The Mammoth Book of Weird News (Mammoth Books)

by Geoff Tibballs

  “PEEPING TOM” WARDER CRASHES THROUGH SKYLIGHT

  A Mexican prison warder who apparently enjoyed watching inmates having sex with their wives during conjugal visits paid a high price for his fantasy in 1999. Raul Zarate Diaz was supervising his prisoners from the roof of the jail in Tapachula, a task which seemingly required him to carry a pair of binoculars and a pornographic magazine. However he tripped over an air vent, crashed through the skylight and plunged 23 feet to the ground, landing next to the bed where a prisoner and his wife were indulging in passionate lovemaking.

  CORPSE WAS STILL PART OF THE FAMILY

  A 77-year-old woman was treated by her son as an active part of the family even though she had been dead for four months. When police officers found her in 1997 – propped up on the sofa at her home in Bakersfield, California – the son told them he thought she was “demonically depressed” and would wake up any minute.

  GERMAN TOURIST MISTAKEN FOR BABOON

  A German holidaymaker out birdwatching at a hunting lodge in Namibia was shot dead by a guide who mistook him for a baboon. As soon as he realized his mistake, the guide put his gun to his head and killed himself.

  EX-DEATH ROW PRISONER DIES REPAIRING TV

  After years awaiting the electric chair in South Carolina, convicted murderer Michael Anderson Godwin finally had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Then in 1989, while sitting on the metal toilet in his cell, he tried to fix his portable TV set by biting into a wire and was electrocuted.

  MAN WEARING CONDOM IS KILLED BY SNAKE BITE

  A 40-year-old man was found dead next to a roadside in Thailand in 2008 with a cobra carcass in his hands and a condom on his penis. Wiroj Banlen had several snake bites to his body and the cobra had also been bitten several times, fragments of the reptile’s skin being found in the dead man’s teeth. The condom contained no semen, leading baffled police to speculate that Banlen was removing his trousers when the snake struck.

  ROBBER DIES STARING DOWN THE BARREL

  Would-be robber James Elliott from Long Beach, California, was mystified when his .38 calibre revolver failed to fire. So he peered down the barrel and pulled the trigger again. This time it worked . . . fatally.

  MAN WEARING FISH SUIT FOUND DEAD NEAR RESERVOIR

  The badly decomposed remains of Neil Wilson, from Melbourne, Australia, were discovered in a paddock near the Toolondo Reservoir in 1995 in what newspaper reports of the day described as a death “shrouded in mystery, tragedy, and a fish suit”. Law enforcement officials said 49-year-old Wilson was wearing a heavy green plastic bodysuit, which he had apparently constructed from old waterbed material. The suit was designed with an external full-length zipper in the back along the spine, constricting his legs into a mermaid-like tail. Apart from the zipper, the only openings in the suit were two holes for the eyes. The suit enclosed his entire body like a maritime mummy costume, thus restricting movement and breathing. A second, yellow suit was found in his garage. Investigators learned that the deceased was taking medication at the time for epilepsy and diabetes and suggested that his unusual behaviour may have had a chemical basis, but locals had their own theories about the aquatic adventure. “He wanted to be a fish,” said one, recalling incidents where Wilson would swing from a rope while wearing the suit at the lake.

  ZAMBIAN MAN IN CLOTHES-LINE TRAGEDY

  A man in Kitwe, Zambia, was electrocuted in 2000 when, having run out of space on his clothes line, he unwisely decided to hang the remainder of his wet washing on a live power line which passed his house.

  STUDENT KILLED BY EXPLODING CHEWING GUM

  A 25-year-old Ukrainian chemistry student was killed by what is believed to be exploding chewing gum. The student from Kiev Polytechnic Institute was found dead with his jaw blown off after working on a computer at his parents’ house. He was known for his habit of dipping chewing gum in citric acid, but police found packets of both citric acid and an explosive material on a table in his parents’ room, leading them to conclude that he may have confused the two packets.

  END OF THE LINE FOR AVID FISHERMAN

  Fishing in a 14-foot boat on Fox Lake, Illinois, in 1998, Daniel Wyman and an unnamed friend decided that they would have more success if they used an M250 firecracker to blast the fish out of the water. After lighting the powerful explosive, they threw it into the lake but seconds later a sudden gust of wind blew their lightweight boat over the firecracker. The resulting explosion sank the boat and caused Wyman to drown.

  YOUNG LOVERS PLUNGE FROM ROOF DURING SEX

  Brent Tyler and Chelsea Tumbleston, both 21, were killed in 2007 after they fell 50 feet from the sloping roof of an office in Columbia, South Carolina, while having sex. The naked bodies of the pair, who had recently graduated from South Carolina University, were found in the street by a stunned taxi driver. He duly informed the police who were mystified as to what had happened until they found the couple’s clothes in a pile on the roof.

  COUPLE ATTEND WRONG FUNERAL

  Believing they had just sat through the cremation of their friend Roy Spencer, pensioners Maurice and Shirley Dodwell were understandably surprised when they arrived for his wake and he answered the door. It turned out that they had been to the funeral of another Roy Spencer in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Maurice said: “It was a terrible fright. I thought I’d seen a ghost. I had to go and sit in the car for a while because I was so shocked.”

  THIEF CRUSHED TO DEATH BY SAFE

  A thief was crushed to death at an office in Huntington, New York, in 1996 while in the act of stealing a 600-pound safe. He apparently violated the cardinal rule of hauling a safe downstairs by standing on a lower step than the one that the safe was on. His efforts were destined to end in disappointment anyway as the safe was empty.

  TRIO PLAY FOOTSIE WITH UNEXPLODED MINE

  Three customers at a restaurant in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, thought it would be fun to play footsie with an unexploded antitank mine in 1999. One of the three – a soldier – put the mine under the table, and then he and his friends began playing with it, stepping on it and tapping it with their feet. Other diners quickly fled the scene but the trio carried on the daring game for another three minutes – until the mine exploded, blowing them up.

  MAN TAKES FATHER’S CORPSE FOR BIKE RIDE

  After his 86-year-old father died, Flemming Pedersen asked staff at the Copenhagen hospital if he could spend some time alone with the body. He then dressed the rigid corpse in leather gear, boots, a crash helmet and dark sunglasses and walked it out of the hospital. Outside he strapped the body to the pillion seat of his Harley Davidson and for the next two hours drove around the city, visiting his father’s favourite haunts. At one point he stopped at a bar, where he bought two bottles of beer and stuck a lit cigar between his dead father’s lips. Pedersen junior explained that he had taken his father for one last ride so that he could have a chat with him. Despite receiving a $300 fine for improper treatment of a corpse, he added: “I wanted him to leave life this way. I’m sure he was happy to have been in the places he liked so much. Everybody should do what I did.”

  TALL MAN’S LEGS CUT OFF TO FIT IN COFFIN

  Faced with the problem of how to fit a 6-foot 7-inch corpse into a standard-sized coffin, a South Carolina funeral parlour came up with a simple solution – an electric saw was used to hack off the lower parts of the dead man’s legs. Allendale undertaker Michael Cave was stripped of his licence following complaints from the family of James Hines who had died in 2004. According to his widow, the deceased’s legs were cut off between the ankle and calf and then placed alongside him in the casket. Mr Hines’s body was only visible from the chest up at the funeral, during which several people had remarked that the casket looked too small.

  BALLOONING PRIEST FLOATS TO HIS DEATH

  A Brazilian priest who took to the skies strapped to 1,000 helium balloons in the hope of breaking a 19-hour flight endurance record perished when he crashed into the sea shortly after takeoff. Fa
ther Adelir Antonio di Carli took off from the port of Paranagua in April 2008 but soon called friends to say that he was crashing into the sea. The following day a cluster of colourful balloons was found in the shark-infested waters and his body was discovered three months later.

  MAN INJURED BY BUS IS KILLED BY SECOND BUS

  A New Delhi labourer survived being hit by a bus, only to be run over fatally by a second bus 20 minutes later. Raj Kumar was on his way to work when a bus hit him from behind. He was taken to hospital by taxi but on the way he said he felt fine and jumped out of the cab. As he crossed the road, another bus hit him, killing him instantly.

  SUICIDE PLAN NEEDED MORE THOUGHT

  A 16-year-old student and a 20-year-old former student of a high school in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, decided to kill themselves in 1999 by crashing a borrowed car into the walls of the school’s gymnasium at 80 miles per hour. Although the impact caused $70,000 of damage, the kamikaze kids escaped unhurt because both were wearing seatbelts!

  EXCESSIVE NOSE PICKING PROVES FATAL

  A man from Manchester picked his nose so much that he bled to death. Ian Bothwell, 63, who suffered from dementia brought on by alcoholism, died from a terrible nosebleed brought on by constant picking.

  MAN SHOOTS HIMSELF WHILE TEACHING GUN SAFETY

  James Looney, 40, of Imperial, Missouri, was killed after accidentally shooting himself in the head while teaching firearms safety to his girlfriend. Witnesses said he was demonstrating how to use the safety mechanisms on several guns. He would put the guns to his head, ask his girlfriend if she thought the gun would go off, and then pull the trigger. The safety mechanism worked on the first two guns but was less successful on the third.

  FRIENDS PUSH CORPSE THROUGH CITY STREETS

  Two men who were found pushing their dead friend through the streets of New York in an office chair thought he was merely incapacitated. Virgilio Cintron, 66, who had died from natural causes, was seen flopping from side to side in the chair while his two friends propped him up.

  GRIEVING WIDOWER DIGS UP WIFE’S CORPSE TO HUG HER

  A Vietnamese man dug up his wife’s corpse and slept beside it for five years so that he could continue to hug her in bed. After his wife died in 2003, Le Van initially slept on top of her grave but 20 months later, fed up with the rain, wind and cold, he decided to dig a tunnel down into the grave in order to sleep with her. When his children found out about the unusual arrangement and prevented him from visiting the grave, Le then dug up his wife’s remains and took them home. “I’m a person that does things differently,” he admitted.

  MAN TRIES TO SHOOT HIMSELF IN COFFIN

  In a bizarre suicide attempt, a man from Podgorica, Montenegro, bought a coffin from a funeral director, climbed in and shot himself in the head. Milo Bogisic, 52, paid cash for the coffin and asked puzzled staff to wait while he wrote out his own obituary. Then he jumped into the casket, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger before the shocked undertakers could stop him. However he survived because the bullet passed straight through his chin and nose, missing his brain. To rub salt into his wounds, the funeral company refused to give him a refund on the coffin.

  SHEEP SHOOTS SHEPHERD

  When a young Egyptian shepherd was found shot dead in the middle of the desert in 2001, the police were baffled by the absence of footprints in the vicinity. Then examination of his rifle revealed that he had forgotten to put the safety catch on before falling asleep next to his sheep. One of his flock had accidentally trodden on the trigger and shot him.

  CACTUS TAKES REVENGE ON GUNMAN

  One day in 1982, roommates David Grundman and James Joseph Suchochi decided to take pot-shots at cacti in the Arizona desert. After felling a small cactus by shooting it repeatedly in the trunk, Grundman became more ambitious and turned his gun on a 26-foot-high specimen, estimated to have been 100 years old. No sooner had he started shooting than a four-foot-long spiky arm of the cactus, severed by the blast, fell on Grundman, crushing him to death.

  DEPRESSED MAN ON THE WRONG TRACK

  A suicidal man decided to end it all by allowing himself to be run over by a train . . . only to lay down on the wrong set of tracks. Martin Rapos placed himself on the rails at Deiva Marina, Italy, in 2008 and waited for the express train from Genoa to hit him at 100 miles per hour. Instead he watched dejectedly as the train roared past him on an adjacent set of tracks.

  WIFE WANTED TO PICKLE LATE HUSBAND’S PENIS

  A German woman was reported to have hacked off her dead husband’s penis in 2006 with the intention of pickling it as a happy souvenir of their marriage. Uta Schneider, 65, was said to have used a butcher’s knife to chop off husband Heinrich’s manhood in a Stuttgart hospital before wrapping it in foil and packing it into a lunchbox ready to take home. However she was spotted by a nurse and accused of mutilation. Uta told police: “It was his best asset and gave me so much pleasure. I wanted to pickle it for eternity. We called it his joystick.”

  WOMAN PLUNGES TO DEATH IN TITANIC TRIBUTE

  A 31-year-old woman from Plymouth, Devon, who had been drinking for several hours on a ferry from Spain to England, plunged to her death in 2003 after apparently striking the famous outstretched arms pose of actress Kate Winslet in the movie Titanic. Emma Blackwell lost her balance, fell from the ninth deck and drowned. Her body was washed up on the French coast eight months later.

  HUMAN HEAD DISCOVERY IS CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY

  Investigating an abandoned mining shed near Detroit, Oregon, in 2002, a hunter thought he had found a severed human head and immediately called the police. However Deputy Larry Taylor deduced it was the just the head of a mannequin when he noticed a price sticker on the forehead.

  MAN WITH SHORT FUSE KILLED IN PIPE BOMB STUNT

  A man who was fascinated with explosives blew himself up in 2002 after putting a homemade pipe bomb in his mouth and lighting the fuse. Kevin Barnes, 20, from Daventry, Northamptonshire, performed the stunt while his terrified flatmates and girlfriend looked on. The inquest heard he was a risk-taker with a quick temper.

  MINISTER SHOT DURING FUNERAL TRIBUTE

  Presiding at the funeral of a Korean War veteran in Champion, Ohio, in 1994, Rev. Thomas Gillum was accidentally shot in the face when the local guard of honour fired a four-gun salute.

  BEDROOM GUITARIST BOUNCES OUT OF OPEN WINDOW

  A 16-year-old business student from China plunged to his death in 2005 while imitating a rock star on the bed of his Singapore hostel room. Li Xiao Meng was playing the guitar and bouncing up and down feverishly on the bed but got so carried away that he bounced straight out of the open window, falling three floors to his death.

  WOMAN CALLS 911 TWICE AFTER FAILED SUICIDE

  A woman who deliberately shot herself in the head survived the suicide attempt and called 911 for help before passing out. But when firefighters, who were trained as emergency medical technicians, arrived at the woman’s home in Soldier Township, Kansas, they thought she was dead. An ambulance was cancelled, and the firefighters and deputies waited outside the house to protect it as a crime scene. Meanwhile the woman regained consciousness and called 911 again, prompting the firefighters to rush back in and give medical assistance. The Shawnee County Sheriff admitted: “It was a mistake.”

  CYCLIST KILLED WHILE CROSSING AIRPORT RUNWAY

  A cyclist crossing an airport runway in Sao Paulo, Brazil, was killed in 1997 when he was hit by a plane that was coming in to land. Marcelo Dias dos Santos couldn’t hear the approaching plane because he was listening to his Walkman on headphones.

  BODY IS MISTAKEN FOR HALLOWEEN DECORATION

  The body of a woman seen hanging from a tree near Frederica, Delaware, in October 2005 went unreported for hours because passers-by thought it was a Halloween decoration.

  MORGUE ATTENDANT DROPS DEAD AFTER DECEASED REVIVES

  Morgue attendants at a hospital in Menoufia, Egypt, were naturally alarmed when Abdel-Sattar Abdel-Salem Badavi pushed open the lid
of his coffin and shouted that far from being dead, he was still very much alive. In fact, one of the attendants was so shocked that he dropped dead on the spot.

  GRANDMOTHER’S BRAIN SENT IN A BAG TO FAMILY

  A New Mexico family were left grieving after the brain of their recently deceased grandmother was sent to them in a bag of personal belongings. The discovery was made after they detected a “foul odour” coming from the bag, which had been forwarded to them by a funeral home. The bag had been left inside a relative’s truck overnight, and when family members opened it the next day, they found personal effects and a small bag labelled with their grandmother’s name and the word “brain”.

  MAN SUFFERS HEART ATTACK JUST BEFORE CHEAP SEX

  An 80-year-old grandfather from Split, Croatia, suffered a fatal heart attack in 2009 moments after negotiating a fee of $6 for oral sex with a local prostitute. The pair went to an abandoned house – their usual rendezvous – but as he dropped his pants, the excitement proved too much for him and he collapsed. A friend described the deceased as a man who was “looking for sex until his last breath”.