January, 2011
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January 1, 2011 Today's Horrible Yet Truly Morbid Fact! A boy died after falling into a pool of boiling water in New Zealand on December 26, 2010. The eight-year-old lad was scalded all over his body in the geothermal pool, believed to be at boiling point - 100°C (212°F). Witness Anna Kare said the unnamed youngster was in agony. She added: "There was screaming and yelling - it was just horrible. The boy was yelling 'My hands! My hands!' and I saw all the skin on his hands peeling off. The burns were all the way from his head to his feet." He after four days in an induced coma in the hospital. The tragedy happened in Kuirau Park in New Zealand's North Island city of Rotorua. The boy - from the Pacific Islands - was visiting the area with his family. The area is known for its steaming geysers and hot mud and water pools. It was unclear how the boy fell in. All pools in the park have safety fences and warning signs. Culled from: The Sun |
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January 2, 2011 Today's Restrained Yet Truly Morbid Fact! In Olde England, one of the most popular forms of restraint were leg-irons, also known as fetters. These took many different forms but basically resembled handcuffs, and were locked around each of the prisoner's ankles and connected to each other by chains or iron links. To add insult to injury, some prisons, York Castle for instance, actually charged prisoners for their leg-irons. 'At their first committing and entry, every Catholic yeoman shall pay ten shillings, every gentlemen twenty shillings and every esquire forty shillings,' decreed the York gaoler. Culled from: Rack, Rope and Red-Hot Pincers |
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January 3, 2011 Today's Ignominious Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Here
lies Fred, This scurrilous, anonymous verse was penned to commemorate the unlamented death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of King George II. Frederick's death in 1751, when he was 44-years-old, was doubly ignominious for an heir to the throne of Great Britain: firstly, it was widely rumoured that death was due to the delayed effects of his having been hit with a tennis ball; secondly, his mode of exit was far from regal: "He complained of a sudden pain and an offesnive smell, and immediately threw himself backwards and died." An ignoble life was ended by an ignoble death. Culled from: Death: A History Of Man's Obsessions and Fears |
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January 6, 2011 Today's Almost Imperceptible Yet Truly Morbid Fact! In 1831, a painter of pottery had the dubious distinction of becoming the first person in Britain known to have contracted cholera. He suffered with vomiting, chills, fever, and diarrhea. His face was covered with cold sweat, and his lips were blue, while his voice and pulse became so weak as to be almost imperceptible. Amazingly, he recovered, but a few days later another worker in the same area collapsed with identical symptoms and died. Doctors called the quickly spreading malady "summer diarrhea." Actually, it was just the beginning in Britain of what became a devastating cholera epidemic throughout Europe. Millions in Britain and other European nations eventually died of the disease. Culled from: The Pessimist's Guide To History |
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January 7, 2011 Today's Young Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Probably the youngest child executed in England was John Dean who was convicted of arson at the Abingdon Assizes on the 23rd of February 1629. His age is given in “The Annals of Windsor” as between eight and nine years and he had set fire to two houses in Windsor. It would appear that the judge, Mr. Justice Whitelock, found evidence of malice, revenge and cunning and therefore did not recommend a reprieve for the boy. Culled from: Capital Punishment U.K |
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January 8, 2011 Today’s Whitewashed Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Helen Jewett’s real name was Dorcas Doyen and she was born in 1813 in Temple, Maine to a working class family. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother died when Jewett was young. When she was 12 years old, Helen found work as a maidservant in the home of Chief Justice Nathan Weston of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. As the years passed, Helen grew into a true beauty. At 17, she was ruthlessly seduced by an unscrupulous bank cashier, thus despoiling her “reputation”. At 18, she changed her name to Helen Jewett and moved to New York City. It was not long before her great beauty attracted notice. She found work in a bordello and earned a very comfortable living as high class courtesan. One day, while she was accosted by a ruffian outside a theatre, a man by the name of Richard Robinson came to her rescue. A bond developed and Robinson soon became a regular patron. However, it was a rocky relationship and the couple broke up. Some said that it was because Helen learned that Robinson was planning to marry another woman, and she threatened him. Others said it was caused by the fact that Robinson had been embezzling money to lavish on Jewett, and he became worried that Jewett would expose him. On an April night in 1836, another woman in the brothel heard a loud noise followed by a moan. She peered out into the hallway and saw a tall man hurrying away. When the Madame of the brothel looked into Helen Jewett’s room, she discovered a small fire and Helen who lay dead in a pool of blood from a large wound in her head. She was struck three times in the head. Her killer fled from the house by a back door and climbed over a whitewashed fence to escape. The women of the brothel named Robinson as their primary suspect. Police found him in his rented room, in bed with whitewash stains on his pants and they charged him with Helen’s murder. Robinson was charged with the murder of Helen Jewett. On June 2, 1836, Robinson’s trial for murder began. The media sensationalized it. Because most of the witnesses were prostitutes, the judge ordered the jury to disregard their testimony. The rest of the evidence was all circumstantial. As a result, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Jewett’s murder excited the press and the public, with strong supporters for Jewett as well as Robinson. Culled from: History and Women So, if your name was Dorcas Doyen, what would you change it to? I think this will be my new pseudonym. Goodbye Comtesse DeSpair, Hello Dorcas Doyen! Hmmmm… maybe not… Anyway, the story of Jewett’s murder and its subsequent press coverage has been retold in a book by Patricia Cline Cohen entitled, sensibly, The Murder Of Helen Jewett which I completed recently. My review will be forthcoming. You hang rapt with anticipation. |
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January 9, 2011 Today’s Greasy Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Eric C. Gottschalk was at the bottom of the pecking order in the Portland apartment he shared with a “street family” of young adults. The band’s matriarch and its enforcer had the 23-year-old sign a contract in which he agreed to do whatever they said and gave them permission to beat him if he didn’t. The contract was marked with Gottschalk’s blood. The band of mostly 18- to 25-year-olds didn’t allow Gottschalk to sit on the apartment’s furniture. Members punched him with brass knuckles and — in one of the more violent incidents — put him in the bathtub and poured hot cooking grease on his genitals. A few days later, on July 9, 2005, Gottschalk’s tormentors beat and stabbed him to death out of fear that he would report the hot-grease incident to police. Nicholas Alexander Thompson, 27, the so-called enforcer of the band’s rules, poured the hot grease on Gottschalk while Raymundo Angel Dominguez, 35, held him down. After that, Gottschalk left the apartment for a few days. The night before the murder, Thompson made plans in front of other members of the band. When Gottschalk resurfaced by calling and asking to be picked up, Thompson, Dominguez and a few others drove out to get him. But instead of returning to their Parkrose apartment, they drove to the Thousand Acres recreation area east of Troutdale, marched Gottschalk about a mile into the brush and told him to kneel. Dominguez hit Gottschalk with a large stick and punched him. Thompson slashed his torso numerous times and stabbed him in the head, neck and lung. Thompson pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release. Thompson also was sentenced to the Oregon State Hospital for stabbing and wounding his girlfriend months before the murder. He will start his sentence at the state hospital, where he will receive psychiatric care, then will move to the state prison system when he’s deemed fit or at the end of 20 years. Dominguez was sentenced to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to kidnapping, assault and conspiracy to commit aggravated murder. Culled from: Oregonlive.Com I just recently finished a fascinating book – All God’s Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families by Rene Denfeld – that details other horrific crimes committed by these Portland Street Families. I’ll post a full review a bit later… Suffice to say, that I’ll never look at street punks in Portland in quite the same way again! |
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January 10, 2011 Today’s Desperately Ill Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Bellevue Hospital in New York City was built on land that once nourished a farm called Belle Vue, for its beautiful prospect on the river. The first hospital building had been constructed there in 1811; only 8 years later Bellevue became the first U.S. hospital to formally require a qualified physician to pronounce a death (after a desperately ill man had been discovered among the corpses stacked on the morgue wagon). Its ambulance system started in 1869; its children’s clinic (the first in the nation) in 1874; its chest clinic, to combat tuberculosis, in 1903. It was from the start a public hospital – in the winter of 1915, nearly a thousand people were treated at Bellevue every day. “It gathers the dead and dying from river and streets and is kept busy night and day with the misery of the living,” wrote one New York Times reporter, attempting to capture the rather ominous mystique of the place. Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook Of course, I always think of the lovely Bruce Springsteen line, “They’re waiting for you at Bellevue with their oxygen masks” when I think of this place… Ah, romance. |
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January
11, 2011 For at least a year after the beginning of the Gold Rush, the population of women in San Francisco probably did not exceed 300. Of this number, perhaps two-thirds were harlots from Mexico, Peru and Chile. Together with male natives of these and other Central American countries they were known as Chilenos or, contemptuously, “greasers”. These pioneer prostitutes occupied tents and board shanties in the vicinity of Clark’s Point, about where Broadway and Pacific Street run into the Bay, and on the eastern and southern slopes of Telegraph Hill. Sometimes as many as half a dozen Chileno women used the same rude shelter, receiving their visitors singly or en suite, with no regard whatever for privacy, and no furniture excepting a wash-bowl and a few dilapidated cots or straw pallets. A few made pretense of operating wash-houses, but there were scarcely any who did not devote the nights to bawdy carousal and to sexual excesses and exhibitions. And the days, also, if there was opportunity. Many of the men who had brought them to California had gone on to the goldfields, but others had remained in San Francisco, where they dwelt promiscuously with the harlots. They lived off the earnings of the women and what they could steal from the men who frequented the district. They also operated a few small, crooked gambling houses. Culled from: The Barbary Coast Just reading that paragraph makes me feel like I may have contracted an STD. Shudder… |
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January 12, 2011 Today’s Unmarked Yet Truly Morbid Fact! John Wilkes Booth might have been a successful assassin, but he was a largely ineffectual escape artist. Just 12 days after murdering President Abraham Lincoln, Booth was shot in the back of the neck and killed. His body was (eventually) buried in an unmarked grave at Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery. His third, fourth, and fifth vertebrae, however, were removed during the autopsy so investigators could access the bullet. For a peek at those bits of Booth’s spinal column, just check out the display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. Culled
from: Neatorama I went to the museum back in 2001 but my shot of the vertebrae didn't show up. You can see photos of some of the other goodies at my travelogue though: |
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January 13, 2011 Today’s Unnoticed Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Firefighters responding to a call on December 31, 2007 struck and killed a woman in a wheelchair. The incident occurred near the intersection of Marbach and Horal roads on San Antonio’s west side. The woman was struck as the San Antonio fire truck was leaving a Wells Fargo Bank parking lot. The crew from SAFD Station No. 44 was responding to a brush fire when they thought they hit something, but reportedly didn’t see anything until they noticed sparks coming from underneath the truck near Highway 90 and Loop 410. When they stopped to check their truck, firefighters found an empty wheelchair under the vehicle. When the crew returned to the scene, they found the victim lying decapitated in the street. Culled
from: KSAT.Com |
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January 14, 2011 Today’s Bright and Shiny Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Fetters (leg shackles) were a popular form of restraint in England. When they were worn for long periods, the rough edges of the iron rings lacerated the raw flesh, making every movement agonizing. The Jesuit Gerard (1564–1637), when in London’s Counter Gaol, was initially secured with very heavy fetters. Ever one to inject humor into the most appalling predicaments, he described his first weeks under restraint: When I first had my irons on, they were rusty, but I made them bright and shining by having to wear them every day and moving about in them. Though my cell was narrow and I could have walked across in three paces if my legs had been free, I used to shuffle from side to side with short steps. In this way I got some exercise. Also, and this mattered more, when the prisoners below started singing lewd songs, I was able to drown their noise with the less unpleasant sound of my clanking chains. Another martyr, Nicholas Horner, was fettered so tightly that “one of his legs rotted and had to be cut off in the Justice Hall.” Culled from: Rack, Rope and Red-Hot Pincers |
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January 15, 2011 Today’s Breathless Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Police say an Ohio man accused of having sex with a corpse told investigators he didn't realize at first that the woman was dead. Richard Elwood Sanden, 55, of Geneva, Ohio, was being held on $500,000 bond in the Daviess County Jail on charges including abuse of a corpse and marijuana possession. Sanden told police he was having sex with the 48-year-old woman in her apartment Saturday when he realized she wasn't breathing. He told police he administered CPR and called an ambulance. The cause of death was unknown. Sanden said he had known the woman for a few months. Culled
from: Dispatch.Com Okay, okay - proceed with the "frigid woman" jokes... |
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January 16, 2011 Today’s Lethal Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Charlie Livingston was executed on November 22, 1997 in Texas by lethal injection for fatally shooting a woman and stealing her purse as she carried groceries to her car. His last words were: “Y’all brought me here to be executed, not to make a speech… get on with it… that’s it.” Charlie may have been a man of few words at his execution, but he was no stranger to the urge to kill. When he committed the attempted robbery and subsequent murder of the woman in the grocery store parking lot, he was already on probation for attempted murder. Livingston received 10 years probation as a juvenile offender for attacking his former girlfriend and her new lover, stabbing them 17 times while they slept. Culled from: Last Suppers So, you can stab someone 17 times and just get 10 years probation? Why did I not know this? |
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January 18, 2011 Today’s Caged Yet Truly Morbid Fact! A cannibal cult mother who tortured her son in a locked cellar while relatives skinned him and forced him to eat his own flesh has been jailed for nine years. Klara Mauerova, 31 - a member of a sinister religious cult and her sister Katerina led the sickening torture of her eight-year-old son Ondrej and his ten year-old brother Jakub. A court in Brno in Czech Republic heard how relatives partially skinned Ondrej and forced him to eat his own flesh. The judge also jailed Katerina, 35, for ten years for her role in the sickening abuse. The two boys had told judges how their mother and relatives had stubbed cigarettes out on their bare skin, whipped them with belts, and tried to drown them. They were also sexually abused and forced to cut themselves with knives. The terrified youngsters said they were kept in cages or handcuffed to tables and made to stand in their own urine for days. The sick sisters - both members of weird religious cult the Grail Movement - refused to reveal why they tortured the brothers. But state prosecutor Zuzana Zamoravcova said: 'Their aim was to make the boys blindly serve their religious goals.' Judge Pavel Goth said as he sentenced the women: 'Their aim was to create a person with a completely broken will. Ondrej and Jakub were repeatedly psychologically and physically tyrannised and held in locked rooms.' Another defendant, 34-year-old Barbora Skrlova, was also jailed for five years for her part in the torture. Three others who took part in the abuse were also given jail terms. Hana Basova, 28, and Jan Skrla, 25, were sentenced to seven years each while another man, Jan Turek, was jailed for five years. Skrlova had posed as an innocent 13-year-old girl when police arrived to free the boys. She later ran away to Norway but was traced earlier this year by Czech police who brought her back to face trial. Mauerova at first admitted abusing her children but she said she had been manipulated by her sister Katerina and Skrlova. All three of them had been part of the Grail Movement cult which claims to have hundreds of followers in Britain as well as tens of thousands of others world wide. The sick abuse was discovered when a neighbour installed a TV baby monitor to keep watch on his new daughter. But it picked up the signal from an identical monitor next door showing one of the victims beaten, naked and chained in a cellar. Mauerova had installed it so she could gloat over her victims' suffering from the comfort of her kitchen. Culled
from: The
Daily Mail |
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January 21, 2011 Today’s Ruthless Yet Truly Morbid Fact! The Janissaries, members of the Turkish sultan’s five-centuries-old elite guard, had bcome a dangerous and unruly force in the empire of the Ottoman Turks by 1826. Resisting the sultan’s attempts to introduce Western army formations and drilling, the Janissaries finally broke into open revolt. On June 10 some 20,000 gathered at Atmeidan, a square in Constantinople, and soon after, began looting and rioting. Sultan Mahmud II, alarmed at the ruthless power wielded by the Janissaries, had been looking for an occasion to get rid of them. The time had come. The sultan surrounded the Atmeidan with 60,000 loyal soldiers and began firing grapeshot into the encircled hordes of rebels. Many of the Janissaries fled to a nearby barracks, but the sultan’s relentless forces set fire to it while also peppering the burning building with grapeshot. In the following days, other Janissaries who had escaped were hunted down and beheaded. In the capital alone, well over 20,000 of them were killed. Culled from: The Pessimist’s Guide To History |
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