Author Archives: Chuck Shepherd

Lead Story In October, William M. Cave, a circuit court judge in Montgomery County, Maryland, sentenced a former YMCA lifeguard, who was facing nine years in prison, to serve a total of three days in jail for the statutory rape of an 11-year-old girl in 1988. He served the customary one-third of the sentence and […]

Lead Story Lee Warrick, 39, was arrested in September at the Mile Hi Flea Market in Denver for allegedly photographing women by pointing a wrist-mounted video camera under their skirts. Police said 40 to 50 women were photographed and that Warrick is a suspect in similar incidents in Boulder and Chicago. Police said Warrick would […]

Lead Story A recount in a parliamentary election in November in Murcia province, Spain, saw the Socialist Workers Party candidate win over the communist United Left candidate by 50,412 to 50,411. The victory gave the Socialist Workers a majority in parliament, 176 to 174. Science Fair Officials at the Stepan Company in New Jersey, which […]

Lead Story The barbaric Gotmaar Festival continues in Pandhurna, India, despite the village’s increasing modernization (10,000 TV sets among its 45,000 people): Each year, after a full moon in September, all village activity stops for a day and the males divide into two groups to gather rocks. They spend the rest of the day throwing […]

Lead Story According to the recent book White Man, Black War, Rhodesian military officers once tortured a black guerrilla by forcing him to listen continuously to a John Denver record played at high volume. Least-Competent People William Sibila, 34, was killed in September when he fell 35 feet onto a cement landing while trying to […]

Lead Story Rodney Thorp Wood, 60, and his wife, Nancy Steffan Wood, 44, pleaded guilty in Eugene, Oregon, to a scheme in which they paid University of Oregon male students to have sex with Nancy in hotel rooms. Rodney, a professor, had told the students they were participating in a study on how mature women […]

Lead Story Because of fears that the song would send students dancing out of control, possibly damaging its aging football stadium, the University of South Carolina recently heeded its insurer’s demand and forbade bands to play “Louie Louie” at games. Questionable Judgments Time magazine apologized earlier this year for running (in its British edition) an […]

Lead Story Critics recently urged the Defense Department to cancel a $2 million contract with Louisiana State University that involves shooting hundreds of cats in the head. The government wants to learn how to return brain-injured soldiers to active duty; so far tests have revealed only that shooting into the brain causes cats to stop […]

Lead Story Meeting with investigators after his USAir flight crashed on takeoff in New York City in September, pilot Michael Martin covered his head with a towel, leaving only a tiny slit to see through, and refused to remove it, forcing investigators to take his fingerprints to confirm his identity. He refused to say why […]

Lead Story Theodore R. Coleman, outgoing fire chief of Washington, D.C., recently filed a $2 million lawsuit for defamation of character against the trade journal Fire Chief because the magazine declined to put his photograph on the cover of a 1988 issue. Despite the insult, he said, he was going to “take the high road” […]

Lead Story David Osborne, 23, was arrested in August in Nashville as a suspect in several episodes in which a man wearing a woman’s dress and with an object protruding from his rear end bent over to moon people in shopping-center parking lots. The police file on the incidents is labeled “The Carrot Man.” Weird […]

Lead Story Jesus Lopez, 18, was killed near Los Angeles last month when two cars accidentally struck him on the Pacific Coast Highway early one Saturday morning. He was standing in a southbound lane with his trousers down, mooning passing vehicles. People in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time Thomas Nick Floratos, a county […]

Lead Story Pennsylvania state police recovered numerous photos of people’s feet from the home of Brookville farm worker John Reed, 57, in August. They also found a jar containing six human toes and videotapes of parades in which the camera zooms in on the feet of the marchers. (A judge refused to allow police to […]