infected."

-- In January in Fremont, Calif., a carjacker described as 5-foot-8, about 170 pounds, yanked Cecilia Laus, 54, out of her car and drove off, leaving the woman shaken and also bewildered, since the car in question was a 1976 AMC Pacer.

-- Willie King, 37, was arrested moments after he had allegedly mugged a 94-year-old woman in a housecoat just outside her front door in New York's Greenwich Village in July. The woman is the mother of Vincent "Chin" Gigante, the reputed godfather of the Genovese crime family. (At press time, amazingly, King is still alive.)

In January, The Wall Street Journal reported on the growing fetish surrounding the act of smoking. As examples: (1) An erotic smoking video from an Oklahoma City firm, CoherentLight, described by the Journal: "The scene opens with a young blonde (Paula), dressed in a shimmering strapless gown and a veiled black hat, lighting her cigarette from a nearby candle. She takes numerous long drags." (2) A smokers' newsletter, with film reviews: Of the above video, it wrote, "(Paula) is a fabulous smoker." Another review, of the Hollywood movie "Mad Love": "Drew Barrymore smokes throughout; there are many deep inhales, although the exhales aren't great." (3) The fetish magazine Leg Show has begun to include pictorials of women smoking.

Houston police arrested a 46-year-old man in February and charged him with molesting his 12-year-old granddaughter. Police officers and social workers suspect that the man is not only the father of the girl's mother but of the girl, too, and, noting that the granddaughter is five months' pregnant, also suspect he is the father of what would be his own great-granddaughter. (The suspect denied all accusations.)

Several sexual service-providers ran for public office in 1996, but none was elected. Ex-prostitute Jessi Winchester, 53, lost her race for Congress from Nevada's 2nd District. Mistress Madison, 32, a San Diego dominatrix who operates the Slave Cave and runs a phone-sex service, ran unsuccessfully for Congress under the banner of Ross Perot's Reform Party. And Margo St. James finished barely out of the running in the balloting for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Acting on the complaint of a 59-year-old female motorist in Bloomington, Minn., in January, police stopped a driver whom she said had pulled alongside her on the highway on a bitterly cold morning and flashed her by pressing a nude photograph of himself against his window.

-- The village council of Bruntingthorpe, England, began consideration in February of one member's elaborate plan to reduce the amount of dog poop in the town of 200 people (and 30 dogs): The village would DNA-test the dogs and keep the results on file for the purpose of matching the DNA to that in any unscooped dog poop lying around the village, so as to punish the appropriate owners.

-- In March an 18-year-old dockworker at Roadway Express in Dallas was arrested at a local Western Union and charged with forgery after improperly trying to cash a check made out to his employer. The man produced a photo ID that gave his name as Mr. "Roadway V. Express." After questioning him, the Western Union manager said, "OK, Mr. Express, I'll be right back (with the money)" and then called police.

-- In April the Iowa Supreme Court turned down inmate Kirk Livingood's attempt to sue Phillip Negrete based on the state's domestic abuse law. Negrete is Livingood's cellmate and, according to Livingood, beats and torments him.

-- In July, Jason Harte pleaded guilty to smashing glass doors in a New York City building with a slingshot. He is a principal in the Adam Glass Co. of Yonkers, N.Y., and is suspected by police of breaking hundreds of other windows in order to elicit business.

-- In a federal court in Boston in July, Phillip W. Cappella, 34, was sentenced to two years' probation for tax fraud. After winning the Massachusetts Megabucks lottery, Cappella attempted to evade income tax on the first of his $135,000 annual payments by falsely claiming gambling losses to offset the income. When faced with an IRS audit, Cappella paid a lottery-ticket collector $500 to rent him a pickup-truck-load of 100,000 old, losing tickets that he tried to pass off as his own.

-- The Floyd County (Ky.) coroner complained in February that ambulance drivers were taking obviously dead people to the hospital just so they could bill the county for the rides. One man was rushed to the hospital even though his suicide shotgun blast was so powerful that it blew both eyeballs out of their sockets. Another had been dead so long that rigor mortis had commenced, leaving the body bent at the waist so that it would not fit on a stretcher, but the driver said he thought he felt a pulse.

According to a Seattle Times feature in March, Robert Shields, 77, of Dayton, Wash., is the author of perhaps the longest personal diary in history -- nearly 38 million words on paper stored in 81 cardboard boxes -- covering his last 24 years in five-minute segments. Example: July 25, 1993, 7 a.m.: "I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin." 7:05 a.m.: "Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used 5 sheets of paper."

The hog-farming Fox family of Mahaska County, Iowa, which for 10 years has been selling vials of boar semen for artificially inseminating sows, expanded its operation in January to include a drive-through window for farmers in a hurry. Said Genette Fox, of the playfulness of customers, "'(O)rder of semen and fries' -- I've heard that a million times."

Western Kentucky University student Joe Schmidt, asked by the school newspaper whether Magic Johnson's return to pro basketball in February would put other players at risk: "It would be an honor to get HIV from playing Magic Johnson on an NBA court. He's one of the greats."

In March, two convicted rapists, Allan Wayne McLaurin and Darron Bennalford Anderson, were resentenced by a jury in Tulsa, Okla., after an appeals court said their original sentences totaling 6,475 years were based on faulty jury instructions. This time, the jury said the crimes were worth an additional 260 centuries in prison -- a total of 21,250 years for McLaurin and 11,250 for Anderson.

In January, Steven Hicks, 38, and Diana Hicks, 35, were sentenced to six months in jail in Cape May, N.J., for child abandonment. While their unruly son, Christopher, 13, was hospitalized, the couple had surreptitiously packed up and moved to Inglewood, Calif.

In March, Palestinian terrorist Youssef Magied al-Molqi, who was convicted in Italy in 1986 for the Achille Lauro hijacking and the murder of an American passenger, was given a 12-day leave for good behavior and failed to return. In August, Germano Maccari, freshly convicted of the 1978 murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, was released from jail pending his appeal, as is customary under Italian law. In September, Italy's highest appeals court ruled that "occasional episodes of wife-beating," "interspersed with moments of (marital) harmony," did not amount to illegal domestic violence, which it said requires "systematic and deliberate" overpowering.

Almost 600 delegates from 17 countries attended the first World Conference on Auto-Urine (i.e. your own) Therapy held in Goa, India, in February. Adherents of the 5,000-year-old therapy claim that urine's hormones, enzymes, vitamins and minerals are so rich that urine can cure illnesses such as tuberculosis and cancer.

Featured at the Donn Roll Contemporary Museum in Sarasota, Fla., in May and June was Charon Luebbers' Menstrual Hut, a 6-by-6-by-5-foot isolation booth to symbolize the loneliness that society has forced upon menstruating women. Accompanying it were 28 canvasses created by Luebbers' pressing her face into whatever discharge was present in each of the 28 days of her cycle one month, to show the contrast.

Two Fremont, Calif., men obtained a patent early in the year for a golf club that will fire a ball up to 250 yards by an explosive charge in the club head. (The club is not expected to be approved for tournament play.) And in April, a Houston man obtained a patent for a cup that goes inside a golf hole and periscopes up after the ball goes in so that the golfer does not have to bend down to retrieve it.

Criminal suspects in 1996 seemed to be better organized than previous years' perps, judging from the numerous "to-do" lists that police are discovering. For example, two escapees from Rutland, Vt., were captured in May with a list to guide them in an imminent robbery. A 15-year-old boy was indicted for murder in Dallas in May, and evidence against him was a list that included the reminder to kill the victim. In September, former Navy Ensign Dana R. Collins, 35, was convicted of the murder of a colleague after police found a list that included "Take him out," "Cut him up/take head/fingers and toes," "Put him in 2 bags," and "Drive body to Pennsylvania. Keep head and fingers and toes -- scatter on way back." Charinassa Fairley was charged in July with killing her husband in Baton Rouge, La., after police found a step-by-step checklist: "Make a prank call to him; offer food and love; make him take a bath with you. Put on gloves" and "Make love like never before for the last time. Lay down after he falls asleep. Pop him."

In April, Nevada County (Calif.) judicial candidate Robert Litchfield, attempting to rectify his low standing among local lawyers, offered to kneel and wash the feet of any lawyer in the county as a gesture of his desire to serve them. Said Litchfield, "What I (offered) was an act of faith, and I don't think that's something a news reporter can understand." At the scheduled washing, Litchfield showed up with a basin and towel, but no lawyer came forth.

In May, Stanford University won the right, over the University of California at Berkeley, to house the literary legacy of the late Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning writer William Saroyan, apparently because it also agreed to take custody of Saroyan's nonliterary property, which included hundreds of boxes of rocks, matchbook covers, old newspapers (numbering in the thousands), labels peeled off cans, and a plastic bag filled with about 10,000 rubber bands.

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.

An increasing number of vicious criminals with the middle name of Wayne made the news in 1996. For example, Conan Wayne Hale, 20, a triple-homicide suspect who allegedly confessed to a priest in Portland, Ore., was embroiled in a constitutional court fight to have the confession ruled inadmissible. Escaped murderer Michael Wayne Thompson was recaptured in July near Farmersburg, Ind. A few days later, Danny Wayne Owens, 38, was arrested in Birmingham, Ala., for allegedly murdering a neighbor. In November, Georgia executed Ellis Wayne Felker for the 1981 murder of a college student. Also in November, the suspected rapist of a 12-year-old girl in Petaluma, Calif. (two miles from where Polly Klaas was abducted in 1993), Larry Wayne Cole, apparently died of natural causes while on the lam. And in October, the Oregon Parole Board turned down the latest bid by Richard Wayne Godwin, serving a life sentence for a 1979 rape and murder.

Police in Toronto, Ontario, arrested a 62-year-old retired schoolteacher in September for allegedly videotaping under the skirts of about 30 women via a pinpoint-sized lens protruding from the toe of his shoe, connected by wires to a camera hidden in his waist pouch.

In May, Quebec legislator Andre Boulerice denounced voter fraud during a committee meeting, citing one particular example of bogus names registered to vote in Old Montreal. "I know there are famous people in my (district)," said Boulerice, "but I doubt 'Omar Sharif' would be voting (here)," especially since, according to voter records, he shares an apartment with "Martina Navratilova." The next day, neighbors of the couple reported, Sharif, son of the actor, is indeed married to a stockbroker named Martina Navratilova.

The London insurance brokerage Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson announced in August it would begin to offer policies to cover people worried about alien abduction. A premium of about $155 a year would pay about $160,000 to an abductee (provided the abductor was not from Earth) and double that if the insured is impregnated during the abduction. Since alien powers are unknown, men can purchase the impregnation rider, also. Said Goodfellow director Simon Burgess, "I personally would not buy (this) policy."

Postal worker Douglas C. Yee, 50, was indicted in February in San Mateo, Calif., for pulling off bulk-mail scams totaling $800,000. Found in Yee's garbage were notes he had written to God expressing gratitude for His continued help in evading police. Read one, "Lord, I am having a difficult time myself seeing you as a God who hides crime, yet your Word says that it's your privilege (or glory) to do just that."

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)