Decidedly Grim

Today’s Noisy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

A 5-year-old girl admitted drowning an 18-month-old boy in the bathtub because he was noisy. The victim, Jermaine Johnson Jr., died Friday, June 3, 2011, in Kansas City, Mo. in what police at first believed was a tragic accident. But the 5-year-old girl later admitted to a social worker she killed Jermaine, saying she did not like the toddler and found him too noisy. Jermaine, who lived in the St. Louis area, had been staying with a relative in Kansas City. Police said he, the 5-year-old and other children were left in the care of a mentally disabled 16-year-old girl while an adult went to pick someone up at the bus. Police said they are unsure how to proceed with a 5-year-old homicide suspect.

Culled from: UPI
Generously submitted by: Aimee

Whenever I read a story like this, I always think… how would you, as a parent, react to the child who killed your other child? I mean, on the one hand, bad girl, BAD GIRL!!!! She definitely gets put on a very long time out for something like this!

But on the other hand, the kid was noisy…

Facts

Just got home from seeing Hobo With A Shotgun. The movie was a hoot. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves over-the-top funny gore movies like Grindhouse or Kill Bill. The dialogue had me howling and some of the gore you just have to see to believe. Hysterical!

Library

Today’s Banging Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Jimmy Lee Gray was convicted of the murder of three-year-old Deressa Jean Scales in 1976, after kidnapping and sodomizing her. At the time of this murder, he was free on parole following a conviction in Arizona for the murder of a 16-year-old girl. He was executed on September 3, 1983 by the State of Mississippi by gas chamber. He became the first person to be executed in Mississippi since 1976 when the death penalty was reinstated. Here is an account of his execution:

The gas rose quickly, in a concentrated, small cloud. Executioners Hocutt and Jones still had their masks on and raised them sat the same time that Gray took three deep breaths and moaned lightly. Gray’s head swayed from side to side, drunkenly, and fell back. A few second later, his head dropped forward easily, went upright and swayed, then dropped again. It stopped moving altogether and he appeared to lose consciousness. Less than a minute had passed….

“God damn,” screamed executioner Bruce, elated that the execution had gone so smoothly. “I told you she’d still work.” Then a huge belching noise came from inside the chamber, and the words, “Oh, Jesus, no,” came to Hocutt’s mouth as he looked away from Bruce to the chamber. Later, he wouldn’t be able to remember if he actually said those words, or if his friend Ronnie Fulcher said, “He ain’t dead, Donald” or just conveyed it with his eyes.

Gray’s head was up and his eyes were wide open. A yellow foam sizzled from his mouth, and he was bucking up against the straps with what seemed like a superhuman effort, then collapsing, almost shriveling, into the chair. Two long groans came from deep in his throat, followed by a horrible gasp, and Hocutt looking imploringly at the doctors standing to the right of the chamber. “He’s dead,” said the one running the EKG machine. Hocutt stepped past Bruce to check it himself. The green line seemed, if not flat, then awfully low. Gray’s head fell again, then rose a second later as his shoulders squared up. His face was now contorted and red veins bulged in his neck as he stared directly ahead, roughly in Bruce’s direction. Then he banged his head back against the pole behind the death chair. The noise it made was hollow, metallic, and sickening, and seemed to reverberate in the silence of the death house.

Gray’s head slammed back again, then again a minute later, then twice in succession, hitting the metal pole so hard the second time the chamber shook. The foam had stopped sizzling in his mouth, but he still stared ahead at Bruce, who stared striaght back.

Gray finally stopped breathing for good eight minutes after the execution began.

Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row

Suffice to say, after this troublesome execution, they put padding around the metal pole so no one could cause such a fuss again.

Facts

Today’s Artistic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

A Portrait Of Camille

Posthumous mourning paintings were a publicly acknowledged and socially acceptable practice in the 19th century. Paintings were hung in public spaces like parlors. Artists placed advertisements in local newspapers offering the service on a regular basis How common these paintings were is only now being recognized. Grete Meilman, Vice President, the American Painting Department of Sotheby Parke-Bernet Inc., estimates that approximately seventy-five percent of the children’s portraits sold through Sotheby fall into this category. The obscurity of the genre is due to the fact that the deceased children are portrayed as if alive with “disguised” death symbols, that is, a willow tree in the background, or a wilted flower in the child’s hand. Sometimes the portrait contains nothing to indicate that it is a posthumous rendition.

With A Portrait of Camille by Shepard Alonzo Mount, documentary evidence of the use of these icons exists. In the artist’s portrait of Camille Mount, painted in 1868, the clouds do signify a posthumous rendering. Camille was Mount’s granddaughter, the child of Joshua Elliott Mount. Shepard was present when the infant died, the cause of her death ascribed to teething. From a life drawing taken while the child was ill, the artist composed a posthumous likeness, which he considered ‘one of the best portraits of a child that I ever painted’. In a letter to his son, William Shepard Mount, he wrote:

Alas! how everything fades from us… She was laid out in a beautiful casket and she looked like an angel – Her eyes were bright and heavenly ’til the last. I painted her with Mr. Searing’s [Camille's maternal grandfather] watch lying in the foreground. The hands pointing to the hour of her birth while she is seen moving up on a light cloud – the image of the lost Camille. She was in the habit of holding her Grandfather’s watch to her ear, and to all others who came around her, she did the same… Camille moves toward a shining star fixed in the heavens, while the pleasures of adoring grandfathers and ticking pocket watches remain behind.

Culled from: Secure The Shadow: Death and Photography in America

Now that I know that most child paintings from that era are of dead kids, I want one!!

Facts

Michael sent me the following information about desomorphine – a horrifying drug that is sweeping across Russia leaving ghastliness in its wake:

“The drug is called Krokodil (Crocodile) in Russia, where it’s cheap to make and therefore gaining popularity among the 2 million addicts there. The shit is a highly addictive and very nasty toxin that turns the skin scaly and then literally rots the flesh off the bone.”

I will warn you that these videos might possibly be the sickest, most disturbing clips I’ve ever seen – and you know that’s saying something!!! Michael put it quite well himself: “I spent 3 years working in a funeral home and this shit made me gag.”

First, here’s an article about the drug from the U.K. newspaper The Independent:
Krokodil: The Drug That Eats Junkies

38-second YouTube video showing damage to leg:

34-second YouTube video showing rotting hands and exposed bone in forearm:

And finally, a site called Morrison World Media has a link to a 14-minute video in Russian discussing the drug. This video is SICK, SICK, SICK!!!!! Many graphic scenes. The text on the banner reads “Monstrous sores, lesions of internal organs, painful death. Film FSKN ‘Semi-death’ -the impact of drugs on the human body, desomorphine.”

Morrison World Media

What a world, huh?

Ghastly!

Today’s Tiny Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

George “Tiny” Mercer was executed on January 6, 1989 in Missouri by lethal injection. He had been convicted of raping and murdering a waitress. After he and two other men had assaulted the girl repeatedly, Mercer strangled her and beat her on the head while screaming, “Die, you bitch, die!” “I’ve always been just like anybody else,” Tiny Mercer once told a reporter. “I’ve paid my taxes, just like any other citizen of the United States would do. I lived a normal life, just like everybody else did.” Many adjectives were used to describe Mercer during his trial, but “normal” sure as hell wasn’t one of them. Tiny was a long-time biker and the leader of two motorcycle gangs, The Rancid Riders and The Missing Links. (“My mother was a biker,” Mercer claimed. “It’s in my blood.”) The words “love” and “hate” were tattooed across the knuckles of his hands, while the Harley-Davidson logo and the words “Rancid Riders” were emblazoned across his back. He is also reported to have once yanked out some of his own front teeth with a pair of pliers during a motorcycle gang ritual. But years of prison life obviously served to mellow out the once “rancid” killer. He became a born-again Christian and divided his reading time equally between motorcycle magazines and the Bible. The kinder, gentler Mercer even offered the prison warden a burrito left over from his last meal just prior to his execution, proving that even the worst criminals are capable of performing a “tiny” gesture of good will.

Last Meal: Barbecued beefsteak, barbecued ribs, tacos, burritos, French fries, a tossed salad with oil and vinegar dressing, and a large Coca-Cola.

Culled from: Last Suppers: Famous Final Meals From Death Row

I always roll my eyes whenever the implication is made that a becoming a born-again Christian is somehow equal to becoming a better person. Some of the most vivid Morbid Facts ever were committed in the name of religion, after all.

Facts

I am extremely miffed to just discovery that this fascinating looking exhibition – “Mummies of the World” – was just on display in Milwaukee, a short excursion from The Castle DeSpair, and I didn’t realize it. Well, now it’s playing in Philadelphia, so perhaps you East Coasters can take solace in that. Is it too much to hope that it might backtrack to Chicago next???

Mummies Of The World

Sightseer

Today’s Motoring Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Author James Agee (famous for his quote, “How far we all come away from ourselves… you can never go home again” in his novel A Death In The Family) died in 1955 at the age of forty-five when he suffered a massive coronary while riding in a New York City taxi cab. According to the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, a typical Manhattan resident will take a hundred cab rides a year, and have only 0.4% chance of dying in one over a ten-year period.

Culled from: Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages

Facts

Today’s Bungled Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Mississippi’s first execution by cyanide gas asphyxiation was of Gerald Gallego, a Biloxi man who had slit the throat of one of his jailers during an escape attempt from the Pascagoula County jail, carried out in March 1955. Executioner Thomas Bruce prepared the chemicals, traveling executioner C. W. Watson dropped the lever to begin the execution… and nothing happened. The lever lowering the cyanide crystals into the sulfuric acid bath hadn’t dropped, and Gallego had to sit it out in the chamber while Bruce went in and fixed it. Watson dropped the lever again, and this time the crystals submerged easily beneath the chair with a quiet wisp. A bit too quiet: only a handful had made it into the acid bath, and the gas that came up was sufficient only to sicken Gallego. He was conscious as Watson decided to evacuate the chamber and start over; it took another twenty minutes to detoxicate the gas, get the chamber unbolted, put another pound of cyanide below the chair, close the chamber up, and start again. A full half hour passed before the attending doctor could declare death.

Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row

With my luck, this would be my execution…

Facts

A Wretched Recommendation!

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
By Svetlana Alexievich

I originally read this book because I thought it would be incredibly morbid – containing many tales of  horribly painful deaths from radiation poisoning.  I was surprised to find that it wasn’t that morbid at all, really (by my standards anyway) and that there was only one tale of radiation poisoning (and a gruesome one it is).  What really surprised me was how I didn’t mind that it wasn’t particularly morbid – because what I found instead was a compelling, heartbreaking collection of tales of loss, pain, and ultimate resilience told with poetry and passion.  

As an American born in the 60′s, I was subjected to constant anti-Soviet propaganda during the first couple of decades of my life.  Americans were taught about the “evil empire” and the horrors of communism but we were never taught about what Soviet life was like for the citizens.  This book is a fascinating glimpse into the pros and cons of the Soviet brand of communism and to the horrifying suffering that the Russian people have endured over the years – horrors that Americans could not even *begin* to fathom.  Like seeing your streets filled with dead townspeople, gunned down by the invading German army.  Like seeing the women of your town having to tie their prolapsed uteruses up into their bodies because they have to sow and reap the fields and carry all the loads themselves since the men and the horses and the vehicles are all off fighting a war (from which many of them will never return).  Like seeing a baby tossed out a hospital window because the invading soldiers believe it was born of the “wrong” ethnicity.  Like seeing a young fireman who battled the graphite fire at Chernobyl choking on pieces of his deteriorating internal organs. 

Chernobyl, of course, dominates the subject matter, and it is illuminating to read of the impact of the disaster on the common people.  The government (as they do) kept people in the dark, evacuating them quickly and promising them they’d be able to come back in a couple weeks, thus tricking them into leaving their entire lives and most of their possessions behind.  All pets were forced to be abandoned because their fur was radioactive, and soldiers recount the disgusting and depressing job of having to hunt down and shoot domestic dogs that came running to them for help.  Other soldiers told of impossible orders they received to remove the radioactive topsoil and bury it in waste dumps.  Removing the soil, the bugs, the plants, the roots – removing entire ecosystems – only to have the remaining land contaminated by the next week. 

Folklore built up around the disaster. Many of the victims talk of drinking vodka as medication against the radiation. One man working at the site said he would drink vodka before he would pick up his son, to try and alleviate the impact of the radiation. The survivors discuss how the townspeople in their new homes treated them like lepers, whispering to their children to stay away from the Chernobylites – they were contaminated.  It’s no wonder than many defied the orders to stay out of their homes and returned to live lonely lives in the exclusion zone.  They may be living in a poisoned land, but at least it’s a familiar poisoned land.  It’s home.

Tales of selfless sacrifice of the individual for the good of the country also dominate the book. Like the helicopter pilot who flew way too many missions dropping debris on the flaming reactor, sticking his head of out the helicopter to precisely drop the load and enduring 140°+ f. temperatures rising from raging atomic fire below. Or the men who swam to the bottom of a contaminated pool of water to release a bolt so that the water could be drained safely instead of potentially causing a nuclear explosion. Or the miners who dug beneath the reactor to place dry ice to prevent the nuclear core from leaking into the ground. Or the men who took 6 minute shifts removing highly radioactive debris from the reactor roof. In the plain-spoken words of one of the people in the book: “Those people don’t exist anymore.” Or at least, most of them don’t. And the ones that do still exist are missing thyroid glands or other body parts, and have left a legacy of deformed or prematurely deceased children behind them.

This book has made me have an enormous amount of respect for the Soviet people, and has piqued my interest on reading more about them.  To suffer as much hardship as they have and to weather it despite intense despair and hopelessness – that takes character.  And even though it’s been 25 years since the reactor exploded, the pain of Chernobyl lingers in the memories, and the DNA, of thousands of people. (5/5)

Library