xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

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

British garbage collector Tim Byrne is not only eager to get to work every day, according to a report in London’s Sun newspaper, but for the past 11 years, he has voluntarily hauled trash alongside local collectors while on holiday in vacation spots such as Tenerife and Mallorca. Said Byrne, “(R)ubbish plays such a large role in my life that I simply don’t need to (get away from it).”

The renegade Mormon splinter group headed by Warren Jeffs and holed up mostly in a few small towns in Utah and Arizona was largely responsible for the collapse of the Bank of Ephraim, according to Utah regulators interviewed for a December Associated Press report. Church officials had taken a secret oath to borrow, furiously, as much money as they could, because according to Jeffs, the world was about to end anyway, and they wouldn’t have to pay it back.

Antonio Hernandez, 29, pleaded guilty in Salt Lake City in December to hijacking a Greyhound bus that had just left Green River, Utah, intending to use it to smash into his estranged wife’s trailer home. He was stopped at the hijack scene, but if he hadn’t been captured, he would still have had to drive the bus all the way to the woman’s home, in Lexington, Neb., 500 miles away.

Sylvain Didier (a mechanic by profession) was found guilty of sexual assault in Longueuil, Quebec, in December stemming from a self-invented procedure (the “Slimtronic”) he was offering to female customers of his wife’s weight-loss clinic. The Slimtronic supposedly took off pounds via electrical currents passed through rubber patches placed on the vulva, and one woman who agreed to the procedure filed charges against Didier after he kept moving the patches around with his probing fingers.
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