Lead Story

In April in Low Moor, Iowa, the body of a
sixteen-year-old boy whose parents suspected
he had run away to join the circus more than
four years earlier, was found hanged in their
farm house basement; the body had not been
discovered sooner because of the severe
clutter.

In Vienna, Austria, since December, the
bodies of three people have been found in
their apartments by officials. Mail in the
apartments suggested that one man died in
1989, and that two sisters had died in 1990.
And in Roubaix, France, the body of Eloi
Herbaux, fifty-five, was found in March by
health officials investigating the smell from
his apartment, apparently ten months after he
had passed away. The body was on the sofa in
front of a television set that was
still on.

Inexplicable

In Monmouth, Ill., Clifford West told a judge
in April that his wife, Cora, could come back
to live with him, and cook for him, while
she's out on bail awaiting her trial for
trying to kill him by poisoning his food.

Uh-Oh

In January, a Dallas recording company
mistakenly sent the wrong compact discs to
about three dozen of the one thousand radio
stations that were to receive religious
programming sponsored by the Southern Baptist
Radio Commission. Instead, the company had
sent the alternative music band Dead
Kennedys' album Fresh Fruit for Rotting
Vegetables, which includes the song "I Kill
Children."

In March, Cleveland, Ohio, judge Terrence
O'Donnell found Dr. Demetrius Pawlyszyn not
guilty of thirty-nine counts of drug
trafficking and writing false prescriptions
despite prosecutor's evidence: In a seven
month period, Pawlyszyn had prescribed, among
other things, more than 60 gallons of
narcotic cough syrup, 53,000 Valium and
35,000 Vicodins.

In December in Marianna, Fla., Brandon
Hatcher filed a lawsuit against the Pepsi
distributor in Dothan, Ala., which services
Marianna, after tests revealed that the
Mountain Dew he started to drink contained
urine. The Panama City News Herald quoted an
executive of the distributing company as
saying, "There are a variety of reasons why
this could happen."

In September, New York City police charged a
Wall Street investment banker and an honor's
student at Yale Law School with tossing huge
chunks of concrete off a forty-five story
luxury apartment building. One woman was
partially paralyzed after being hit with a
seventy-five pound slab. According to police,
one of the men said, "We had so much fun
throwing that (stuff). This is better than a
bank robbery."

Least Competent Person

A twenty-four-year-old salesman from Hialeah,
Fla., was killed near Lantana, Fla., in March
when his car smashed into a poll in the
median strip of Interstate 95 in the middle
of the afternoon. Police said the man was
traveling at 80 mph at the time and judging
by the sales manual that was found open and
clutched to his chest, had been busy reading.

The trial of Ismael Rodriguez in Trenton, N.
J., in April revealed the practices of the
rehabilitation program of the halfway house
to which he had been sent after serving time
in prison on heroin possession charges.
Rodriguez said he wanted to escape from the
halfway house because he objected to inmates
being forced to don dresses and high heels, a
practice that officials say breaks down
inmates' self images as tough guys.

Good News

The Associated Press reported in April that
the Belle Saloon in Salt Lake City is
prospering under its new owners. Last year,
bikers in a motorcycle gang called the
Barons, whose clubhouse is near the bar,
became angry at seeing drug dealing,
prostitution, and violent crime taking place
at the bar, so they bought it, rehabilitated
it, and set the clientele straight.