xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Police in the Ibaraki prefecture north of Tokyo arrested a 70-year-old man in April after the manager of a 7-Eleven reported that the man had menaced him with a chainsaw. The would-be customer apparently came to the store every day only to read from various magazines for sale, and after several hours, the manager finally ordered him to leave. The man returned a short time later with the chainsaw, cranked it up, and shouted, “I’ll cut you to pieces.” He then laid it down and resumed reading and was still reading when police arrived.
At least one judge in recent years accepted the defense of mistaken sexual intercourse when a man enters a dark bedroom and initiates sex with a woman he believes is his sexual partner, only to discover that it is another resident of the home. In a recent case, Paul Chappell, 31, raised the defense at his trial in Sydney, Australia, claiming that he (reportedly intoxicated) erroneously stumbled into bed with his new girlfriend’s female housemate. Since the housemate’s boyfriend was elsewhere in the house, she assumed that the boyfriend had decided to come to bed and that it was he having sex with her. At press time, the trial had not concluded.
A female guard at a New York state juvenile detention center was raped, beaten and kidnapped at knifepoint in 2004 by one of the inmates, who escaped with the guard in a car and remained at large until he was recaptured six hours later, but when the guard applied for union insurance payments, she was informed that the contract paid kidnapping benefits only for incidents of at least eight hours’ duration. According to a March Albany Times Union story, she received worker compensation and about $10,000 in other benefits, but if she had remained captive for two more hours, she would have received between $40,000 and $100,000 more.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD