September 13, 2003
"You never know who people are."
It's hard to say which stabbing is more bizzare - an attack on a parent in front of a school in plain view of the children, or a stabbing of a woman in a park by a 12-year-old.
On the subject of strange crime, beating a disabled man with his own cane and setting his beard on fire is pretty disgusting, but can't really compete with the evil involved in a cult leader's child murder or the unadulterated insanity of a German man who beheaded his sister-in-law and then ran through the street with her bloody head, insisting that "God ordered [him] to kill".
A man who participated in the killing of two police officers in Florida and then lost his leg in a subsequent shoot-out had been on the run since 1994, but was caught with his wife in Washington state. One of the officers involved in the investigation said,
"To all his neighbors, he'd be the guy next door," Florida Highway Patrol Lt. Paul Henry told The Seattle Times, "but you never know who people are. You never really know."Speaking of officers going down in the line of duty, a woman in Florida who lied to two police detectives was sentenced to 21 years in prison when they were killed by her boyfriend after she concealed the fact that he was a dangerous fugitive from them.
Serial and mass murders have been coming out of the woodwork recently. The conviction of Australia's worst-ever serial killers has gotten a lot of press given the sensational facts of the case, but a serial killer in the United States who may have killed more than 70 people recently confessed to yet another murder of a child. He was sentenced to life in prison, though he's already on death row. A Detroit area man killed 4 people in a convenience store he was trying to rob, led police on a high-speed chase, crashed his car, and then shot himself to death. A man in Colorado claims to be a serial killer, though police can't find the all the evidence. DNA was used to positively identify a suspect in 30-year-old murder case, and police think that he may have been involved in several other murders during that timeframe.
When a man goes to three different hospitals seeking treatment but doesn't get any and dies anyway, you have to wonder what the hell is going on. That's the sort of attention to detail that allows people to let a woman walk out of a maternity ward with a baby in a suitcase or to set free a child abuser "accidentally". Fortunately, a serial child rapist in Denver won't be set free - accidentally or otherwise - for another 60 years and (hopefully) may never be released.
When you think your family relations are bad, consider the following cases: a San Diego teen was out running with his high-school cross country team when he was ambushed and killed by his father. A Kansas man also shot his own son to death. Both men were embroiled in custody disputes and both men committed suicide after being confronted by police. Similarly, a Canadian man killed himself after fatally shooting his common-law wife in the head with an arrow, a Missouri man died of a heart attack after strangling his estranged wife, and an Indian man beat his wife and stepdaughter to death with an iron bar because he thought his wife was using the Internet to cheat on him.
Locking twins in a cage is bad enough, but when a pair of twins were abandoned on a woman's doorstep, one was found dead - perhaps from his twin laying on top of him.
A Korean family who burned themselves to death in their car, apparently due to insurmountable debt, showed a lot more family solidarity than a man who killed his wife on their honeymoon. Still, it's hard to think of a family dynamic more tainted by evil than one that got 5 family members - the victim's mother, father, 2 uncles, and a grandmother - convicted for their part in raping a 5-month-old baby to death.
Posted by stupefied
02:49 PM