LEAD STORY

In March, jurors in New Orleans convicted Isaiah Doyle of a 2005 murder and were listening to evidence in the penalty phase of the trial when Doyle decided to take the witness stand (as defendants sometimes do in a desperate attempt to avoid the death penalty). However, Doyle said to the jurors, "If I had an AK-47, I'd kill every last one of y'all with no remorse." (The jury recommended the needle.) [WWL-TV (New Orleans), 3-25-2011]

The Montana House of Representatives passed a tough drunk-driving bill in March to combat the state's high DUI rate, but it came over the objection of Rep. Alan Hale (and later, Sen. Jonathan Windy Boy). Hale, who owns a bar in Basin, Mont., complained that tough DUI laws "are destroying small businesses" and "destroying a way of life that has been in Montana for years and years." (Until 2005, drinking while driving was common and legal outside of towns as long as the driver wasn't drunk.) Furthermore, Hale said, people need to drive home after they drink. "(T)hey are not going to hitchhike." Sen. Windy Boy said such laws put the legislature on "the path of criminalizing everyone in Montana." [Billings Gazette-AP, 4-1-2011]

Why Unions Are Unpopular: The police officers' union in Scranton, Pa., filed a state unfair labor practice complaint in April against Chief Dan Duffy because he arrested a man whom he caught violating a warrant and possessing marijuana. According to the union contract, only union members can "apprehend and arrest" lawbreakers, and since the chief is "management," he should have called an officer to make the arrest. The union president suggested that, with layoffs threatened, the chief doesn't need to be taking work away from officers. [Times-Tribune (Scranton), 4-19-2011]

Conventional academic wisdom is that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to homicide, but according to accused murderer Dmitry Smirnov, it deterred him from killing Ms. Jitka Vesel in Oak Brook, Ill. -- until March, that is, when Illinois' death penalty was repealed. Prosecutors said Smirnov, from Surrey, British Columbia, told them he decided to come to Illinois and kill Vesel (in cold blood, over an online relationship gone bad) only after learning through Internet research that the state no longer had capital punishment. [Chicago Sun-Times, 4-15-2011]

Shelly Waddell, 36, was cited by police in February in Waterville, Maine, after "a couple of" drivers reported seeing two children riding on the roof of the van she was driving early one morning. Waddell told police she was in fact delivering newspapers to customers, but denied that the kids were on the roof. [WMTW-TV (Portland, Maine)-AP, 2-24-2011]

At the Niceville, Fla., Christmas parade on Dec. 4, a municipal employee was arrested when he stepped up onto a city truck that was part of the parade and challenged the driver (who apparently was a colleague). The employee accused the driver of "taking (my) overtime" hours for the previous two years and ordered him out of the truck so he could "whip your ass." (The employee was charged with disorderly intoxication.) [Northwest Florida Daily News, 12-10-2010]

Louis "Shovelhead" Garrett is an artist, a mannequin collector and a quilter in the eastern Missouri town of Louisiana, with a specialty in sewing quilts from women's panties, according to a report in the Hannibal Courier-Post. After showing his latest quilt at a women's luncheon in Hannibal in March, he told the newspaper of his high standards: "No polyester. I don't want those cheap, dollar-store, not-sexy, farm-girl panties. I want classy -- silk or nylon." [Hannibal Courier-Post, 3-24-2011]

Arifinito (he goes by one name), a member of the Indonesian parliament, resigned in April after a news photographer in the gallery zoomed in on the tablet computer he was watching to capture him surfing Internet pornography sites. Arifinito's conservative Islamic Prosperous Justice Party campaigned for a tough anti-pornography bill in 2008 (which the photographer's video shows Arifinito likely violating). [AlJazeera.net, 4-11-2011]

Wheeee!

In March, in Pierce County, Wash., a sewer worker, 37, came loose from a safety line and slid about 3,000 feet through a 6-foot-diameter sewer pipe at the Chambers Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. He "could have drowned," according to one rescuer, but he was taken to a hospital with "minor injuries." [Tacoma News-Tribune, 3-21-2011]

Firefighters in Gilbert, Ariz., rescued Eugene Gimzelberg, 32, in March after he had climbed down a 40-foot sewer hole -- naked. Gimzelberg said he had smoked PCP and marijuana and consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms. He was hospitalized in critical condition. [Arizona Republic, 3-3-2011]

Jacob Barnett, 12, an Asperger's-syndrome-fueled math genius who maxed out on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children and is now enrolled at IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis), told an Indianapolis Star reporter in March that his next project is about proving the Big Bang theory all wrong. But if not the Big Bang, asked the reporter, how do we exist? Said Jacob, "I'm still working on it." "I have an idea, but ... I'm still working out the details." (Hint: Jacob's major point of skepticism is that the Big Bang doesn't account neatly for carbon.) Said his (biological) mother, Kristine Barnett, 36: "I flunked math. I know this did not come from me." [Indianapolis Star, 3-20-2011]

Overreaching:

In April, Texas state Rep. John Davis of Houston proposed a tax break -- aimed at buyers of yachts valued at more than a quarter-million dollars. Davis promised more yacht sales and, through a ripple effect, more jobs if Texas capped the sales tax on yachts at the amount due on a $250,000 vessel -- a break of almost $16,000 on a $500,000 boat. [San Antonio Express-News, 4-24-2011]

Adam Yarbrough, 22, ticketed by a female police officer in Indianapolis in March after he was observed swerving in and out of traffic on an Interstate highway, allegedly compounded the problem first by offering the cop "five dollars" to "get rid of this ticket" and then by "(H)ow about I give you a kiss?" Felony bribery charges were filed. (Bonus fact: Yarbrough was riding a moped.) [Indianapolis Star, 3-14-2011]

Marissa Mark, 28, was indicted in March in Allentown, Pa., for hiring a hit man in 2006 via the then-active website HitManForHire.com, agreeing to pay $37,000 to have a California woman killed (though prosecutors have not revealed the motive). Mark allegedly made traceable payments through the PayPal service (which in recent years has righteously refused to process transactions involving online gambling or the WikiLeaks document dumps, but which in 2006 did in fact handle payments for HitManForHire.com). The hit man site was run by an Egyptian immigrant, who told the Las Vegas Sun in 2008 that he would never contract for murder but sought to make money by double-crossing clients and alerting (for a fee) the intended victims. [Allentown Morning Call, 3-22-2011; Las Vegas Sun, 7-20-2008]

The local board of health closed down the Wing Wah Chinese restaurant in South Dennis, Mass., briefly in August (1992) for various violations. The most serious, said officials, was the restaurant's practice of draining water from cabbage by putting it in cloth laundry bags, placing the bags between two pieces of plywood in the parking lot, and driving over them with a van. Said Health Director Ted Dumas, "I've seen everything now." [Brewster Oracle, 8-21-92]

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/index.html

LEAD STORY

Imprisoned rapist Troy Fears, 55, had another four years tacked onto his sentence in April by a federal judge in Phoenix after he was convicted of swindling the IRS out of $119,000 by filing 117 fake tax returns from 2005 to 2009. According to prosecutors, IRS routinely dispatched direct-deposit refunds while indifferent to matching the payment recipient with the person whose Social Security number was on the return. (In fact, Fears was caught not by the IRS but by a prison guard who happened upon his paperwork.) [Portland (Maine) Press-Herald, 4-8-2011]

Apparently, the federal government failed to foresee that fighting two wars simultaneously, with historically high wound-survival rates, might produce surges of disability claims. Just in the last year, according to an April USA Today report, claims are up over 50 percent, and those taking longer than two months to resolve have more than doubled. (Tragically, Marine Clay Hunt, who was a national spokesman for disability rights and who suffered from post-traumatic stress, killed himself on March 31, ultimately frustrated that the Department of Veterans Affairs had lost his paperwork. "I can track my pizza from Pizza Hut on my BlackBerry," he once said, "but the VA can't find my claim for four months.") [USA Today, 4-7-2011; Washington Post, 4-15-2011]

Close Enough for Government Work:

A contract security guard at Detroit's McNamara Building (which houses the FBI and other vital federal offices) was found in March to have casually laid aside, for three weeks, a suspicious package that turned out to be a real bomb. (It was, eventually, safely detonated.) [Detroit News, 3-23-2011]

The Census Bureau got it right this time around for Lost Springs, Wyo. In 2000, it had missed 80 percent of the population (counting 1 instead of 5). The new total (4) is correct, since two people subsequently died, and one moved in. [Casper Star-Tribune, 4-2-2011]

Great Art!

Occasionally (as News of the Weird has reported), patrons of art galleries mistake ordinary objects as the actual art (for example, solemnly "contemplating" a broom inadvertently left behind by a janitor), and sometimes the opposite mistake occurs. At the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam in May, a wandering patron absent-mindedly traipsed through a re-creation of Wim T. Schippers' floor-level Peanut Butter Platform (a 40-square-foot installation of creamy spread). (The museum manager had declined to fence in the exhibit, which he said would spoil its beauty.) [News Limited (Sydney), 5-11-2011]

Homeless Charles Mader, a convicted sex offender in Albuquerque, was arrested in May for failure to report his change of address, as required by law. Mader had moved out of his registered address, which was a Dumpster, into a community shelter. [New York Times-AP, 5-4-2011]

Robert Norton Kennedy, 51, was arrested in Horry County, S.C., in May and charged with assault and battery, despite the humble tattoo on his forehead referencing a Bible verse and reading, "Please forgive me if I say or do anything stupid." [The Smoking Gun, 5-9-2011]

Sharon Newling, 58, was arrested in Salisbury, N.C., in April and charged with shooting at her stepson with a .22-caliber rifle. She denied shooting "at" him, but said she was just shooting toward him "to make him stop working on his truck." [Salisbury Post, 4-19-2011]

In April in Greensboro, N.C., Stephanie Preston and Bobby Duncan were married in front of family and friends at the local Jiffy Lube. [WGHP-TV (Greensboro), 4-18-2011]

A 25-year-old man in Okaloosa County, Fla., was arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing after he entered the Club 51 Gentlemen's Club, from which he had been banned after a February incident. The man told police that he knew he had been banned from a strip club but couldn't remember which one. [Northwest Florida Daily News, 4-19-2011]

A college senior in Colorado complained long-distance in March to the Better Business Bureau in Minnesota's Twin Cities because EssayWritingCompany.com, headquartered in Farmington, Minn., failed to deliver the class paper she ordered (at $23 per page). (The meaning of "academic dishonesty" is evolving, but it is still a sometimes-expellable offense to submit someone else's work as one's own.) [St. Paul Pioneer-Press, 3-28-2011]

Filipino Henson Chua, working in the U.S., was indicted in March for illegally bringing back into the country an American-made military spy plane and openly offering it for sale for $13,000 on eBay. Sophisticated equipment such as the RQ-11B "Raven" Unmanned Aerial Vehicle requires high-level government approval to prevent acquisition by U.S. enemies. [TPM Muckraker, 3-29-2011]

Lisa Osborn was one of only two candidates who qualified to run for the two vacant seats on the Bentley (Mich.) Board of Education in May, yet she did not win. One vote would have put her on the board, but she got none (having been too busy even to vote for herself that day because of her son's baseball game). [Flint Journal, 5-11-2011]

Monika Strub began campaigning for a state parliament seat in Germany in March as a member of the Left Party. Until 2002, Strub, then "Horst Strub," was with the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, but then decided he was really a female, underwent surgery and became Monika, a socialist. Not surprisingly, she has been harassed by some of her former colleagues. [The Local (Berlin), 3-12-2011]

Perps Making It Easy on the Cops in Joliet, Ill.:

Domonique Loggins, 21, was running from two Joliet officers in April (suspected of assaulting his girlfriend) when his escape took him through Bicentennial Park downtown. Obviously unknown to him, dozens of police officers from surrounding jurisdictions were in the park that day on a training session (with 60 squad cars in a parking lot). Loggins was arrested. [WLS Radio (Chicago), 4-28-2011]

Police imposters usually drive cars outfitted to resemble cruisers (flashing lights, scanners) and carry impressive, if fake, ID. However, Hector Garcia-Martinez, 35, fooled no one in April as the two Joliet women whose car he stopped immediately called 911. "Officer" Garcia-Martinez had none of the trappings -- except, as he lamely pointed out, a sticker on his front license plate reading "Woodridge Police Junior Officer" (typically given to children at police events). [Joliet Herald News, 4-20-2011]

Anorexia nervosa is widely recognized as a debilitating eating disorder that can be fatal in as many as 10 percent of cases. However, men with masturbation fantasies about super-skinny women have fueled an almost-five-fold increase in "ana-porn" websites, to more than 1,500 since 2006, according to an April report by London's The Guardian. One site's recruiting page limited models to those with a body-mass index of 15 or under, and warned that "(b)ones and ribs must be very visible." However, these recruiters are sometimes anorexics' only flatterers, terming them "superstar(s) of starvation," "much prettier than all those meat mountains." (Unlike child or animal pornography, ana-porn is not illegal.) [The Guardian, 4-6-2011]

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation of voter rolls since 1981 in East St. Louis, Ill., identified 27 specific dead people who voted in various elections, complete through the 1990 primary. Inspiringly, two men who had never cast a single vote while alive apparently decided to begin participating in the democratic process once they had died, and Mr. Willie E. Fox Sr., who has voted six times since his death in 1987, mysteriously switched registration this year (1991) from Republican to Democrat. [St. Louis Post Dispatch, 9-9-90]