xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

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

The BBC reported in January that Holger Voss has been ordered to court in Muenster, Germany, accused of breaking its law against “glorification of a criminal act.” According to a complaint to police, Voss had written on an Internet message board, “Congratulations to the murderers of (Sept. 11).” Voss told a BBC reporter that he obviously meant to be sarcastic, but court spokesman Juergen Wrobel said that would be for the court to decide.

Freshman Missouri state Rep. Cynthia Davis, at a legislative orientation session in December in Jefferson City, took her turn at learning how to preside over debates and interrupted Rep. Chuck Graham, who had the floor. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Davis recited the rule that members must be standing in order to speak and that Graham was thus out of order, in that the veteran legislator Graham has been in a wheelchair for 21 years, the result of a car accident.

Retired pediatrician Alva J. Hartwright, 63, pleaded guilty in February to sexually assaulting two boys, age 11 and 14 at the time, by giving them enemas (part of a 30-year pattern, said prosecutors, of administering enemas to as many as 40 boys). When police arrested Hartwright at his home in June in Morrisville, Pa., they found “feces everywhere,” with “so much feces in one room (that) it was impassable,” said an officer. Also found were “thousands” of photographic images of boys receiving enemas, all of which, insisted Hartwright, were “medically necessary” and not sexually gratifying to him.

Edgar A. Brown, 27, was arrested in Worthington, Ohio, in January and charged with robbing the First Merit Bank; police were tipped off after Brown paid his electric bill at a Columbus store using red-stained $50 bills.
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