The sheriff’s deputies assigned to the case were concerned for the safety of Lytle’s wife, so they visited her during her shift at Walmart and asked her to confirm some of the information contained in the text. She told the deputies that she and Lytle had been married for seven years, and that they had a four-year-old daughter. Their finances were tight because Lytle was unemployed.
The wife admitted that like any couple, she and her husband had their problems, but she expressed shock that any marital troubles they had would be enough for her husband to want to kill her. She said that she thought she and her husband might have life insurance, but she was unable to provide the deputies with details. She denied knowing anyone named Shayne, which wasn’t surprising: Not many people know the hitman who has been hired to kill them.
Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt skipped a state dinner in 1933 to take a spontaneous flight to Baltimore.
A LIKELY STORY
When the deputies finished speaking to Lytle’s wife, they drove to Lytle’s residence to question him. He confirmed that the cell phone number was his, and that he had worked for the businessman who received the text. But Lytle denied sending the text. Under further questioning, he admitted that he had written the text, but he said he wrote it months earlier. He claimed it was a work of fiction, something he’d made up to blow off steam following an argument with his wife (she’d gotten mad at him for talking to another woman). Lytle denied sending the text to anyone, though he admitted saving copies of it on his phone.
Lytle also denied hiring a hitman, and denied knowing anyone named Shayne, hitman or not. That was just a name he came up with when he wrote the text, he told the deputies. And he denied having any insurance policies on his wife or his child, so he had nothing to gain financially by having them murdered.
So if he didn’t send the text, who did? Lytle speculated that his four-year-old daughter may have sent it by accident while playing with his phone.
BOOK ’EM
Naturally, the deputies didn’t buy a word of it. They took Lytle in for further questioning, and later that day they arrested him. He was charged with two counts of first-degree investigation of criminal solicitation for murder. That evening the sheriff’s office passed the case to the Monroe Police Department, and they served a search warrant on Lytle’s home to confiscate his cell phone and any records relating to life insurance policies.
The following morning Lytle was brought before a judge, who found that probable cause existed to believe he was guilty of the crimes. He ordered Lytle held in custody pending a trial. Bail was set at $1 million.
STRANGER THAN FICTION
Lytle was taken into jail on February 8, 2017…and walked out again on March 27. Not because he’d made bail, but because the police were unable to find any evidence that he really had tried to hire a hitman to kill his family. His crazy story about the text being a figment of his imagination suddenly didn’t seem so crazy after all.
The police had scoured his phone and his phone records for any evidence that Lytle had made calls or sent any other texts to anyone named Shayne. He hadn’t. And the police found no life insurance policies on his wife and daughter, so there was no evidence of a financial motive, either.
A kidney “transplant” is usually a kidney addition—surgeons implant the new one, but leave the old one in place.
When Lytle was released from jail, the Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office issued a statement saying the investigation was ongoing, but in May 2017 they dropped all charges against Lytle. After a month and a half more of searching, the investigators still hadn’t found any evidence that a hitman named Shayne existed anywhere other than in Jeffery Lytle’s imagination. “In all likelihood this case will never be fileable. If Shayne is fictional then there cannot be a conspiracy with a fictional person,” the prosecutor’s office said when it announced that all charges were being dropped. “Since we cannot prove Shayne is real, and cannot corroborate this disturbing text from Lytle in any way, we cannot prove a crime occurred.”
“Since we cannot prove Shayne is real, and cannot corroborate this disturbing text from Lytle in any way, we cannot prove a crime occurred.”
The news of Lytle’s release came as a shock to everyone except Lytle’s wife, who never doubted her husband’s innocence. “She adamantly asserts that…she is ’110%’ sure that Lytle would never hurt her,” the Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office noted in its statement, adding that “she claims to be the assertive one in the relationship.”
So what’s the moral of the story? Never text your hitman, not even if he’s fake.
GETTING HOOKED
Ever seen an old movie or cartoon where a bad comedian or singer gets pulled off the stage by a long crook with a hook at the end, pulled by an unseen stagehand until the offending performer is gone from the audience’s view? That’s called “getting the hook,” a phrase that’s come to describe any time someone fails, like when someone gets fired from a job or when a pitcher gets removed from a baseball game. This was actually something that happened in the world of vaudeville, the live theatrical variety shows that were a common form of American entertainment in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It started at an amateur night at Miner’s Bowery, a New York vaudeville theater, in 1903. A reportedly terrible singer tried to sing an aria, and kept singing even as he was being drowned out by the crowd’s boos. Owner Tom Miner wanted to end the miserable performance, so he told his stage manager, Charles Guthinger, to hide in the wings and use a prop left behind by a previous act—a comically oversized, crook-handled cane—to yank the singer off the stage. Vaudeville theaters all over the country soon started using “hooks” of their own. The famous singer and actor Eddie Cantor claimed that his energetic performance style of jumping around the stage originated when theater operators tried to give him the hook…and he dodged it.
When you swallow a teaspoon of water, you are swallowing eight times as many atoms as there are teaspoons of water in the entire Atlantic Ocean.
TODAY IS WHAT DAY?
There are 1,500 “National Days” per year, which averages out to 4.1 holidays every day. Here are some odd ones.
JANUARY 1: National Bloody Mary Day. Nursing a New Year’s Eve hangover? Take today to remember Ferdinand “Pete” Petiot, the bartender who invented the Bloody Mary at Harry’s Bar in Paris in 1921. His original name for the drink: “Bucket of Blood.”
JANUARY 21: National Squirrel Appreciation Day was founded by wildlife rehabilitator Christy Hargrove as a day for people to see past squirrels’ reputations as pests, vermin, and “tree rats.” There are more than 200 squirrel species worldwide. Largest: the Indian giant squirrel of Southeast Asia. It can grow to be three feet long.
FEBRUARY 5: National Weatherperson’s Day. Expect this holiday to be partly fun with a slight chance of learning something about weather forecasters. For example, did you know that John Jeffries, born on this day in 1745, was one of America’s first weather observers? His other claim to fame: While accompanying Jean-Pierre Blanchard on his historic balloon flight across the English Channel in 1785, Jeffries dropped a letter over London, which is considered the oldest piece of airmail in existence.
MARCH 1: National Pig Day was established by sisters Ellen Stanley and Mary Lynne Rave in 1972. Their mission: To help others see pigs as they saw them—as “intelligent and domesticated animals.” (If you’re not interested in celebrating pigs’ intelligence, consider the first Monday of September—National Bacon Day.)
APRIL 6: Plan Your Epitaph Day was created by Lance Hardie, author How to Write Your Own Epitaph—and Live Long Enough to Enjoy It. You can also celebrate this holiday on November 2, which coincides with the Day of the Dead. Either way, Hardie encourages you to write your epitaph before it’s too late.
MAY 14: National Underground America Day. Do you not celebrate National Underground America Day? “That’s just the way it should be,” said Malcolm Wells. This holiday, he declared, is only for the 6,000 people across
North America who live in some type of underground or “earth-sheltered” dwelling. Wells’s hope is that, on every May 14, “Hundreds of millions of people all across this great land will do absolutely nothing about the national holiday I declared in 1974.”
MAY 14: National Dance Like a Chicken Day honors the “Chicken Dance” song that Swiss accordionist Werner Thomas wrote in the 1950s. In 2010 chicken dancers set a world record in Mandan, North Dakota, for the longest “chicken dance line,” which covered 24 city blocks. (But they didn’t do it on National Dance Like a Chicken Day, so should the record really count?)
Year the first computer was installed in the White House? 1978.
JUNE 1: National Go Barefoot Day. Kick off your shoes and enjoy the feel of the soft grass between your toes. This holiday was started by Soles4Souls, a nonprofit organization that provides shoes to underprivileged children. Afraid of stepping on a piece of glass? Skip this holiday and celebrate National Shoe the World Day in March or National Two Different Colored Shoes Day in May.
JULY 3: National Eat Your Beans Day. We love beans because they…are good for your heart (and they make you fart!). But the founders of this holiday want to remind you that there’s more to beans than the music they make. For example, did you know that there are 40,000 varieties of beans around the world? And that in Nicaragua, people give newlyweds a bowl of beans for good luck? And that approximately 71,089 people in the world have the last name Bean? Bean facts. Bean farts. Equally entertaining.
AUGUST 23: National Ride the Wind Day celebrates Paul MacCready, who, on this day in 1977, debuted the first human-powered aircraft capable of controlled and sustained flight. He flew a figure-eight course, cruising at only 11 mph (roughly the same speed that a mouse can run).
OCTOBER 12: National Freethought Day celebrates the separation of church and state, scientific advancement, and freedom of speech. Why October 12? That marks the anniversary of the end of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692.
NOVEMBER 20: National Absurdity Day. Get weird! Celebrate things that make no sense! We like to celebrate by sharing absurd facts. Here are two: 1) During the Great Emu War in 1932, the Australian military tried to curb the population of emus by shooting them; the emus won. 2) The first incident of “mooning” took place in 66 AD, when a Roman soldier mooned a group of Jewish pilgrims. The mooning caused a riot, and thousands were killed.
DECEMBER 4: National Sock Day honors all of those special sock pairs that accomplish the near-impossible feat of staying together after countless washings and dryings. What about lonely single socks? May 9 is National Lost Sock Memorial Day, a day to throw them away, guilt-free.
More strange-but-real “holidays”January 3: National Drinking Straw Day April 2: National Ferret Day May 27: National Grape Popsicle Day July 12: National Paper Bag Day August 7: National Lighthouse Day September 16: National Play-Doh Day October 1: National Fire Pup Day November 4: National Candy Day December 16: National Chocolate-Covered Anything Day
All German pet shelters are no-kill pet shelters.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
How much good can a single hungry schoolkid accomplish with a little grit, determination …and a website? More than you’d think.
THE CRITIC
Martha Payne was a nine-year-old girl at Lochgilphead Primary School on the west coast of Scotland. She liked to write and she was also interested in nutrition, so in the spring of 2012 her father helped her set up a website called NeverSeconds, where she could critique the lunches served at school. Each day Martha rated her meals on a scale of 1 to 10 for both taste (“food-o-meter”) and healthiness. She also counted the number of mouthfuls, as well as the number of hairs she found in her food, and she posted a picture of each meal on her site.
Martha was frank about what she liked and didn’t like about her lunches. On May 8, 2012, for example, she was served a small slice of cheese pizza, a muffin, a single croquette (similar to a tater tot), and a few spoonfuls of sweet corn on a food tray that looks half empty. Martha gave it a food-o-meter score of 6, and a health score of 4. The pizza was “alright,” she wrote, but the meal was too small. Mouthfuls: “forgot to count but not enough!…I’d have enjoyed more than one croquette. I’m a growing kid and I need to concentrate all afternoon and I can’t do it on one croquette. Do any of you think you could?”
FOOD FIGHT
School lunches vary in quality and quantity from one part of the UK to another, but Martha’s reviews suggested that primary schools in Scotland clearly had some catching up to do. School officials were embarrassed. About a month after Martha started her reviews, she was pulled out of class by the head teacher and told that the local Argyll and Bute government council, which runs the school, had banned Martha from taking any more pictures of her lunches.
Over the next 24 hours, Martha’s website received more than 2 million visits from people all over the world. Many expressed outrage over the fact that Martha had been silenced.
When Martha reported the development on her website in a post titled “Goodbye” and announced that she was ending her school lunch reviews, the BBC and other news outlets covered the story; within hours it began spreading virally on Facebook and other social media sites. Over the next 24 hours, Martha’s website received more than 2 million visits from people all over the world. Many expressed outrage over the fact that Martha had been silenced.
The average human consists of 125,820 calories.
That was all it took: The next day, after being pressured by Mike Russell, Scotland’s Education Secretary, the Argyll and Bute council reversed itself and allowed Martha to resume taking pictures of her lunches. The school had already announced that students would be allowed unlimited servings of fruit, vegetables, and bread with their lunches (though it claimed that this had always been the policy).
“Well my friends and I never knew that,” Martha wrote. “It must have been a well-kept secret.”
LUNCH MONEY
Bonus: When Martha launched the NeverSeconds website in April 2012, in the upper right corner she posted a link to a fund-raising page for Mary’s Meals, a charity that provides food aid to schools in developing countries. When the photo ban caused visits to her website to soar, donations to the charity also climbed, from £2,000 (about $2,700) before the controversy to more than £90,000 ($125,000) in just a few days. That was more than enough to build a new kitchen at an elementary school in the African nation of Malawi.
Martha continued posting her lunch reviews until the end of the 2012 summer school term. After that, she posted less frequently. Like most nine-year-olds, she had lots of interests and was eager to move on to other things. But she invited schools around the world to continue contributing their own photographs and posts, so that kids everywhere could see what their peers in other countries were eating.
Martha’s last post was in February 2014, when she reported that her website had received its 10-millionth hit, and had raised more than £131,000 ($183,000) for Mary’s Meals. And that’s enough money to feed 12,300 schoolchildren in Malawi for an entire year.
TONY’S TONYS
The Tony Awards are named after American Theatre Wing cofounder Antoinette Perry. Three Tonys have won Tonys: costume designer Tony Duquette (for Camelot in 1961), scenic designer Tony Walton—three times, for Pippin (1972), The House of Blue Leaves (1986), and Guys and Dolls (1992)—and playwright Tony Kushner, who won for Best Play twice, for each part of Angels in America: 1993’s Millennium Approaches and 1994’s Perestroika.
The person who said “previously on Lost” on Lost was ABC chairman Lloyd Braun…
FRIGHT WHITE
Many horror stories told around the campfire end with the victims being so terrified that their hair instantly turns white. Is that just a scary story or can it really happen? Read on…
MEDICAL MYSTERY
For centuries, the idea of a person’s hair turning white overnight was thought to be a myth, but there are now enough medical professionals who have witnessed and do
cumented the phenomenon that it has earned an official name: canities subita, or “sudden hair blanching.” Researchers agree that the condition can be caused by extreme stress from fear, grief, or traumatizing medical events. What is not quite clear is how hair turns white from root to tip. (One possibility: a sudden infusion of air into the hair shaft caused by an adrenaline rush.)
Proof that it really does happen is no clearer than in the case of Alexander Littlejohn, a first-class steward on the Titanic. As the ship was sinking, Littlejohn was helping women and children board Lifeboat 13 before he was ordered to get in and row the boat. A photo taken just before Littleton boarded the Titanic shows a dark-haired, mustached man of 40. A second photo, taken just six months after he survived the disaster, reveals that not only did his hair turn white—his eyebrows, eyelashes, and mustache were also bleached of color.
OFF WITH HER HEAD!
Sudden whitening of hair is also known as “Marie Antoinette syndrome,” named after the French monarch and wife of King Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette was the poster girl for the excesses of the nobility, which led to the French Revolution in 1789. Placed under house arrest, she tried to escape in 1791 but was recaptured and sentenced to die by the guillotine. Observers at the execution reported her auburn hair had turned white overnight. Both Sir Thomas More in 1535 and Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 were also reported to have had their hair turn white as they waited for the chopping block, but it was the last queen of France for whom the fright-white syndrome was named.
POST-TRAUMATIC TRESS DISORDER
The numerous recorded instances of sudden whitening of the hair include:
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