September 1, 1998
On February 19, 1997,a 16-year-old student opened fire with a shotgun
in a common area at the Bethel, Alaska, high school. School principal Ron
Edwards and classmate Josh Palacious were killed. Two other students were
wounded. Authorities later accused two other students of knowing the
shootings would take place. Evan Ramsey was sentenced to two 99-year
terms. (USA
Today, suggested by Kevin Frost)
September 2, 1998
In 1900, business men from Quebec organized the construction of a
bridge accross the St. Lawerence River. They hired an American company
to design the bridge. They designed quite a nice and elegant one,
although it was flawed. The Chief engineer (Theodore Cooper) knew this
but chose to keep quiet. In 1907, during the construction of the
bridge,
workers noticed that there was a bend in one of the bridge's chords.
Each day it grew noticably worse. When they tried to straighten it, it
just grew worse. So, the engineers went to New York to discuss the
situation. Mr. Cooper realized that the flaw was showing and ordered all
construction on the bridge to stop. But it was too late. On August 27th,
1907, the bridge collapsed before Mr. Cooper could get the news to
Quebec. In less than a second the entire structure fell 50 metres into
the St. Lawrence. Many workers who jumped off the bridge were simply
crushed by it when it fell. All in all, 75 people died that day. Nine
years later in 1916, a stronger bridge was designed and was being
completed. The last piece, the center, was being hoisted from barges in
the river when a chunk of steel fell off and the section fell. Thirteen
people died. Finally on September 20, 1917, the Quebec bridge was
finished, 17 years and 89 lives after it had begun. It is said that all
iron rings worn by Canadian engineers are part of a girder from that
bridge as a reminder of the disasters that come from mistakes. (Donated
by Adam
Taggart, The
Quebec Bridge Disaster).
September 3, 1998
In 1840, King Louis Philippe requested British permission to remove
Napoleon's remains from St. Helena. Permission was granted, and a
delegation including the king's son, the Price de Joinville, and many
of those who had been close to Napoleon traveled to St. Helena to
bring him home. Because of rumors that lime had been used by the
British to destroy the body, the coffin with its triple layering of
mahogany, lead, and tinplate was opened. Onlookers wept as they saw
their emperor again after 19 years, remarkably preserved, with
lifelike color and perfectly recognizable features. After a few
minutes, the old coffin was resealed and placed inside a new ebony
sarcophagus. (The People's Almanac
#2)
September 5, 1998
On March 12th, 1857, a train from Toronto was heading for Hamilton.
The train began to cross over a small bridge over the Desjardins
Canal. It never made it across. There were about 100 passengers aboard,
including John C Henderson, and Sam Zimmerman. Now, the bridge was
made of wood, and for some reason the train stopped. People heard a loud
crack, and the locomotive fell through the bridge, dragging the coal,
baggage and first passenger car with it. The second passanger car
teetered on the bridge for a few seconds and then fell. 59 people
died. It was ruled that the locomotive had broken an axle just before
crossing on to the bridge. The timbers couldn't withstand the smashing
impact of steel wheels and the train fell through. Now, all bridges are
made of steel. (Adam Taggart)
September 6, 1998
In California in 1987, a professional ash-scatterer was forced to
pay $27 million to 5,000 families after he was found guilty of using
the ashes to fertilize his farm. (Fiendish Freya
Harris)
September 7, 1998
The first motorized hearses appeared in the United States and
England in 1910. (Fiendish Freya Harris)
September 8, 1998
A 24-year-old Hayward man trying to retrieve his hat from a restricted
area beneath the Top Gun roller coaster at Santa Clara California's Great
America theme park died Monday after he was struck in the head by the leg
of a passenger dangling from the speeding ride. Hector Villegas Mendoza
climbed a 6-foot fence posted with warnings and was beneath the first drop
of the ride at 2:20 p.m. when the passenger coach descended and the
rider's leg struck him in the head, said Santa Clara police Sgt. Anton
Morec. Top Gun is a popular suspended coaster on which passengers hang
from the track in harnesses with their legs swinging free. The ride
reaches speeds of 50 mph. "He had been on the ride earlier and had lost
his hat," Paramount's Great America spokesman Tim Chanaud said. "He went
in there to retrieve his hat and he was struck in the head." Great
America paramedics attempted to revive Mendoza, who was at the park on
Labor Day with his wife and brother-in-law, but he died an hour later
at Valley Medical Center. The 28-year-old woman who struck him was
hospitalized with a fractured leg, Chanaud said. (San
Jose Mercury News)
September 9, 1998
Infamous pirate Blackbeard was the terror of the high seas in the
early 1700's. He never turned down a battle, even with the Royal
Navy, whom he soundly defeated. Eventually, the Royal Navy got
their revenge. During a ferocious battle in which all of his crew were
killed, Blackbeard was eventually felled by several men who swarmed
upon him as he valiantly attempted to fight them off. One
slashed open his throat and it was all over for Blackbeard. An
autopsy revealed five pistol wounds and twenty severe sword cuts to
his body. Blackbeard's head was cut off and his body tossed into the
sea. In order to collect his reward, Lt. Maynard brought Blackbeard's
head to Virginia as proof of his victory. Rumor has it Blackbeard's
skull found its way to a tavern in Williamsburg where it was made into
a drinking goblet. Nothing would have pleased the old pirate
more. (The Big Book Of Bad)
September 10, 1998
11-year-old Cody Fox was late in arriving to his home in the rural
northern California community of Corning on September 6, 1998. His mother
phoned the police to report him missing at 5:35 p.m. At 6:00 she called
back to say she had found her son in an unoccupied mobile home and that he
had been attacked by dogs and needed medical attention. Further
investigation revealed that Cody had been attacked by a pack of anywhere
from 8 to 18 dogs while walking past his neighbor's house. The narrow
country road had blood stains from edge to edge for 17 feet. Cody,
grievously injured, was rushed to UC Davis Medical Center with severe bite
wounds all over his face and body, particularly on his arm, which was
amputated. Police investigated the home of the dogs' owner, Jim Wick,
and found a blood-smeared, torn, lifesize human replica hanging in a grove
of tall manzanita bushes just outside the low wire fence that bordered the
side of the road, indicating that the dogs were being trained to attack
humans. Animal Control officers responded to the residence and snared 15
dogs, including pit bulls, Rottweillers, and bulldogs. (The Chico
Enterprise-Record)
September 11, 1998
Tracy Edwards was "The One That Got Away" - the man who nearly
became Jeffrey Dahmer's 18th victim. Edwards had met Dahmer in a
shopping mall and Dahmer had invited Tracy and his friends to an
impromptu party at his apartment. However, unbeknownst to Edwards,
Dahmer gave them the wrong address so he could get Edwards alone.
While sitting in Dahmer's apartment sipping beer, Dahmer put his arms
around Edwards and propositioned him. Edwards, a straight man, was
instantly awake and said he was going home. At that point, Dahmer
placed handcuffs on his arm and led him by knifepoint into the stench
ridden bedroom. On the wall of the bedroom were photographs of
Dahmer's butchered victims. Edwards realized the stench was coming
from a barrel beside the window - and he could imagine what it
contained (three male torsos, as a matter of fact). Dahmer told Edwards
if he didn't cooperate he would cut his heart out and Edwards swung his
right fist in a punch that knocked Dahmer sideways, then kicked him in
the stomach and ran for the door. When he had made his escape, he led
police to the apartment of horror. When police entered the apartment,
they found Dahmer lying on the floor, handcuffed. Then one of the
policemen opened the door of a refrigerator and gasped, "Oh my God!
There's a goddamn head in here!" That was the moment Dahmer began to
scream - a horrible, unearthly scream like an animal. (Crimes And
Punishment: The Illustrated Crime Encyclopedia,
Vol. XI)
September 13, 1998
On April 12, 1814, after surrendering for the first time but before
being shipped off to Elba, Napoleon attempted suicide by swallowing a
vial of poison which he had been carrying with him for some time. Instead
of killing him, however, the weakened toxin merely gave him the hiccups.
He hiccuped so violently that he vomited before the poison had had a
chance to do any real harm. (The People's Almanac #2)
September 15, 1998
Russians take their ice fishing very seriously. So seriously, in
fact, that more than 100 Russians a year die while ice fishing. Last
year, when 75 anglers near St. Petersburg were swept away on a platform of
ice and were rescued nine hours later by helicopter, fights broke out over
which ones got to be the last ones aboard so that they could remain
fishing even longer. (News Of
The Weird)
September 16, 1998
There is an island between the Bronx and Long Island called Hart
Island. If you look on a map, you'll see two big islands in the Long
Island Sound. The bigger one to the west is City Island, and the smaller
one east of that is Hart Island. What makes it particularly morbid is the
function it serves. The city uses it as a potter's field, which is (if
you remember the Christian story of Judas Iscariot's 30 pieces of silver
being used to purchase such a field - of course, I don't) a graveyard for
unknowns. Vagrants, unclaimed bodies, and stillborn babies (who make up
about half of the island's population) are buried there in large trenches
by prison inmates. The babies are put in "shoebox-size coffins stacked
five high and 20 across" while adults go "three high, two across" for a
total
of 1650 per trench. Limbs and organs from local hospitals are also buried
there in boxes marked "refuse". Several thousand new bodies are interred
there every year, each placed in a plastic bag before going into boxes
the city buys for $54 each. With that many residents, Hart Island has a
larger population that all but 10 cities in the U.S. The island was also
used in the past as "a Union training camp, a Confederate prison, a
yellow-fever quarantine, a 19th-century lunatic asylum, a workhouse for
aged inmates, a prison for World War II German soldiers, an antiaircraft
missile base, a rehab center for the homeless and drug addicts, and a
driving school for chronic traffic offenders." Aside from the concrete
slabs that mark a grouping of bodies, there are sometimes flowers on
"graves", mostly for the dead babies. In addition, there is "a large
obelisk to the Union dead, a tall white stone marked 'Peace', and a cross
beside the baby field that says, 'He Calleth His Own by Name.'"
(Jeff
Worthless, The Wall Street Journal, Hart
Island)
September 18, 1998
In 1812, Napoleon led the French Grand Army (600,000 strong) into
Russia in order to teach the Czar a lesson because he would not
close ports to British shipping. It was to prove a huge mistake. On
September 7, at Borodino, 70 mi. west of Moscow, the French defeated
the Russians in a Pyrrhic victory: 30,000 French soldiers and 43
French generals were killed, while the Russians lost 43,000. Napoleon
called it "the most terrible" of his battles. On September 14, the
army entered Moscow to find it deserted. Moscow's governor had ordered
it burned prior to Napoleon's arrival. On October 19, having tried
unsuccessfully for five weeks to negotiate with the czar, Napoleon,
fearful of winter's approach, headed west with his Grand Army into the
long nightmare of the retreat. Never had the Russian winter with its
blizzards and intense cold come so suddenly and so early. The men
suffered from starvation, dysentery, frostbite, and hallucinations.
Instances of cannibalism were alleged. Of the original 600,000
troops, only about 100,000 returned from Russia. (The People's Almanac
#2)
September 19, 1998
A Texas hiker, who is believed to have accidentally started a
forest fire just south of the Oregon-California state line, died from
injuries sustained in a fall off the trail. The body of Bobby Drew
Stacker, 44, was recovered September 15, 1998 just off the historic
Kelsey Trail, about 15 miles southwest of Gasquet. Stacker, of
Amarillo, Texas, apparently slipped off the trail sometime Sunday
night. It was already dark at the time and he didn't have a
flashlight, said detective Gene McManus. "In an attempt to gain
attention, he used a lighter that he had," McManus said. "We believe
the lighter accidentally caught the nearby brush on fire, which
initiated the forest fire." Stacker's body was not burned and it's
believed he died of injuries he sustained after falling about 600 feet
down the steep slope. (Associated Press)
September 20, 1998
Before it even had a wrinkle, 2-year-old Mycha Lee Herbert's face was
torn off. While he was playing Sept. 4 in his back yard in Tulsa, Okla.,
the toddler's visage was reduced to bone as he was savaged by the family's
pit bull, Blue. Only Mycha's eyes and forehead were intact. No cheeks.
No nose. No eyelids. No flesh. By most medical accounts, Mycha should
have died that day. But now, under a constantly changing mask of bandages,
the boy has a new face. Sculpted from the flesh of his legs, forearms and
abdomen during 39 hours of surgery this week, Mycha has a mouth again.
"It's a mouth that will not smile but will eat, so we're thanking God
for that," said Mycha's aunt, Delisa Herbert-Cabrellis. "They created a
face." Mycha lay in a Tulsa hospital for three days before he was flown
to Dallas where a team of plastic surgeons frantically improvised. "We
happened to be in the right or wrong place at the time, depending on how
you look at it," said Jay Burns, one of eight surgeons from Children's
Medical Center of Dallas who performed the operation. "We all began to
realize what it was going to take." The damage was so catastrophic that
the plastic surgeons could not use traditional skin grafts. "I've never
seen a case where all of the facial muscles were gone," Burns said. "I've
done my share of reconstructive surgery, and I was overwhelmed." After
briefly considering the technically possible, but ethically troubling,
solution of transplanting a face from a cadaver onto Mycha, the doctors
decided to use a traditional procedure known as a free flap. In a free
flap, doctors harvest a section of flesh from another part of the body,
sew it onto the damaged area and sculpt it as needed. The procedure,
essentially a composite graft, involves reconnecting nerves and tiny
veins. In Mycha's case, five such interconnected procedures were needed.
The risk, Burns said, was that if one free flap attachment failed, the
other four could fail in succession. The child will have multiple
reconstructive surgeries throughout his life, Burns said. Even though
Mycha has some muscular control, he will never have a normal face. Mycha
still has no nose. In a year or so, doctors will take one of his ribs to
fashion one. "He's going to need a lot of love," Burns said. "This kid
still has to deal with this defect for the rest of his life." (The
Associated
Press)
September 22, 1998
Frederick Fleet was the lookout who spotted the iceberg in
Titanic's path on the fateful night of April 14, 1912. He survived
the wreck, rowing a lifeboat of women to safety. Fleet worked at sea
until 1936 and in his final years sold newspapers ("just to while away
the time," he said) in his home of Southampton, where he spent most
nights drinking beer alone at the local workingmen's club. "He seemed
a sad, lonely man," said Titanic historian Bruce Ticehurst. "His
wife, Eva, was the only person he related to." Shortly after her
death in 1965, Eva's brother, whose house the couple had shared asked
Fleet, 76, to move on. "The next morning," says Ticehurst. "the
brother-in-law pulled open the curtains, and there was Frederick
hanging from [a clothes post] in the garden." (People,
3/16/98)
September 23, 1998
Just months before the liberation of the Auschwitz-Berkenau death camp,
when it was already known that the Russian army was approaching, the SS
caught wind of the fact that the last of the Sonderkommando--the squads of
Jewish prisoners formed to shepherd their fellows to the gas chamber--
were planning an uprising. They determined to eliminate them all. On
October 7, 1944, as the SS were forming a detail of three hundred members
of the Sonderkommando for some outside work (this was thought to be a ruse
to separate and execute them) the Sonderkommando began pelting the SS with
stones and drove them off. They packed crematorium IV with explosives they
had "organized" or stolen, and blew it up. Eighty to one hundred trucks of
SS men arrived and the Sonderkommando fought them with stolen machine guns
and grenades they had been stockpiling; the SS responded in kind and by
unleashing fifty attack dogs. Sonderkommando in other units rose up too;
some seized crematorium II and threw an SS man and a kapo into the furnace
alive. Some men cut holes in the barbed wire and fled, but in the wrong
direction, remaining within the larger confines of the extended camp. The
SS trapped some in a barn and set fire to it, and hunted others down in
the woods; by the end of the day, hundreds of members of the
Sonderkommando had been burned or shot to death. After the revolt was put
down, the remaining two hundred members of the Sonderkommando were
executed, some with flamethrowers. (The Auschwitz
Alphabet)
September 24, 1998
The USS Thresher, commissioned on August 3, 1958, was the first of a
new class of submarine, designed for optimum performance of her sonar and
weapons systems. Thresher was capable of diving deeper and running more
silently than any other submarine of her time. On the morning of April 10,
1963, Thresher proceeded to rendezvous with USS Skylark off the coast of
New England during routine testing manuevers. At 7:47 AM Thresher reported
to Skylark, "We are commencing our deep dive". From 7:47 until 9:13 the
dive appeared to be going well, with Thresher reporting her depth and
course changes to Skylark. At 9:13 AM Thresher reported to Skylark that,
"We are experiencing minor difficulties, we have a positive up angle, and
are attempting to blow. Will keep you informed". Nothing further was heard
until 9:16, when Skylark received a garbled transmission. Again at 9:17
Skylark received a second garbled transmission with partial words that
appeared to be, "Nine Hundred North". No further transmissions were
received and at 9:18 Skylark detected a high energy, low frequency
disturbance, which was most likely the sound created by the implosion of
the Thresher's hull as she exceeded crush depth and broke apart, killing
all 129 crewmembers. An investigation determined that the probable cause
of the accident was a faulty piping system that failed, causing the ship
to sink uncontrollably. (USS Thresher - A Tribute
To Those Sailors On Eternal Patrol)
September 25, 1998
Madame Tussaud opened her wax museum in 1802. She got her start making
death masks of guillotine victims during the Reign of Terror. (City
Of The Silent)
September 26, 1998
A 66-year-old nursing home patient died in Jackson, Mississippi
after being bitten hundreds of times by fire ants that swarmed over
her while she lay in bed. Nell Rein, who had Alzheimer's disease,
was found covered in fire ants when employees checked on her during
the early morning of August 30, 1998. She died four days later from heart
failure brought on by physiological stress, according to her
physician. (The Associated Press)
September 27, 1998
In Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1853, Dr. Alexander Wood devised the
hollow metallic needle, attached it to a syringe and called the
invention a "hypodermic syringe". Wood first used his invention to
inject morphine into a surgical patient in 1853. The hypodermic
syringe gained wide acceptance and was used extensively, especially in
the American Civil War. Unfortunately, this device accounted for
400,000 American soldiers' becoming addicted to narcotics during that
war. (The People's Almanac #2)
September 30, 1998
Legendary schoolboy basketball star Richie Adams - who traded a career
in pro basketball for a drug-fueled career of crime - was convicted
on September 28, 1998 of stomping a 15-year-old Bronx girl to death. Adams
was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter despite an O.J.-esque
defense that the sneakers linked to the death did not fit him and that the
real killer was still at large. A medical examiner had testified that the
victim, Norma Rodriguez - Adams' neighbor in the Jackson Houses project -
died from being stomped in her head and neck. A shoe print on her neck
matched a pair of bloody, size-13 basketball sneakers. The left shoe was
found near the body - the right one in Adams' bedroom. He claimed he
didn't know how the shoe got there and that the police must have planted
it. Jurors didn't buy it. Their guilty verdict followed nearly four days
of deliberations, and a two-week trial featuring eyewitness testimony from
a terrified neighbor, who viewed the vicious stomping from the peephole of
her apartment door. Adams, a 6-foot-9 lefty, was twice named player of the
year at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. But the day after he was
drafted by the Washington Bullets in 1985, he was busted for stealing a
sports car, ruining him for the NBA. Since then, he has bounced in and
out of jail on three felony convictions for robbery and grand larceny in
Manhattan and The Bronx. (The New
York Post)
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