News of the Weird
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
According to sheriff’s officials in Buffalo, N.Y., Thomas Montgomery murdered a 22-year-old workplace colleague in a love triangle involving a West Virginia woman, except that two of the three triangle characters were nonexistent. Montgomery, age 47, was pretending to be a young Marine in online conversation with the woman, 45, who was pretending she was her 18-year-old daughter. The murder victim had also struck up an online conversation with the woman, apparently making Montgomery jealous, but the victim, ironically, was the only one in the triangle who wasn’t someone else.
A hospice in Britain run by Sister Frances Dominica approved the wish of a 22-year-old man (born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy), who wanted to lose his virginity before he died. The Douglas House hospice arranged for a prostitute to visit him at his family’s home, and the man said afterward, “It was not emotionally fulfilling, but the lady was very pleasant.”
The Washington Post, examining 135 cases of disability by “stress” among Washington, D.C., police officers, found only 16 that resulted from specific incidents, such as gunfire, with the rest due to “common workplace tensions” (“arguments with colleagues, shift changes, disciplinary actions” among them). According to an internal police memo, the department’s generous disability benefit would be “unheard of in private industry and public service,” and the department’s rate of officers unable to work is, for example, several times higher than Baltimore’s, according to the Post’s report.
(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
