News of the Weird

-- In March, Rogers, Ark., software developer Rick Bray introduced his TVGuardian sound monitor, which silences offensive words in television dialogue and prints tamer substitutes as captions on the screen. Bray expanded George Carlin's "seven words you can't say" to about 100, and says his device can analyze surrounding dialogue so that, for example, "God" will be muted only when used irreverently. (An earlier version of the software captioned "Dick Van Dyke" as "jerk Van gay.")

-- Serious Grudges: In Sissonville, W.Va., in March, Darrell Carpenter drove a front-end loader through his two-story house, flattening it, rather than honor a court order to sell the house and split the profits with his estranged wife. The next day, in Sayville, N.Y., Richard Hellenschmidt, 45, who owed the title to his 35-foot boat to a bail bond company, blew the boat up by igniting propane fumes, rather than surrender it.

-- 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.

-- Two more houses were revealed in March to be public-health problems because owners had allowed cat-breeding to get out of hand. Fifty-four cats were found in a house in a neighborhood of semi-luxury homes in Tarpon Springs, Fla., and 34 were found in an Edmonton, Alberta, house whose owner insisted, "There is no smell. The neighbors are simply neurotic." Meanwhile, authorities in Vietnam said they are being overrun with rats (despite having exterminated 55 million last year) and blame the problem on the number of cats being taken out of circulation as food delicacies bound for China.

-- Movie producer Warren Weideman announced in February that his company would make a crime-and-intrigue adventure film for the Showtime cable channel based on the work of U.S. Postal Service inspectors and said he hopes it will improve the Postal Service's reputation. Several years ago, Weideman worked for USPS scanning movie scripts, trying to find places to insert positive images of the Postal Service and admitted there were "not that many."

-- In February, police in Corpus Christi, Texas, said they planned to charge a 34-year-old man in a spree of gumball machine thefts. They were tipped by the suspect's landlord, who said the man paid his weekly rent in quarters and that when he went to collect one week, he saw a huge pile of Jawbreakers on the floor. And Charles James Harding, 31, was arrested in January in Bountiful, Utah, and charged with stealing as much as $250,000 a year from vending machines (including some in the lobbies of police departments). Police had gone to a house seeking another man on a drug charge, but Harding was there, too, along with a large box of quarters whose existence neither man could adequately explain.

The Sleepwalking Defense to homicide finally made its way to the United States in February after having achieved success in a famous case in Canada 10 years ago. Phoenix 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 February, Houston City Councilman Rob Todd sent the vice squad to investigate Myrtle Freeman's Condoms & More shop, but they turned up no violations. Frustrated, Todd, noting that the novelty inventory included chocolate lollipops shaped like breasts and items like "edible panties," then sent the health department in to close the store for not having a license to serve pre-packaged food. To avoid closing, the condom store chose to discontinue its grocery section.

-- In October, the town of Morris, Ala., came within a few days of having the IRS commandeer its assets to satisfy a $60,000 back-tax bill, but it came up with the money by mortgaging City Hall. To solve a similar problem, Mayor Zenon Chica of El Palme, Peru, proposed in March to auction off City Hall altogether and had lined up four bidders willing to start at about $350,000.

-- 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.

-- The Horror of Barking Fish: The new pet nuisance code adopted in January by the city council of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., permits a maximum of four pets, except that five is permissible if none weighs more than 10 pounds, and 10 is permissible if none weighs more than one pound, and 25 is permissible (no more) if they are all fish.

-- In Pittsburgh 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 a 1993 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 Beat Goes On in Texas: Donald Wayne Martin killed his wife, two stepchildren and himself in January. Michael Wayne Hall and another white supremacist were arrested in February in the killing of a woman. And faring better was Wesley Wayne Miller, who was finally approved for imminent parole after serving 16 years for the murder of a woman.

-- 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.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@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 March, trial began in Lesli Szabo's $1.7 million lawsuit against a Hamilton, Ontario, hospital for not making her 1993 childbirth pain-free. Physicians said that painless childbirth cannot be achieved without the anesthesia's endangering the child, but Szabo said she expected enough comfort to be able to read or knit while the child was being delivered. She admitted to previous run-ins with physicians, explaining, "When I'm in pain, the (words) that come out of my mouth would curl your hair." After five days of trial, the parties reached an undisclosed settlement.

-- David Samarzia, 44, who won a $650,000 judgment against the Redeemer Lutheran Church in Duluth, Minn., as damages for being molested as a kid by former pastor Daniel Reeb, told reporters in February that since the church cannot pay the judgment, he most likely would take over the house of worship himself as payment and turn it into a place to help other sex abuse victims.

-- Following the August death of 122-year-old French woman Jeanne Calment, Canadian Marie-Louise Febronie Meilleur, 116, was named by the Guinness Book of Records as the world's oldest person. In an interview with the Associated Press on that occasion, Meilleur said her hobby was finding a girlfriend for her 81-year-old son at the nursing home where they both reside.

-- In November, Howard and Jean Garber of Anaheim Hills, Calif., announced that in spring 1998 they would have a grandchild despite their daughter Julie's having passed away a year earlier at age 28 from leukemia. Julie had harvested 12 eggs before undergoing radiation treatment, and after her death, her parents selected a father and surrogate mother, who announced on Thanksgiving Day that she was pregnant.

-- While locked up in the Kerr County (Texas) jail in November, burglar Bill Wells, 40, met up with burglar Corey Hillger, 22, for the first time in about 22 years. Hillger is Wells' son. And in October near New Orleans, according to sheriff's deputies, George Francois, 72 and drunk, slammed his car into a vehicle driven by another drunken driver, his son, Roland Francois, 35. Both were hospitalized.

-- In January in Union Township, N.J., Phyllis Klingebiel, who said she had always had a "close and loving relationship" with her adult son, Michael, filed a lawsuit against him after he refused to share the winnings on an October Pick 6 lottery ticket that paid $2 million. According to Phyllis, the two had pooled $20 a month each for tickets for more than 10 years, and Michael had called her after the winning ticket was announced to say that "we" had won, but then the next day, he called his mom back to say that the winning ticket happened to be one that he had bought on his own.

-- At his trial in Fort Worth, Texas, in January, William Lee Monroe, 28, admitted he stole a gas stove from an apartment but denied responsibility for the resulting ruptured gas line, explosion and fire that sent two people to the hospital and injured three others. According to his lawyer, Monroe is too dumb to know that an open gas line is dangerous. "Stupid is as stupid does," said the lawyer. (Guilty anyway, said the jury.)

-- Two days after Arthur Downey's arrest in Phoenix in October, during a drug bust in which an 8-year-old boy was detained as Downey's runner, Downey (whose age was not given but who is at least in his 20s) told the Arizona Republic newspaper that, actually, the boy was the boss and that he, Downey, was the runner.

-- John Kieser, 45, was convicted in Philadelphia in January of carrying a weapon on an airliner. While a passenger on a US Airways flight in August 1997, Kieser had uttered the word "hijack," which is illegal to do, but protested later that he was just responding to someone who had addressed him by saying, "Hi, Jack." A search of his carry-on bag revealed a flare gun and 17 fire-starting flares.

-- In November, the police chief of New Haven, Conn., explaining why $23,000 was missing from the police evidence room following an investigation into illegal gambling, said in a report that the money must have accidentally fallen into a garbage can and been thrown out. And Wells Fargo armored-car personnel David Faircloth and Steven Stepp reported that $209,000 missing from their truck in Research Triangle Park, N.C., in December must have accidentally fallen out the open back door and that they don't know what happened to it.

-- According to a December report in PC Week magazine on the recent Comdex computer convention, the exhibitor Prescient Systems installed its new Gotcha video surveillance software to record the construction of its convention booth, as a tool to help sell the software once the convention opened. During the night following the installation, two convention-hall guards, unaware that Gotcha was operating, broke into the Prescient booth and stole two boxes of Pentium chips. The guards were identified on Gotcha's digital tape and arrested the next day.

-- People Who Should Have Kept a Lower Profile: Daniel Thorn, St. John, New Brunswick, on the lam for parole violation, was arrested at a Toronto Blue Jays game in September when he happened to take a seat a few feet away from his parole officer. And Steve Graves, Phoenix, behind in child-support payments, inadvertently revealed his whereabouts to his wife when he got his picture in the newspaper in November for publicly handing in $23,000 that he found on the street. And Neil Ramirez, also behind with child support and moonlighting behind a beard as Santa Claus in December in Brooklyn, N.Y., saw his unwitting toddler-daughter wander up to his lap. The kid recognized him and yelled, "Daddy is Santa!" at which point the ex-wife grabbed some child-support paperwork from her purse and crammed it into Ramirez's Santa suit.

-- In December, a 24-year-old woman was charged with battery in Beloit, Wis., for allegedly hitting her husband with a plant stand, sending him to the hospital for six stitches. According to police, the couple had been married for two months and fought frequently about sex. That night, she was angry that he had retired for the evening after only four episodes.

-- Still More Recent Rages: "Rejected Her Marriage Proposal Rage" (Amy J. Weir, arrested in Vancouver, Wash., in December, suspected of killing her reluctant boyfriend, cutting up his body, and flushing some of the parts down a toilet). "Relatives Staying Too Long Rage" (Jonathan M. Charest, 31, Rochester, N.H., in January allegedly carved open his guest-bedroom door with a chain saw to stop one of the frequent, loud arguments between visiting in-laws). "Road Rage (Variation)" (Jerry Russo, 51, Howell Township, N.J., in December allegedly ran down a car whose occupants had been laughing at him for picking his nose while driving).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@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.)

-- Open Season: Three weeks before a U.S. Marine Corps pilot clipped a ski gondola in the Dolomite mountains in Italy, killing 20 people, a British air force Harrier jet accidentally dropped two half-ton, unarmed bombs on a farm in southern Italy near the town of Pizziferro, narrowly missing the house of Tommaso Giannico.

-- In February, the Hawaii House Agriculture committee approved a bill to legalize the "sport" of cockfighting, provided the roosters wear tiny padded gloves on their feet instead of the traditional metal leg spurs.

-- In September in Des Moines, Iowa, federal prosecutor Kevin Query, 40, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for fondling a 12-year-old girl and taking nude photographs of her, owing, he said, to his obsession with females' hair, which he said exuded perfection and beauty. He took showers with the girl, he said, to make sure her hair got washed without tangling, and he photographed her nude to document her beauty in case she later cut her hair. (He said his own marriage ended when his wife cut her hair.)

-- Wells Fargo and MasterCard announced in January that they have installed an automatic teller machine at McMurdo Station in Antarctica (whose winter population is 200). And in November, army engineers in India installed a pay phone atop the Siachen Glacier, on the Pakistan border and home to a recurring Indian-Pakistani battlefield, where the temperature hovers around minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit with winds around 70 mph.

-- In September in Center Point, near Birmingham, Ala., Tim and Maxine Smith were convicted of promoting prostitution in their massage parlor, but the women who work for them were not charged because the legislature in that Bible Belt state never got around to making prostitution illegal in Center Point or in several other areas of the state.

-- In August, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning against an electrical cattle-prod-type device called The Stimulator, sold by at least six companies to be self-applied as relief for headaches, back pain, arthritis, stress, menstrual cramps, earaches, sinus, nosebleeds and the flu. Wrote the FDA, "The Stimulator is essentially an electric gas barbecue grill igniter with finger grips."

-- Doctors at the Center for Impotence and Fertility in Rome, Italy, reported in the Dec. 6 issue of The Lancet medical journal that the experimental virility drug alprostadil increased penis size in almost all men who injected it into their urethras but that the rigidity usually subsided within a couple of minutes. Measurements for their work were obtained via a Rigicompt, which shows the pressure exerted by the erection, and by patients' hanging a 750-gram weight to see if their penises could hold it. (A few can support a 1-kilogram weight, which Dr. Ermanno Greco says is "peak virility.")

-- In December in Fort Pierce, Fla., William Alfred Hitt, 71, was sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding the federal government of about $450,000 by claiming disability benefits from a World War II hand injury while working full-time as a house painter. Once a month for 22 years, Hitt put on an arm brace, got into a wheelchair, and reported to the local federal building to pick up his "paycheck." (The jury deliberated 12 minutes before finding him guilty.)

-- In order to get around local ordinances that shut down their stripper bars, entrepreneurs in Eureka, Calif., and Ladson, S.C., converted their businesses. Tom Razooly's Tip Top Club became a recreational vehicle promotion facility in November, and now customers sitting under the flashing lights are handed numerous brochures for RVs while they watch women do pole dances. In January, Ladson's Jerry Colombo converted his Club 2010 into the "Church of the Fuzzy Bunny's," (sic) featuring Bible-reading followed by a procession of pastie-wearing dancers.

-- Christina Mack, 35, was arrested for attempted murder in Peoria, Ill., in December, based on a neighbor's statement that Mack had told her she planned to cover a floor with oil or grease so that her boyfriend, who lost his right leg in 1992, would fall down the stairs to his death. He fell, all right, and hit his head, but declined medical assistance. Mack, however, also fell, knocking herself out, but firefighters revived her so the police could take her away.

-- Recent Sympathy Hoaxes: Schoolteacher Jody Sue Stein allegedly accepted thousands of dollars in gifts and disability payments based on an elaborate, false claim that she had a brain tumor (St. Louis, June 1997). Valerie Jones allegedly accepted thousands of dollars in gifts for her nonexistent leukemia-stricken infant daughter (Yorktown Crossing, Va., October). Police officer Allen Blunk, 30, and his wife allegedly raised $43,000 from neighbors for a bone marrow transplant for their 7-year-old daughter (who did not need one) and spent it on themselves (Tulsa, Okla., January).

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-- In August, the three murder convictions against Michael Pardue, 41, which sent him to prison 24 years ago, were dismissed by the Alabama Supreme Court as the product of a coerced confession (and a sister of one of the victims said she accepts that Pardue is innocent). However, the state Board of Pardons and Paroles said in November that it will not release Pardue, because of three subsequent convictions during those 24 years, for attempting to escape from the prison that was wrongfully holding him.

-- Right Place, Right Time: In October, a federal judge in Albuquerque refused to send convicted casino robber Loretta Martinez, 61, to prison for stealing $7,000 in an April 1997 holdup. The judge noted that, in the interim, that particular casino was found to be without proper state authority and thus was operating illegally at the time of the heist. Martinez was not required to make restitution because, the judge said, that would be like reimbursing a drug dealer for his losses.

-- In February, prosecutors in Boston finally dismissed two counts of arson against Boston University junior Keven Ackerman, despite overwhelming evidence several days after his arrest in June that it was a simple case of mistaken identity. Though he slightly resembles the arsonist (yet is 6 inches taller), Ackerman had no fire-type evidence on his skin or clothes, no motive, no criminal record, and 15 alibi witnesses who were at a party with him all evening long. Also, the only witness against him has a long criminal record himself, and reportedly sometimes falsely accuses people of crimes.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@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.)