News of the Weird
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Since 1999, News of the Weird has reported stories of perhaps the same man who, posing as a cop, made periodic phone calls to managers of fast-food restaurants in several states demanding that a young female employee be interrogated about a crime while he listened in and steered the questioning to sex. Last year, police finally made an arrest after identifying the purchaser of a calling card used to phone a Kentucky McDonald’s as David R. Stewart, 39, of Fountain, Fla. (The caller had demanded that the employee undress and jump up and down so that the manager could sniff her sweat for traces of drugs.) However, a jury in Shepherdsville, Ky., acquitted Stewart in October. The employee still has a lawsuit pending, and authorities in other states want to talk to Stewart.
Sarasota, Fla., dermatologist Michael Rosin was sentenced to 22 years in prison in October for subjecting numerous patients to unnecessary, frightening cancer surgery so that he could bill them (and Medicare) for millions of dollars. An FBI investigation had revealed that Rosin had once detected aggressive cancer from a slide that contained not a skin sample but chewing gum and another time from a slide that contained plastic foam.
When oil prices rose in the summer, Steve Jordan began drilling what would be an 8,500-foot oil well under his house near Lake Charles, La., because prices were finally high enough for him to recover the $2 million he thought the operation would cost. (Crude oil, which peaked in July at about $77 a barrel, had fallen to $65 by the time Jordan gave his last reported interview, on CNN in September, and at press time was about $56 a barrel.)
(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
