Uncle John’s True Crime

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  IRONY BEHIND BARS

  • In 1853 a contractor named John Coffee built a new jail in the town of Dundalk, Ireland. During the project, Coffee went bankrupt. He became his jail’s very first inmate.

  • In 2002 Albion State Prison in New York offered a class that became so popular among the most violent criminals that there was a waiting list to sign up. The subject of the class: quilting.

  LEGISLATING IRONY

  • A new anti-pornography law could not go into effect in Winchester, Indiana, because the editors of the town’s only newspaper refused to print the wording of the law on the basis that it was pornographic. For a new law to be official, it has to be printed in the newspaper.

  • New York state assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun pled guilty to charges that she harassed her ex-boyfriend in 1999. According to testimony, she “burst into his home in the middle of the night, tailgated him in a car, and posed as a cosmetics seller to get his new girlfriend’s phone number.” Calhoun was co-sponsor of the state’s new anti-stalking legislation.

  • On October 30, 2003, Congress released findings of a study that said toy guns don’t have any relationship to crime. That same day, the Capitol was locked down for an hour because two workers had brought toy guns to work as part of their Halloween costumes.

  Good news for Wiccans: Witchcraft hasn’t been a crime in the New World since 1750.

  IRONY IN THE COURT

  • A 1986 court case did not go well for the Otis Elevator Company. It might have had something to do with the fact that the jury—on their way to hear the case—got stuck for 20 minutes in an Otis elevator.

  • A similar thing happened to the Pacific Gas & Electric Company in 2000. While on trial for “failure to trim vegetation around power lines,” a branch fell off a tree and knocked out power to the courthouse.

  • In 1992 the U.S. Postal Service was defending itself against an unemployment discrimination lawsuit. In order to proceed, the defense had to mail a list of expert witnesses from Washington, D.C., to Dayton, Ohio. The list was sent via the USPS’s Overnight Express Mail delivery service, but did not arrive in Dayton for ten days.

  • A production company won a $1.8 million judgment against a former employee accused of stealing the concept for a television game show. Name of the stolen show: Anything for Money.

  DEATHLY IRONY

  • Myra Davis was Janet Leigh’s body double in the 1960 Hitchcock classic Psycho. It was her hand that was seen in the famous shower scene in which Leigh’s character is stabbed to death. On July 3, 1988, Davis was found strangled in her Los Angeles home, murdered by a 31-year-old “caretaker and handyman”...just like Norman Bates.

  • A 22-year-old California skier stole a piece of padded yellow foam from a ski lift pole, dragged it up the hill, and used it as a makeshift sled. He crashed into the newly unpadded pole, hit his head, and died.

  CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET IRONIC?

  • “Human Kindness Day” took place in May 1975, in Washington, D.C. Afterward, the cops announced that during the festivities, there were “600 arrests, 150 smashed windows, and 42 looted refreshment stands.”

  • Love Your Neighbor Corp. of Michigan sued Love Thy Neighbor Fund of Florida for trademark infringement.

  Actor/wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has a degree in criminology.

  DRIVE LIKE YOU STOLE IT

  Here are some real-life bumper stickers (with attitude) that our perps...er, readers have sent us over the years.

  MY CHILD WAS INMATE OF THE

  MONTH AT THE COUNTY JAIL.

  Dangerously under-medicated!

  Honk at me if you’ve never seen

  an UZI from a car window

  99% of Lawyers Give the

  Rest a Bad Name

  Bad Cop,

  No Donut!

  If it weren’t for physics and law

  enforcement, I’d be unstoppable.

  Drive it like you stole it

  Forget Gun Control, Ban Crime

  THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

  A RUT & A GRAVE IS THE DEPTH

  Hello, Ossiffer.

  Just put it on my tab.

  I NEED SOMEBODY BAD.

  ARE YOU BAD?

  man cannot live on bread

  alone...unless he’s in a cage

  and that’s all you feed him

  It is as bad as you think

  and they are out to get you

  EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW

  I LEARNED IN PRISON

  REMEMBER: IT’S PILLAGE FIRST,

  THEN BURN.

  Skateboarding is NOT a crime!

  (but most skateboarders are criminals)

  Don’t like the way I drive?

  Stay off the sidewalk!

  Four out of five

  voices in my head say, “Kill!”

  Come to the dark side:

  We have cookies

  Don’t you make me release

  the flying monkeys!

  TO ERR IS HUMAN.

  TO ARR IS PIRATE.

  Support Your Local Police

  (Leave fingerprints)

  JAIL SUCKS

  If a cop refers to you as “EDP,” it means you’re an “Emotionally Disturbed Person.”

  THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS BAND

  Marilyn Manson, Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne—those “wild children” of rock ’n’ roll are downright tame compared to the craziest musical act we’ve ever heard of. Murder, suicide, and sheep heads are all part of the package with the Norwegian “black metal” band known as...Mayhem.

  DISILLUSION

  In the early 1980s, a radical underground music scene was forming in Europe. As far as these young musicians were concerned, rock was too tame, punk had gone mainstream, and the supposed “Satan-worshipping” heavy-metal acts like Black Sabbath, Dio, and KISS were all faking it. So, with no bands that were “heavy” enough for their taste, these young people made their own music that reflected their bitter attitude toward...well, everything. The two most prominent styles to emerge from the scene came to be known as “death metal” and “black metal.” To the untrained ear, both sound pretty much the same—blisteringly fast tempos; distorted guitars; screeching, unintelligible vocals; morbid lyrics (when you could hear them); and elaborate, gruesome stage acts. But of the two, black metal was the most melodic... and the most blasphemous.

  THE GATHERING

  One of the pioneering bands of black metal was an Oslo band called Mayhem. Formed in 1984, the original lineup consisted of guitarist/vocalist Øystein Aarseth (also known as “Euronymous”), bassist Jorn Stubberud (“Necrobutcher”), and drummer Kjetil Manheim. After going through a few singers (“Messiah” and “Maniac”), Mayhem was joined by Swedish vocalist Per Yngve Ohlin, who adopted the nickname “Dead.”

  Dead was the quintessential black-metal singer: He buried his clothes for weeks underground to give them a “grave” scent; he slashed his own skin during performances; and, for inspiration, he inhaled rancid air from a plastic bag containing the decomposed remains of a crow. In 1990 Dead and the rest of Mayhem moved into a house together to work on their first full-length album, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas—a Latin phrase that loosely translates to “Lord Satan’s Secret Rites.” During those album sessions, a style emerged that would come to define black-metal music. According to Dark Legions magazine:

  [The music] was metamorphosing into a sleeker, melodic variant with more dynamic change in the songs, producing different “settings” to tell a tale, somewhat like a micro-opera in harsh guitars and howling vocals. Similarly, the band’s appearance went from t-shirts and jeans to black clothing, black boots, and black-and-white facepaint, or “corpsepaint,” to make them all appear dead.

  High caliber? More Americans in their thirties own firearms than any other age group.

  THE SPLINTERING

  Life in the Mayhem house was as intense as the music: Dead, who continually battled depression, didn’t get along with Euronymous. And on Ap
ril 8, 1991, Euronymous came home to find Dead dead—with slit wrists and a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. (Next to him was a suicide note that read, “Please excuse all the blood.”) Before calling the police, however, Euronymous ran to the store and bought an instant camera...and then photographed Dead’s body in a variety of positions. (One of the photos later found its way onto the cover of Mayhem’s bootleg live album, Dawn of the Black Hearts.) According to legend, Euronymous also kept chunks of Dead’s scattered brain and mixed them into a stew, and used bone fragments from his skull to make necklaces that he gave to musicians whom he “deemed worthy.”

  The well-publicized tragedy gave a huge boost not only to Mayhem’s popularity but to all of black metal. “People became more aware of us after that,” said Necrobutcher, the bassist. “It really changed the scene.” But the “scene” became too much for Necrobutcher to handle, and he soon quit the band.

  THE REFORMATION

  But Mayhem lived on...for a while. Singer Attila Csihar took over for Dead, while Varg Vikernes (“Count Grishnackh,” named after a Lord of the Rings villain) stepped in on bass. But once again, there was trouble in the band—Count Grishnackh, who suffered from paranoid delusions, became convinced that Euronymous was secretly conspiring to torture and kill him. On August 10, 1993, less than a year after joining the band, Grishnackh went to Euronymous’s apartment and stabbed him 23 times, killing him.

  Russia has almost twice as many judges as the United States does. It also has 80% less crime.

  The ensuing murder trial put Mayhem in the news again. And the trial revealed that not only did the bassist kill the guitarist, but Grishnackh was also responsible for a spate of infamous church-burnings that had plagued Norway for the past few years. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison. (He was released on parole 15 years later, in 2009.)

  THE SHEEP OFFENSIVE

  It seemed that with two members dead and one in jail, Mayhem would never rock again. Not so—in 1995 Hellhammer got a lineup together to start anew, this time with guitarist Rune “Blasphemer” Eriksen and original member Sven Erik “Maniac” Kristiansen on vocals. He even lured Necrobutcher out of retirement to play bass. Soon after, Mayhem finally released De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas—an album that had been stalled amidst all of Mayhem’s mayhem. That was followed by Wolf’s Lair Abyss in 1997 and Grand Declaration of War in 2000. Mayhem were back in business—and were now a bona fide legend in the black-metal world. They managed to stay below the radar of the mainstream press... for a time.

  But in 2003 the band made headlines again. During a show in Bergen, Norway, Maniac was cutting up a dead sheep on stage—a ritual that had become a regular part of their act—when its head somehow catapulted into the crowd, hitting 25-year-old Per Kristian Hagen. The sheep’s head knocked the young man to the floor, and he ended up with a fractured skull. Hagen filed assault charges against Mayhem. “The whole thing was an accident,” claimed Blasphemer (although he added, “but maybe it would be an idea for another show”). In the end, Hagen dropped the charges and the band had weathered yet another storm.

  LONG DIE ROCK

  With the band members now in their 40s, Mayhem is still at it. They made the news again in 2009 when they were arrested for trashing a hotel room in the Netherlands. And though they don’t expect everyone to like their music, they don’t want to be thought of as just a gimmick. According to vocalist Attila Csihar, “It took us 20 years of doing this before people realized we weren’t joking.”

  Serial killer Rodney Alcala once appeared on The Dating Game.

  THE GREAT DIAMOND

  HOAX OF 1872, PART II

  Here’s the second installment of our tale of what may have been the biggest con job of the 19th century. (Part I is on page 79.)

  EMPIRE BUILDER

  As Arnold and Slack made their getaway, William Ralston was hard at work putting together a $10 million corporation called the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company. He’d already lined up 25 initial investors who contributed $80,000 apiece, and now he was preparing to raise another $8 million. New York newspaper publisher Horace Greeley had already bought into the company; so had British financier Baron Ferdinand Rothschild.

  A Rothschild investing in the diamond field? The house of Rothschild was a world-renowned banking firm and experienced at spotting good investments. With Tiffany and Rothschild involved, the excitement surrounding the diamond field grew to a fever pitch. No one but Arnold and Slack knew where the mine was, but so what? When rumors began spreading that it was somewhere in the Arizona Territory, fortune seekers by the hundreds began making their way there in the hope of finding strikes of their own.

  LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

  The stage was now set for the swindle to grow much bigger, which meant that a lot more people would have lost a lot more money. That it didn’t happen was due purely to chance: When Arnold and Slack picked the location of their “diamond field,” they unknowingly chose an area where a team of government geologists had been conducting surveys for five years.

  The leader of the geological team was a man named Clarence King. When he learned of the diamond strike, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d been all over the territory and had already filed a report stating that there were no deposits of precious gems of any kind anywhere in the area. If the story were true, he and his team of experts had missed a significant diamond field that two untrained miners had been able to find on their own. His professional reputation was on the line: If there really was a diamond field and word of it got back to Washington, D.C., he would be exposed as incompetent and funds for the survey would be cut off.

  The Talking Heads song “Psycho Killer” is about the Son of Sam.

  TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?

  King arranged to meet the engineer Henry Janin over dinner to get a firsthand account of the diamond field story. As he listened to Janin describe his trip to the site, he started to smell a rat. Janin reported finding diamonds, rubies, and sapphires next to each other, and as a geologist, King knew that was impossible. The natural processes by which diamonds are created are so different from those that create rubies and sapphires that they are never found in the same deposits.

  Because Janin had been blindfolded on the trip to the site, he couldn’t tell King where it was. But King was so familiar with the area that after quizzing Janin, he was able to figure out exactly which mesa he was talking about. The next day he and some other members of his team set out to visit the site themselves.

  ON THE SPOT

  They arrived at the site a few days later. It was fairly late in the day, so they set up camp and then started exploring the area. As had been Janin’s experience, it didn’t take long for them to find raw diamonds, rubies, and other gems. By the time King was ready to turn in for the night, he’d found so many precious stones that even he had a touch of diamond fever. He went to bed wondering if the field really was genuine, and maybe even hoping a little that it was. That hope vanished early the next morning.

  • Shortly after sunrise, another member of the party found a diamond that was partially cut and polished. Nature is capable of many things, but it takes a jeweller to cut and polish a diamond—the stone had been planted there by human hands.

  • King noticed that wherever he found diamonds, he found other precious stones in the same place, and always in roughly the same quantities, something that does not happen in nature.

  People most often killed during bank robberies: The robbers.

  • Upon close examination, the team also noticed that the crevices in which the gems were found had fresh scratch marks, as if the gems had been shoved into place with tools.

  • When precious stones were found in the earth, it was always in places that had been disturbed by foot traffic. When they went to areas that were undisturbed, they never found anything.

  DIGGING DEEP

  King knew that if the field was real, diamonds would also be found deep in the ground as well as on
the surface. As a final test, he and his men went to an undisturbed area where they thought diamonds might occur naturally and dug a trench 10 feet deep. Then they carefully sifted through all of the dirt that had been removed from the trench, and found not a single precious stone in any of it. There was no question about it: the find was a hoax. Arnold and Slack had planted the gems.

  As soon as King got to a telegraph station, he sent word to Ralston in San Francisco that he’d been conned. Ralston was shocked and angry. He closed the company and returned the unspent capital to the original 25 investors. Then, because his reputation was on the line, he refunded the rest of their investment out of his own pocket, which cost him about $250,000. It turns out that Ralston’s bad judgment wasn’t limited to diamonds: He poured millions into the building of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel and other money-losing schemes, which contributed to the Bank of California’s collapse in 1875. His body was found floating in the San Francisco Bay the following day, though the cause of death remains a mystery.

  THE HOAX EXPOSED

  The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, as it came to be known, received widespread newspaper coverage not just in America but also in Europe. As reporters in the United States and abroad researched the story, details of how the hoax had been perpetrated began to emerge:

  • Arnold had once been a bookkeeper for the Diamond Drill Company of San Francisco, which used industrial-grade diamonds in the manufacture of drill bits. He apparently stole his first batch of not-so-precious gems from work, then bought cheap, uncut rubies and sapphires from other sources and added them to the mix. None of the people he duped had been able to tell industrial-grade diamonds and second-rate gems from the real thing.

  • When Ralston and the other early investors paid Slack the first installment of $50,000 for his share of the mine, he and Arnold made the first of two trips to London, where they bought $28,000 worth of additional uncut stones from diamond dealers there. Most of the gems were used to salt the claim in Colorado; the few that were left over were the ones that Tiffany and his assistant had foolishly valued at $150,000.