Xxxnews Of The Weirdxxx

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

Herbert Toney, 36, and Latisha Washington, 29, were arrested in October in St. Bernard Parish, just outside New Orleans, and face several charges including deserting their 8-year-old son. According to police, the couple instructed the son to go into a Winn Dixie supermarket and steal groceries and beer. When a security guard stopped him, the boy pointed out his parents nearby, but Toney and Washington matter-of-factly denied knowing the kid and walked away. Deputies brought the couple in again a while later, but Washington said only that maybe she had seen the boy around the neighborhood a few times. Finally, she admitted he was hers.

According to a July Reuters photo dispatch from the mountains of northeast Colombia, U’wa Indian girls’ traditional “cocora” hats, designed to encourage chastity from puberty until marriage, consist of oversized cones made of layers of large sheets of green leaves, all completely covering the girls’ heads, except for narrow eye slits.

Suspected cult leader Scott Caruthers, 57, was arrested in September in Carroll County, Md., and charged with conspiracy to murder the ex-husbands of two of his alleged disciples; according to a Baltimore Sun report, Caruthers has claimed to be an alien who reported back to the mother ship by messages to cats.

Dem Mam, 54, head of a fringe Buddhist cult, was freed from custody in October, having been determined not responsible for three disciples’ immolating themselves in a bathtub of gasoline in a Cambodian countryside pagoda; Dem Mam teaches that ritual suicide is the only path to heaven but told police that he did not need to commit suicide himself because he is already holy enough.
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd

NEWS OF THE WEIRD