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Bizarre Stories
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The Old Brewery - Drunkeness and Buggery, Five Points Downtown New York
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Bizarre HistoryDickens called them rookeries, decaying inner city tenemant buildings, linked by a maze of dingy alleys, stuff full of the worst scum the industrial revolution could produce.
Every major city had them, but none was more crowded, less sanitary or more lethal than the Five Points diestrict in downtown New York, a stinking hollow at the junction of Bazter, Wrothe and Park Streets which foremed a natural meeting point for the local crooks, escaped slaves and the most brutal and desperate immigrants from the worst slums of Europe.By the middle of the 19th centrury, The Five Points teemed with muggers, sneak thieves and child prostitutes. Heavily-armed gangs patrooled the turf for stray well-heeled New Yorkers.The cops seldom investigated such crimes, however, as Five Points was so dangerous that police only dared enter it it squads of six.The dark heart of this slum, was the Old Brewery, a five storey 18th Century brick building which had been converted in 1837 ino the dankest tenemant in the city. Up to 1,000 people were packed inside the brewery, living up to 75 in a room in the worst conditions; the building had no light, no heating, no furniture and no sanitation. The inhabitants crapped in the corners and buried their dead under the floor.So far as the rest of New York was concerned, the only good thing about the building was that it directed much of it's occupants preyed on their weaker neighbours. One girl was murdered for a a penny and her body thrown into a corner, where it lay unburied for five days. It has been estimated that between 1837 and 1852 that the murder rate in this one building ran at a killing a day, an estimated total of 5,000 deaths.The deaths only stopped when the Old Brewery was purchased for $16,000 by the Ladies Home Missionary Society.On 2 December 1852, a huge force police ejected the inhabitants into the street and the foul old building was raised to the ground.Some of the most lurid stories told about the Old Brewery are exaggerations. Its hardly credible that many of those born within the walls could have grown to adulthood without venturing outside- but many went for days and weeks without tasting fresh air, if only because each time they left they risked losing their belongings and their floor spacke. And the police did sometimes enter the building, though never in squads less than 50 strong.What certainly is true is that the Brewery was an awesome hotbed of drunkeness, crime, buggery and incest as ever existed - and that when the demolition crewe finished their work, they took away 10 sacks of human bones from under the floors!
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Ear we go, ear we go, ear we go
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Chinese Strongman, Li Jianhua proves he can lug anything by pulling a van loaded with eithe children using the strength of his right ear alone.During this demonstration of his prowess, in the town of Wu Qiao in China's North Easter Hebei provence on 9 May this year, Li shifted his heavy load with a rope clipped onto his ear lobe and he didnt suffer so much as a cauliflower ear afterwards!
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1994's most Bizarre Suicide
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At the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the American Association for Forensic Science, AAFS President Don Harper Mills astounded his audience in San Diego with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story."On 23 March 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound of the head. The decedent had jumped from the top of a ten- story building intending to commit suicide (he left a note indicating his despondency). As he fell past the ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the eighth floor level to protect some window washers and that Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide anyway because of this.""Ordinarily," Dr. Mills continued, "a person who sets out to commit suicide ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended. That Opus was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not have changed his mode of death from suicide to homicide. But the fact that his suicidal intent would not have been successful caused the medical examiner to feel that he had homicide on his hands. "The room on the ninth floor whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing and he was threatening her with the shotgun. He was so upset that, when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the a window striking Opus."When one intends to kill subject A but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. When confronted with this charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant that neither knew that the shotgun was loaded. The old man said it was his long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her - therefore, the killing of Opus appeared to be an accident. That is, the gun had been accidentally loaded."The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to the fatal incident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.There was an exquisite twist. "Further investigation revealed that the son [Ronald Opus] had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March 23, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through a ninth story window."The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide."
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