Paul Sinclair

nut-houses are full of TWO-TONE schizos' and MULTI-COLORED madmen.

An ostensibly genuine version of the gerbil yarn appeared in the BMA Journal in May. Devito Bistone got a live gerbil stuck in his ascending colon. Koko Rodriguez attempted to rescue the animal with a cardboard cylinder, then lit a match "to improve visibility". A methane combustion occurred. Bistone was treated for "partial thickness burns of the natal
cleft" at Salt Lake City General Hospital, Utah. Rodriguez suffered a singed moustache and a broken nose. The gerbil survived.
77 year old Arthur Sharland was found dead in an armchair with two crocodile clips attaching bare electric wires to his chest. He had been electrocuted, but as his torso was a mass of tiny scars, it seemed he'd spent most of his life plugging himself into the mains - for the thrill of it.
A sex line caller who complained to trading standards watchdogs when he got a woman nagging her husband instead of a panting girl was disappointed. They said they couldn't take any action as the line was titled "Hear Me Moan". D.Record, 16 Jan 1996.
A busload of Russian shoppers refused to break off their trip to Poland when one of them died of a heart attack. They tried to get the man buried on the spot, but the Polish authorities wouldn't allow it; so they continued bargain-hunting for days, while leaving the corpse on a back-seat.
Surly Ernst Hort spoke an average of 3.5 words a day over a two month period, his wife Suzanne told a divorce court in Bielefeld, Germany. "We never have rows because he never says anything," she said. Having kept a notebook, she was able to tell the judge that his longest utterance during the period was: "This coffee tastes like dish-water." When asked
for a divorce, he simply said: "I agree."
Jonathan Thomas was walking home through Oxford after a night out with friends in April 1992. On a secluded footpath he was seized by a man who tied his hands behind his back and blindfolded him with sticky tape. His assailant then forced him to ground, stripped him of his shoes and socks, and mercilessly tickled his feet for several minutes. He then
engaged in a brief conversation with his victim before untying him and vanishing into the night, leaving him shaken but unhurt, and with his wallet and other possessions intact.
Palle Birkelund was jailed for being drunk in charge of a lift, in Aalborg, Denmark. Shoppers complained when he kept yelling: "This is the captain of your aircraft - we will be landing in the next few seconds!"
Jean Cellise of Toulon cut open his stomach with a razor to check that surgeons had removed his appendix properly. They had, but he had to go back into hospital to recover from his do-it-yourself efforts.
Told to get lost by an irate housewife who answered their knock at the door, two vacuum-cleaner saleswomen in Ljungby, Sweden, saw red. Instead of leaving, they vacuumed every carpet in the house, while accusing the owner of failing to keep it clean. The struggle to evict them took three hours
Allison Johnson of Lincoln is an alcoholic burglar with a compulsion to eat cutlery, who's spent 24 years in jail. He repeatedly went to restaurants on his release from prison and ordered lavish meals. When he couldn't pay, he would tell the owners to call the police and would then eat cutlery until they arrived. At the time of his last arrest he had eight forks in his stomach. He was jailed for another four years.

WHEN SHARON R. LOPATKA left her home in Hampstead, Maryland, on 13 October, she wrote a note for her husband saying she was going to visit friends in Georgia and would not be coming back. "If my body is never retrieved, don't worry, know that I'm at peace," she wrote. She also asked him not to go after her attacker. In the event, Lopatka took a 300 mile bus ride to North Carolina, where she expected to be sexually tortured and killed by a man she had corresponded with over the Internet. Apparently, she got her wish. Her body was found in a shallow grave in late october behind a mobile home in Collettsville. The autopsy showed she had been strangled about 16 October. The home's owner, Robert Glass, was charged with first-degree murder. Messages from Glass, recovered from Lopatka's home computer, indicate that she travelled to North Carolina knowing what awaited her. Lopatka, 35, operated three World Wide Web pages. One offered to write classified advertisements, while the other two, advertising psychic hot lines, were entitled "Psychics Know All," and "Dionne Enterprises." A friend described her as happily married and sensible. Glass, 45, a father of three who separated from his wife earlier this year, worked as a computer programmer for the county for nearly 16 years. The two first came in contact over the Internet. Lopatka's husband reported her missing on 20 October and police discovered the e-mail messages from Glass despite his attempt to have her erase the files. Messages from "slowhand" -- Glass' apparent Internet alias -- "described in detail how he was going to sexually torture... and ultimately kill her," an affidavit said. [AP] 29 Oct 1996.