Murphy to Holden: “I’m not going with the bad boys anymore.”
Murphy’s friend Nelson to Holden: “I can knock the stuffin’ out of you.”
Holden: “No, you won’t.”
Nelson grabs Holden.
Holden: “I know you can whip me and I don’t want to fight with you.”
Nelson knocks Holden down and kicks him.
Holden: “Is it fair to kick?”
Nelson: “Yes, in a rough and tumble anything is fair.”
Holden flies into a rage and knocks Nelson down, kicking him in the stomach.
Nelson: ”That’s enough!”
Nelson collapses and dies from internal injuries.
Holden was found innocent due to self-defense.
(Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1877)
Sundry
Today’s Slurred Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
New York City coroner Patrick Riordan got himself in trouble for coming to work drunk in 1914. As one angry witness put it, he stumbled into a death scene with “a glassy eye and smirky face” to sneer at bodies. That indictment followed an accident on the Ninth Avenue Elevated, the crowded commuter line run the private Interborough Rapid Transit Company. The collision had occurred in the last days of December, 1914. Newspapers described it like a scene from a circle of hell – brakes failed on a local, metal and flame exploded as it went slamming into the back of an express waiting at the Eight Avenue and 116th Street station. The impact had pushed the wooden cars upward into a blazing pyramid. Flying sparks then set the platform on fire. Passengers, dazed and bloody, fled to the street, stumbling down the rickety stairs from the seventy-five-foot-high track, crowds gathering in the fire-lit dark to catch them if they fell. Two train workers died in the crash. Dozens more workers and passengers went to the hospital seeking treatment for burns, lacerations, and shock.
The papers also offered a memorable image of the coroner that night. Eight hours after the accident, as the hands of the clock were just slipping past two a.m., Riordan finally ambled into the police station where the bodies lay. An assistant was holding him upright, officers, reported, and he was a big enough man that his weight pulled both of them sideways. Riordan looked down at the dead men. When told their names – Joseph Collins, 52, Gottlieb Minnick, 27 – he snapped, slurring the words but saying clearly enough: “It’s a shame that two such names should pull us out on a night like this.” All this according to the notes of journalists covering the accident, who helped trigger a formal investigation of Riordans’ work. (He was replaced as coroner in 1918.)
Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook
Facts
Today’s Excruciating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
A Venezuelan man who had been declared dead woke up in the morgue in excruciating pain after medical examiners began their autopsy. Carlos Camejo, 33, was declared dead after a highway accident and taken to the morgue, where examiners began an autopsy only to realize something was amiss when he started bleeding. They quickly sought to stitch up the incision on his face. ”I woke up because the pain was unbearable,” Camejo said. His grieving wife turned up at the morgue to identify her husband’s body only to find him moved into a corridor — and alive. Reuters could not immediately reach hospital officials to confirm the events. But Camejo showed the newspaper his facial scar and a document ordering the autopsy.
Culled from: Reuters
Generously submitted by: Sarah
Facts
Here’s a nifty, if a bit overpriced, Morbid Trinket: a bloody bookmark! Made of hand-poured red silicone, I think it would look so lovely in the ghastly books I read.
Available from Think Geek.
Trinkets
Today’s Sacrificial Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev, Deputy Head of the Executive Committee of the Shield of Chernobyl Association, on the aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion:
There was a moment when there existed the danger of a nuclear explosion, and they had to get the water out from under the reactor, so that a mixture of uranium and graphite wouldn’t get into it — with the water they would have formed a critical mass. The explosion would have been between three and five megatons. This would have meant that not only Kiev and Minsk, but a large part of Europe would have been uninhabitable. Can you imagine it? A European catastrophe. So here was the task: who would dive in there and open the bolt on the safety valve? They promised them a car, an apartment, a dacha, aid for their families until the end of time. They searched for volunteers. And they found them! The boys dove, many times, and they opened that bolt, and the unit was given 7000 rubles. They forgot about the cars and apartments they promised — but that’s not why they dove! Not for the material, least of all for the material promises. [Becomes upset.] Those people don’t exist anymore, just the documents in our museum, with their names. But what if they hadn’t done it? In terms of our readiness for self-sacrifice, we have no equals.
Culled from: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
This makes me wonder: what do you suppose would happen in America if a situation like this occurred? Would the U.S. government be too concerned about lawsuits to send someone down there and simply allow the explosion to occur, as it sat around in a bureaucratic stalemate, unable to make the necessary decisions? Or would it assign a Navy seal or two to do the dirty work and keep it hush hush as they died from radiation poisoning – making up some story to cover up the real reason for their deaths? Are Americans by nature too selfish to volunteer for a suicide mission like this? Do they lack the community mentality found in a communist nation?
Facts
Today’s Obfuscating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Examples of bureaucrating distancing of responsibility during modern executions: Oklahoma uses three lethal injectioners, each of whom injects one of the drugs; Georgia, Missouri and Utah use the old standby of the blank bullet placebo: three lethal injectioners, only one of whom has the lethal drugs in the drip bags on his IV stand; and Georgia has three keys that activate the switch to the electric chair. Tennessee’s electric chair, activated by one of two men turning keys simultaneously in a blue enamel box labeled Electric Chair Control, has computer software that randomly decides which of the two keys starts the voltage cycle. It’s a nice sci-fi touch, meant to hide the executioner’s identity from himself, but every sci-fi reader sees through the ruse: computers, by definition, cannot create randomness. Therefore, the author of the software is the executioner. Tennessee’s answer for that is simple: the author of the software doesn’t know what he wrote it for. New Jersey’s death penalty statute has a measure, written by a Metuchen dentist who served as an assemblyman, that mandates that “the procedures and equipment [of a lethal injection] shall be designed to ensure that the identity of the person actually inflicting the lethal substance is unknown even to the person himself.” In Texas, he is no longer even called the executioner; he is the “designee of the Director”.
Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row
Facts
I am very excited about this new acquisition to the library. Can’t wait to have a proper viewing. I’ll share some of the best pics when I can.
Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930
Library
A Wretched Recommendation from Aimee!
The Road Out of Hell: Sanford Clark and the True Story of the Wineville Murders
by Anthony Flacco with Jerry Clark
Aimee’s Review:
This book is about the case of California serial killer Gordon Stuart Northcott, who, with the unwilling assistance of his teenage nephew Sanford Clark (whom he brought to California from Canada for just that purpose with the complicity of Clark’s mother) raped, tortured and murdered at least 20 young boys on his isolated chicken ranch in the desert east of L.A.Very disturbing book. Especially so given the attitude of nearly everybody in the Northcott family. Just an example:Northcott had kidnapped a nine or ten-year-old boy named Walter Collins, whom he knew and whose mother he had met, and and kept him chained up in an empty chicken shed for over a week. During that week, Northcott’s mother, Sarah Louise, came to stay, ostensibly to help with some ailing birds. One evening while Sanford and Northcott were getting ready to eat dinner, Louise came storming into the house, furious.She had noticed her son making trips to the supposedly empty shed and had taken it upon herself to take the key and go inside to see what was in there. There she found the badly injured and terrorized Walter, and in talking with him she learned all about what was going on at the ranch.Louise’s fury was triggered not by the pitiful state of the young boy, but rather by the fact that Stuart (her son) had behaved so recklessly in kidnapping a boy whose family he knew. She then insisted that the boy must die immediately, and that furthermore each of them was to strike him with an ax, so none could squeal on the others without implicating himself. Louise herself led the way to the shed, and she struck the first two blows.
Sounds like a fascinating read! I’ll put that one on the morbid reading list immediately and I’ve added it to The Library Eclectica’s Maniacal Monsters aisle. It’s available on Kindle too!
Library
Today’s Explosive Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
An Amish woman doing laundry in a pot over an open flame in Pennsylvania’s Indiana County died when she caused an explosion with kerosene. Ella Miller, 32, threw kerosene on the fire Monday (May 30, 2011) to increase the heat, causing an explosion that caught her clothes on fire. Miller sustained first, second and third-degree burns and was treated with home remedies. Miller developed an infection and died Wednesday of septicemia and severe thermal burns. She is survived by her husband and six children.
Culled from: UPI
Generously submitted by: Aimee
I somehow doubt that skin grafting was part of the home remedies…
Facts
Today’s Remembered Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
World War II boyhood memories shared by Russian psychiatrist Pyotr S.:
I saw a woman trying to kill herself. In the bushes by the river. She had a brick and she was hitting herself in the head with it. She was pregnant from an occupying soldier whom the whole village hated. Also, as a boy, I saw a litter of kittens being born. I helped my mother pull a calf from its mother, I led our pig to meet up with a boar. I remember – I remember how they brought my father’s body, he had on a sweater, my mother had knit it herself, and he’d been shot by a machine gun, and bloody pieces of something were coming out of that sweater. He lay on our only bed, there was nowhere else to put him. Later he was buried in front of the house. And the earth wasn’t cotton, it was heavy clay. From the beds for beetroot. There were battles going on all around. The street was filled with dead people and horses.
Back then I thought of death just as I did of birth. I had the same feeling when I saw a calf come out of a cow – and the kittens were born – as when I saw that woman with the brick in the bushes killing herself. For some reason these seemed to me to be the same things – birth and death.
I remember from my childhood how a house smells when a boar is being cut up. You’ve just touched me, and I’m already falling into there, falling – into that nightmare. That terror. I’m flying into it. I also remember how, when we were little, the women would take us with them to the sauna And we saw that all the women’s uteruses (this we could understand even then) were falling out, they were tying them up with rags. I saw this. They were falling out because of hard labor. There were no men, they were at the front, or with the partisans, there were no horses, the women carried all the loads themselves. They ploughed over the gardens themselves, and the kolkhoz fields. When I was older, and I was intimate with a woman, I would remember this – what I saw in the sauna.
Culled from: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
Facts