Fun_People Archive
8 Jun
Weirdness [432] - 17May96

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Sat,  8 Jun 96 14:00:23 -0700
To: Fun_People
Subject: Weirdness [432] - 17May96

Excerpted-from: WEIRDNUZ.432 (News of the Weird, May 17, 1996)
		by Chuck Shepherd

* The New York Observer reported in March that business for therapists who
perform colonic irrigations increased dramatically following Princess
Diana's recent revelation that she favors the treatment.  Membership in the
professionals' International Association for Colon Hydrotherapy has grown
to about 1,000, and one New Yorker complained she could hardly get an
appointment to have her colon "toned" because of all the "models" "lined up
out the door" of her therapist.  As a former IACH president said, "It gets
tacky in [the colon]."  Get a colonic, she said:  "There's probably macaroni
and cheese in there from 1978." [New York Observer, 3-25-96]

* In March, two convicted rapists, Allan Wayne McLaurin and Darron
Bennalford Anderson, were re-sentenced by a jury in Tulsa, Okla., after an
appeals court said the original sentences totaling 6,475 years were based
on faulty jury instructions.  This time, the jury said the crimes were worth
an additional 260 centuries in prison--a total of 21,250 years to McLaurin
and 11,250 to Anderson.  (Two weeks later, the same Oklahoma appeals court
upheld a 1994 sentence, for the man who raped a 3- year-old girl, of 30,000
years.  The only dissenting judge said he would have ordered the six
5,000-year sentences to be served concurrently instead of consecutively.)
[Daily Oklahoman-AP, 3- 23-96, 4-3-96]

CRIMINAL DEFENSES

* San Francisco police officer Francis Hogue was convicted in April of
kidnaping a woman and forcing her to perform oral sex on him in his patrol
car.  He had denied the charges and brought his ex-wife and a former
girlfriend into court to swear that he disliked receiving oral sex. [San
Francisco Chronicle, 4-16-96]

* In Toledo, Ohio, the lawyer for Robert Wheeler, who had confessed to
putting a pipe bomb in his wife's car--a bomb that exploded, killing her in
April--told reporters his client was innocent:  "People blow up empty cars
all the time.  Who knows [the motive]?  There's been no indication what his
intent was." [Toledo Blade, Apr96; Dayton Daily News, 4-12-96]

FETISHES ON PARADE

* Physician Bryant Litchfield went to trial in Edmonton, Alberta, in April
on charges that he improperly fondled nine female patients during office
exams.  One of the women said Litchfield asked her to sit on him during a
1988 exam.  (The case was originally brought in 1991 involving seven women.
Litchfield's lawyer delayed the trial by asking an appeals court for
separate trials for each charge, but the appeals court divided the case only
into two trials:  "above the waist" fondling charges and "below the waist"
fondling charges.  In 1991, Dr. Litchfield was found not guilty of the
"below the waist" charges, but that verdict was set aside by Canada's
Supreme Court, which ordered a new, combined trial and included two new
complainants.) [Edmonton Journal, 4-10-96, 4-17-96]

* In March in Watford City, N. Dak., rancher Robert Mead Jr., dissatisfied
that two beers he was served at the local American Legion were warm, left
and came back with two rifles, which he used to take two customers hostage
in a nine-hour standoff.  One police officer was killed. [Hartford Courant,
3-22-96]

* In November, in Columbus, Ohio, Kathleen Kyanko, 29, was sentenced to a
month in jail for felonious assault.  According to the prosecutor, Kyanko
had been captured on tape offering to hire a man to break the arms or legs
of car dealer Dave Gill because Gill's dealership had installed a car alarm
for her but would not give a warranty. [AP wirecopy, 11-9-95]

Copyright 1996, Universal Press Syndicate.  All rights reserved.
No commercial use may be made of the material or of the name
News of the Weird.

© 1996 Peter Langston