Decidedly Grim

Today’s Fraudulent Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Two men wheeled a dead man through the streets in an office chair to a check-cashing store and tried to cash his Social Security check before being arrested on fraud charges. David J. Dalaia and James O’Hare pushed Virgilio Cintron’s body from the Manhattan apartment that O’Hare and Cintron shared to Pay-O-Matic, about a block away, spokesman Paul Browne said. “The witnesses saw the two pushing the chair with Cintron flopping from side to side and the two individuals propping him up and keeping him from flopping from side to side,” Browne said. The men left Cintron’s body outside the store, went inside and tried to cash his $355 check. The store’s clerk, who knew Cintron, asked the men where he was, and O’Hare told the clerk they would go and get him. A police detective who was having lunch at a restaurant next to the check-cashing store noticed a crowd forming around Cintron’s body, and “it’s immediately apparent to him that Cintron is dead,” Browne said. The detective called uniformed New York Police Department officers at a nearby precinct. Emergency medical technicians arrived as O’Hare and Dalaia were preparing to wheel Cintron’s body into the check-cashing store. Police arrested Dalaia and O’Hare there. Cintron’s body was taken to a hospital morgue. The medical examiner’s office told police it appeared Cintron, 66, had died of natural causes within the previous 24 hours. “He was deceased in the apartment when he was removed by these two,” Browne said. Dalaia and O’Hare, both 65, were being held by police and faced check fraud charges.

Culled from: AP
Generously submitted by: Katchaya

I think it’s so unfair the way that we discriminate against the dead in this society.  I mean, just because this guy was heartbeat-impaired, is that any reason he shouldn’t be able to cash his check?  And if he needs friends to help him out, why should we judge?  Disgusting…

Today’s Pressurized Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On March 18, 1965, Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first man to perform a space walk.  He is said to have sweated away 12 pounds while attempting to re-enter the spacecraft.  His suit had been pressurized to the extent that he could not bend his knees and had to go in head first, rather than feet first, as he had been trained for.  He got stuck trying to close the hatch behind him and had to lower his suit pressure to get back in – a potentially lethal move, akin to a diver ascending too quickly.

The NASA History Office account includes an intriguing Cold War detail: Leonov, it claims, had been given a suicide pill in case he couldn’t get back in and crewmate Pavel Belyayev was forced to “leave him in orbit.”  Given that death from cyanide, the poison most commonly associated with suicide pills, is slower and more ghastly than death from having one’s oxygen supply cut off, there would have been little call for the pill.  (As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.)

Culled from: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

This book also talks about the “deadly rapture of space” almost claiming astronaut Ed White during the first American spacewalk on Gemini IV.  Apparently, White was so entranced by the view of Earth from outside the capsule, he refused to come back inside for several minutes after he was ordered to do so, finally sulking back in with the comment, “This is the saddest moment of my life.”  Then, it took White 25 minutes to get back through the hatch.  All the while, he knew that if he were to pass out from lack of oxygen, his fellow astronaut was under orders to cut him loose.  Talk about racing the clock!

Today’s Laced Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Examples of some of the cyanide poisoning cases investigated by the New York state court system in the first two decades of the 20th century:

• A Westchester man, irritated one evening because his wife wouldn’t fetch his cigarettes, placed a box of poisoned candy on the sitting room table and waited for her to sample it.
• A fired Mayville county clerk sent a box of homemade candy laced with cyanide to the woman who had replaced her.
• A White Plains woman, irritated by the neighbor’s barking dog, substituted a bottle of milk containing cyanide for one that the milkman delivered.
• A newly married woman in Olean hadn’t wanted a stepson so she’d sent the six-year-old boy a box of poisoned chocolates while he was vacationing in Missouri, nearly killing the child’s aunt, who ate a piece when her nephew shared his candy.

Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook

Today’s Speculative Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On February 20, 1835 the naturalist Charles Darwin, ashore while his ship HMS Beagle was anchored off the Chilean coast, lay down to rest in an apple orchard.  Suddenly the ground beneath him began to shake.  Staggering to his feet, he could barely stand up, and later described the feeling that “the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, had moved beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid.”

Even so, Darwin had yet to realize the awesome destructive power of the earthquake.  Later he saw that the port of Talcahuano looked “as if a thousand great ships had been wrecked.”  Battered ships and their cargoes, roofs of houses, and other debris lay piled on the shore, and the town itself had been wrecked by the earthquake and tidal waves.

The inland town of Concepcion was flattened within six seconds by the quake, as the ground buckled and tossed like a wild sea, and entire blocks of houses collapsed.  Overall, some 5,000 persons died in the calamity.  Darwin, though horrified by the carnage, nevertheless used the experience of the earthquake to speculate on a theory of the origin of continents.

Culled from: The Pessimist’s Guide To History

That’s my Darwin!

Today’s Precipitous Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Alta is a ski resort in the middle of one of the most notoriously dangerous mountain chains in North America, Utah’s Wasatch, just east of Salt Lake City.  With peaks rising sharply to 12,000 feet, the Wasatch are battered by weather from three directions.  Winter snowfalls of 35 to 40 feet are not uncommon, and on such precipitous slopes, the snow does not grip the mountainside long before it cascades downward.  Once a gaudy silver mining camp, Alta was so susceptible to avalanches that, in a vestige of Victorian concern for femininity, women were not allowed to stay in the mining camps in winter.  The town had been nearly obliterated in the winter of 1863 by avalanches and forest fires that broke out when coal and woodstoves were overturned.  With all the anchoring trees either knocked down, burned up, or cut for lumber or firewood, avalanches were worse than ever.  In the winter of 1873-74, a slide destroyed half the town and killed 60 people.  Ten years later, another avalanche in the same town killed 12 more, and in February of the following year 16 people were killed and the town almost completely destroyed.  An unpublished masters thesis by Utah State University’s Anthony Bowman has estimated that between 1865 and 1915 up to 250 people were killed by avalanches in Alta’s Little Cottonwood Canyon alone.

Culled from: The White Death

Today’s Camouflaged Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

A man dressed in a military-style “ghillie” suit and apparently trying to provoke reports of a Bigfoot sighting in northwest Montana was struck by two cars and killed on August 26, 2012. The man was standing in the right-hand lane of U.S. Highway 93 south of Kalispell on Sunday night when he was hit by the first car. A second car hit the man as he lay in the roadway. Flathead County officials identified the man as Randy Lee Tenley, 44, of Kalispell. Trooper Jim Schneider said motives were ascertained during interviews with friends, and alcohol may have been a factor but investigators were awaiting tests. “He was trying to make people think he was Sasquatch so people would call in a Sasquatch sighting,” Schneider said. “You can’t make it up. I haven’t seen or heard of anything like this before. Obviously, his suit made it difficult for people to see him.” Ghillie suits are a type of full-body clothing made to resemble heavy foliage and used to camouflage military snipers. Tenley was struck by vehicles driven by two girls, ages 15 and 17, who were unable to stop in time.

Culled from: Daily Inter Lake
Generously submitted by: Aimee

This guy has to be a Darwin Award winner, right??

Today’s Fashionable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The noted gentleman astronomer Tycho Brahe, who lost the bridge of his nose in a drunken sword duel in a dimly lit banquet hall in 1564, was said to have ordered a replacement nose of silver.  The metal was fashionable and, more important, curtailed infections.  The only drawback was that its obviously metallic color forced Brahe to carry jars of foundation with him, which he was always smoothing over his nasal prosthesis.

Culled from: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

Today’s Determined, Planned, Vicious Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

A nurse has been jailed for trying to stab his ex-partner to death three days after she ordered him to leave. Marion Powell, 52, of Pembroke Dock, only just survived the “determined, planned, vicious” attack by Kelvin Bull-De’ath, Swansea Crown Court heard. She suffered 16 stab wounds to her chest, arms, leg, head and jaw after he broke into her home in July, 2007. Bull-De’ath, 50, who worked at Withybush Hospital was jailed for 11 years after admitting attempted murder. Kevin Jones, prosecuting, told the court Miss Powell had been in a two year relationship with Bull-De’ath, who lived with her in Charles Thomas Avenue. She later described the relationship as “mental torture” and told police how on July 14 she asked him to leave. Bull-De’ath did as he was asked, but immediately began planning her death. Three days later he armed himself with a blow torch, hammer and chisel and at 0300 BST headed for her home, having first written a letter to his family. He spent a full hour breaking in, eventually using the blow torch to melt a section of double glazing until a window panel fell out. Miss Powell recalled how she awoke to find him sitting on her bed holding a knife and shining a torch into her eyes. He told her: “I have come to kill you. I can’t live with you and I will certainly not live without you. So this is the end. You are dead.” Bull-De’ath then stabbed her so many times the knife broke. After the knife fell apart he took Miss Powell downstairs and continued the attack using two knifes from the kitchen. The court heard that Bull-De’ath began complaining that the knives were blunt and he asked Miss Powell where he could find something sharper. She told him where and while he was looking she made a telephone call to her sister in law Ann Powell and her husband David, a special constable. As they arrived Bull-De’ath escaped from the back of the house. He was tracked and found by a police dog. The court heard that Miss Powell would be left with permanent scars from some of the 16 stab wounds and may need plastic surgery. Passing sentence Mr Justice Evans said Miss Powell had been deeply affected by the attack and could no longer live in the house or continue to work. “This was a determined, pre-planned and vicious attack upon her in order to kill her,” he said. “You broke into her home and carried out the attack when she was asleep in bed.”

Culled from: BBC
Generously submitted by: Pascal

Okay…

1) He asked her for a sharper knife!

2) Bull-De’ath!

Today’s Notorious Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The use of poison in the furtherance of political ends is supposed to have reached a fine art in Italy in the 1500s and 1600s.  The most notorious practitioners were Cesare Borgia (1476-1507) and his sister Lucrezia (1480-1519) whose names are still synonymous with such depravity.  (Lucrezia may even have borne a child as a result of an incestuous relationship with her father the Pope.)  The pair employed a white powder they referred to as La Cantarella and which was almost certainly arsenic trioxide.  It was said they got the recipe for making it from the Spanish Moors, and indeed their father was a Spanish cardinal called Rodrigo Borgia who came Pope Alexander VI in 1492.  He died in 1503 after attending a banquet with his son Cesare and it was even rumoured that his death was caused by him eating poisoned food and wine that was destined for someone else.  This seems unlikely because Cesare was also taken ill, although he recovered. Lucrezia died in 1519 at the age of 39, apparently in a state of grace, having given up her scandalous life for one of religious devotion.  Her brother died in a skirmish in 1507 aged 31.

Culled from: The Elements of Murder