News of the Weird

-- In January, Jack Petelui, 43, claiming to hear God, stripped down to his underwear, climbed the ornate facade of the Ansonia Hotel in New York City, resisted police efforts for more than an hour to talk him down, and finally jumped. Cynical New Yorkers were said to be astonished at the dozens of bystanders who were actually yelling, "Don't jump!" (Petelui was spared serious injury when he landed on a police department rescue airbag.)

-- Life Imitates Crime Movies: In January, six inmates, including two convicted murderers, tunneled out of the maximum security state prison in Pittsburgh, 15 feet below ground, using tools from the prison machine shop. And in January, the Banco Credito Argentino in Buenos Aires was robbed of about $25 million by a gang that had made a 165-foot-long tunnel under a street over the previous several months. It was Buenos Aires' 55th tunnel-related bank robbery since 1990.

-- Police in Allentown, Pa., discovered in September that a man who was recently arrested at the bus station with 280 small bags of heroin in his luggage had chewed off the skin of seven fingertips after being jailed. Said a police sergeant, "It certainly is a strong indication that somebody somewhere is looking for him."

-- Armed and Dangerous: A man robbed a variety store in Guelph, Ontario, in December wielding only a 3-foot-long tree branch. And in Columbia, Mo., in December, Eric O. Criss, 31, fortified only with a socket wrench, failed in his alleged attempt to rob a grocery store. And in Calgary, Alberta, in December, a man brandishing only a bottle of household cleaner robbed a Bank of Nova Scotia.

-- A 21-year-old, allegedly intoxicated man was spotted by police on an Austin, Minn., street in January urinating on a car but was let go with a warning when he persuaded police it was his own car. A few minutes later police returned and arrested the man for DUI, having figured out that he was urinating on the car's door lock to melt the ice so that he could get in and drive away.

-- Roger Augusto Sosa, 23, was charged with burglary early on Christmas morning in Chevy Chase, Md. Scott Kane and his wife had heard a prowler in the house and called 911. Despite the clamor of several squad cars arriving and seven officers rushing into the living room with guns drawn, Sosa by that time reportedly was seated under the tree, blissfully opening the Kanes' presents.

-- In October in Great Falls, Mont., Tina Rae Beavers, 19, was arrested on the lawn separating the jail and the courthouse and charged with indecent exposure. According to a sheriff's deputy, she was energetically complying with her jailed husband's request to remove her clothes, lie down in the grass, and make suggestive movements so that he could see her from his cell window.

-- Slaves to Love: In December in Hong Kong, Yuen Sai-wa, 33, pleaded guilty to bank robbery but said the only reason he did it was that he felt challenged to keep his girlfriend, who was about to leave him. And in San Diego in January, Michael William Smith, 26, and Danny Mayes, 20, were charged with arson for fires they said they set at the behest of Tammy Jo Garcia, 27, who, they said, became sexually aroused by the fires, to their benefit. (She was also charged.)

-- 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.

-- Helen Stanwell, a 23-year-veteran park ranger in Seattle, was suspended for six days in November because she worked after hours without pay to help a historical society member look for a local site. (It is illegal in Washington to work more than 40 hours without claiming overtime.) And in January, Wallingford, Conn., city employee Millie Wood, 72, was suspended for one day because she voluntarily trimmed the town's Christmas tree during Thanksgiving holiday. (It is illegal to be in the building after hours.)

-- In March Amy Howe, 25, was the victim of a hit-and-run driver in Washington, D.C., and suffered a broken leg. Three witnesses immediately supplied police with the car's tag number, and shortly afterward Howe's husband used public records to identify for police the car that was assigned that tag. In September 1996, upon inquiry by the Washington Post, a police spokesman said that despite having the pertinent information virtually handed to it, the department was only then almost ready to begin its investigation.

-- In October, the Associated Press uncovered several military construction projects that continued to be fully funded by the Pentagon long after the facilities on which they are housed had been designated for permanent closing. Included were a $5 million Navy chapel in San Diego, a $3 million Army classroom building near Chicago, a $13 million Navy dining hall in Orlando, and a $5 million Air Force fire station and training facility in Indianapolis. Said a Navy spokesman in San Diego, "(The taxpayers) are going to have to pay for it anyway, so why not complete (it)?"

-- The town of Colma, Calif., just south of San Francisco, has a population of 1,000 in an area of about 2.2 square miles, but three-fourths of the land consists of cemeteries in which a million people are buried. In October, citizen Robert Simcox announced he would gather signatures to secure a ballot referendum for 1997 that would impose a municipal tax on the dead, in the form of a levy on cemetery owners of $5 per grave per year.

In August 1996, News of the Weird reported on a group of New York City police officers who had availed themselves of expensive and hokey tax-resistance kits that would allow them to be regarded as nontaxable aliens while still being law-enforcement officers. Six subsequently pleaded guilty, but in January 1997, in the first case to go to trial, Officer Adalberto Miranda testified that he owed no tax because New York was merely a geographic area, not a government entity, and a short ways into his testimony, Miranda took it upon himself to disqualify Federal Judge Denny Chin because Chin seemed "upset," and then to "arrest" Chin from the witness stand and to give Chin his "Miranda (no relation) warning."

(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.)

-- Japanese researchers at Tokyo University and Tsukuba University said they will begin in February testing a project to surgically implant microprocessors and electrode sets, and eventually microcameras, into American cockroaches for a variety of possible missions, including espionage surveillance and searching for victims in earthquake rubble. The equipment, which can also receive remote-control signals to command the cockroach's movements, weighs a 10th of an ounce, twice a typical roach's weight but still only a 10th of what it potentially can carry.

-- In December, the Idaho High School Activities Association rejected a proposal by the superintendent of public instruction for extracurricular firearms competition in junior high schools. But in January in neighboring Wyoming, a House committee approved a bill that would lower the minimum age for big-game hunters to 12.

-- The New York Times reported in January that the Taliban movement in Afghanistan is presiding over such a bankrupt economy that a viable career field now has men (women are forbidden to work at all) raiding cemeteries of human bones, which are then sold to dealers in Pakistan as animal bones to be fashioned into cooking oil, soap, chicken feed and buttons. Skulls must first be broken up to preserve the ruse that only animal bones are involved.

-- Recent Inappropriate Nudity: In September, dozens of schoolteachers from the state of Bihar stripped in front of the Indian parliament to protest low wages. And the Defense Intelligence Agency, in a memo disclosed by The Washington Post in October, reported the emergence of a Liberian leader known as "General 'Butt Naked,'" "from his propensity for fighting naked," which he "probably believes terrorizes the enemy and brings good luck." And Meaux, France, high school philosophy teacher Bernard Defrance was suspended in January for his pedagogical game in which he removes an article of clothing each time a student stumps him with a riddle (sometimes losing everything).

-- In a July soccer game in Tripoli, Libya, a team sponsored by the eldest son of Moammar Gadhafi suffered a questionable referee's call and began beating the official and the other team. After spectators jeered, Gadhafi and his bodyguards opened fire on them, and some spectators shot back. The death toll was somewhere between eight and 50, including the referee, and Moammar Gadhafi declared a period of mourning, the hallmark of which was that Libyan TV was to be in black and white only.

-- Role Model Gains: In October, Marcia Fann, 37, won the prestigious Bass'n Gal Classic Star XX bass-fishing tournament in Athens, Texas. Fann cheerfully discloses that she was formerly a man, having been surgically changed sometime in the 1980s.

-- In December, the entire 300-man paramilitary police force of the 83-island, South Pacific nation of Vanuatu was arrested for kidnapping a visiting Australian official in order to increase its leverage in an overtime-pay dispute with the government. The force had been suspended in November for kidnapping Vanuatu's deputy prime minister for the same purpose, and in October, several members of the force had kidnapped Vanuatu's president and held him for almost a day before releasing him because of the populace's seeming indifference.

-- A July Wall Street Journal story reported that the city jail (capacity 134) in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Wash., does a brisk business charging petty criminals from around the state $64 a day to serve their sentences of up to 40 days in comfortable settings. Reservations are recommended, and the policy is cash only.

-- A United Nations spokesman in Sarajevo disclosed in November a recent marital quarrel that escalated out of control "in classic Bosnian style" and reflected the war-saturated quality of life. During an argument, the wife of Pero Toljij fled to a neighbor's home, but Toljij chased her with a bazooka he happened to have on hand, fired at her, missed, and hit the couple's own house. He was arrested.

-- In October in Massapequa Park, N.Y., four men, ages 19 to 21, intending to follow a recipe in the Underground Steroid Handbook, failed to wait patiently until the Drano-like concoction had reached a satisfactory pH level to make it milder. The four were hospitalized with bad internal burns, and the concoction also burned rescuing police officers when the four men vomited on them.

-- In November in Santa Maria, Texas, Luis Martinez Jr., 25, was stabbed in the neck with a broken bottle by his uncle, allegedly to punish Martinez for not sharing his bag of Frito's. In October a 20-year-old man was hospitalized in Guthrie, Okla., after encouraging his friend, Jason Heck, to kill a millipede with a .22-caliber rifle; after two ricochets, Heck's bullet hit the man just above his right eye, fracturing his skull.

-- Phillip Johnson, 32, was hospitalized in Prestonburg, Ky., in December with a gunshot wound just above his left nipple, which he inflicted upon himself because, as he told paramedics, he wanted to see what it felt like. When the paramedics arrived, said the sheriff, they found him "screaming about the pain, over and over."

David S. Peterson filed a lawsuit against New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson in August for racketeering, seeking three times the sum of money that Peterson had given his girlfriend to buy him clothes but which she had lost gambling at an Indian tribal casino. Peterson said Gov. Johnson was so much a supporter of the Indian gaming industry that it was his fault Peterson was out the money.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (15) The burglar with poor planning skills who attempts to enter a building after hours through a chimney or vent and gets stuck, as Baltimore police say Dwayne Terry, 33, did at a convenience store on Christmas morning. And (16) certainly the thousands of times a year (about 50 in the past year in Fremont, Calif., alone) that trial-bound defendants and others cheerfully place their belongings on the X-ray machines at the entrances of courthouses, only to have their illegal drugs detected.

(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.)

-- In December, McDonald's opened restaurants in its 100th country, Belarus, amid about 4,000 eager customers and 500 protestors, and a few days later, in its 101st, Tahiti. According to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, no two countries with McDonald's restaurants have ever gone to war against each other -- because, as Friedman theorizes, countries prosperous enough to support a McDonald's are surely stable enough to resist most provocations.

-- Texas A&M student Jonathan Culpepper and his fraternity, Kappa Alpha, were indicted in College Station, Texas, in December on a criminal hazing charge because of a severe "wedgie." The grand jury found that fraternity members lifted a candidate, unnamed in news reports, off his feet by the waistband of his briefs, causing the man to require the surgical removal of a testicle.

-- The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported in December that a female inmate at the Yell County Jail in Dardanelle had been receiving regular shipments of methamphetamines via Federal Express. Jail officials had finally become suspicious and obtained the necessary search warrant to check her frequent deliveries.

-- During the Christmas Handicap race at a track in Melbourne, Australia, the horse Cogitate threw its rider and bumped the horse Hon Kwok Star, sending Hon's jockey, apprentice Andrew Payne, into the air. To break his fall, Payne grabbed the neck of Cogitate and then climbed into the stirrups and rode that horse across the finish line (though the official records would show that both horses were disqualified).

-- The Miami Herald reported in September that David McAllister, 77 and blind, a nursing-home invalid in North Miami Beach, Fla., receives daily visits from Chris Carrier, 32, who reads to McAllister from the Bible. Their only previous relationship occurred during a few days in December 1974, when McAllister kidnapped young Carrier at a bus stop and left him for dead in the Everglades with cigarette burns on his body, ice-pick holes in one eye, and a gunshot wound that left him blind in the other eye. Said Carrier, "I don't stare at my ... potential murderer. I stare at a man, very old, very alone and scared."

-- In November, ballroom dancing champion Michael Keith Withers was convicted in Perth, Australia, of the attempted 1994 murder of his wife/dance partner, Stacey Larson. He had said it was an accident, but the jury found that he had doused her with gasoline (set aside to use in a Whipper Snapper lawn trimmer he had borrowed from a neighbor) and set her afire, burning 70 percent of her body. Larson testified that she had not seen Withers since the incident, but under cross-examination finally admitted that she had slept with him 15 times since then, and another witness said Larson had bought Withers Christmas gifts in 1995, including his very own Whipper Snapper.

-- Results of a University of Minnesota study, announced in July and pertinent to the dispute between large animal feedlots and their neighbors who object to the smell, showed that home values nearer the feedlots were higher than those farther away. (No explanation was given by researchers, but some experts interviewed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune said increased employment opportunities at feedlots had driven up demand for housing.)

-- A 1985 lease fixed the annual rent the U.S. pays for its Moscow embassy at 72,500 rubles. That was worth about $60,000 at the time, but now with nine years to go on the lease, the devaluation of the ruble has reduced the rent to the equivalent of $22.56 a year. In August, the Russian government stepped up its demands to renegotiate, but the U.S. continues to resist.

-- The New York Times reported in December on a Jordanian company that employs veiled Palestinian women stitching together women's exotic underpants for Victoria's Secret stores and catalogs. Adding to the irony is that the products, which in 1997 will also include brassieres, are sold with a "Made in Israel" label in order to take advantage of Israel's favorable trade status with the U.S.

-- In December, Frederick Lundy was to report for a court hearing in Akron, Ohio, in which he had been told: Plead not guilty to a parole violation and be released until trial, or plead guilty and go to jail immediately. Lundy pleaded guilty and was abruptly led away. That decision could be explained, perhaps, by Lundy's desire to get on with his punishment. What was not explained was why he had come into the courtroom under the circumstances with 41 rocks of crack cocaine in his pocket, which were discovered in a routine, pre-incarceration search.

-- In November at the Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, Anthony Valencia and Fitzgerald Vandever, both age 20, were arrested and accused of roaming the Intensive Care Unit, looking to steal patients' food off warming carts. (Said a hospital spokeswoman, "Actually, we've got some pretty good (food) down there.")

-- In December in London, the first fraud cases against the parent company of Hoover vacuum cleaners went to trial, four years after the company's disastrous giveaway campaign in which it promised two free air fares with all vacuum cleaners, which retailed for as little as about $165 in Great Britain. The company sold more than a half million units during the campaign and has so far paid out about $72 million in airline tickets to about a third of the purchasers.

In 1995 News of the Weird listed four cities in which entrepreneurs had begun businesses to fly couples around for an hour so that they could have sexual intercourse while airborne. In December 1996 several homeowners near Van Nuys (Calif.) Airport complained vociferously to the Los Angeles Daily News that one of the four, Mile High Adventures (whose flights now start at $429), flies so frequently and low that they are extremely irritating. Said one homeowner, "What people do in their own bedroom is their business. What they do over our heads is the community's business."

In January, disbarred Parsonburg, Md., lawyer Paul Bailey Taylor, 61, finally snapped after years of erratic behavior and barricaded himself inside a church, armed with a rifle, for five hours before police convinced him to surrender. When he was working, Taylor ran his law practice from the bathroom of his unheated rural trailer, where he had set up a desk over the toilet so that he could sit for long periods of time because of an intestinal disorder. A social worker once described the place as "clean," in that Taylor's 12 cats were neatly housed in cardboard boxes and his legal papers were filed in an orderly fashion in the bathtub.

(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.)