I’m not talking about the obvious like 9/11, JFK or The Challenger - I’m talking about local stories or stories from a long time ago that made an impact on you or that you just remember for no apparent reason.
Mine is something that happened in the 1990’s. It seems a couple in Toronto had a number of children and then they had a baby girl. Long story short, they abused and starved this little baby until she died at only a few months of age. The worst part is that apparently the older daughter (9 or so, IIRC) was holding the baby and begging the parents to take the baby to the hospital but the parents kept telling her to shut the fuck up. The baby died in her sister’s arms. When someone finally called 911 the paramedics just went through the motions of CPR because rigor mortis had already set in. If I remember correctly the baby’s name was Lisa. I sometimes wonder what became of that sister, how she turned out.
On a lighter note, I have a faint memory of a picture in the newspaper that showed a truck had flipped and spilled it’s cargo of gas station signs - the signs that display the price of gas. Everybody was freaking out because the signs showed 3 digits when at the time gas was in the 2-digit range. The powers-that-be insisted that the photo had been doctored and that no, the price of gas was not going up to a dollar. Sure enough, not long after this the price of gas rose to over a dollar.
What news stories have stuck in your minds over the years?
In the mid-seventies a young woman was found in one of the Chicago area forest preserves. She had been beaten to a pulp and was unconscious and it was not at all clear whether she would recover.
No one knew who she was.
They couldn’t get a lot of mileage out of running her picture because her face had been so badly damaged, but they hired sketch artists to try to draw what she would’ve looked like before. They ran these pictures in the papers and I’m sure on TV as well. No one came forward to admit to knowing her.
I’m pretty sure she died without ever regaining consciousness. It turned out that she was a local 15/16-year-old who had gone off one day. Her mom had assumed she’d gone off to visit her grandmother in Florida or something, and did not grow worried when weeks went by and she received no word. In any case, she had no idea her daughter was comatose in a hospital not ten miles away…Oh, and the mother said the daughter was “very mature” and often stayed out late without telling anyone or didn’t come home for several days…which struck me then, and strikes me now, as an odd use of the word “mature.”
Don’t know if they ever found out who did it. And why that story sticks out still–don’t know that either, only that it does.
A guy was heading southbound in his pickup on a major road, lost control, and was killed in the accident. That’s the tragic part. The funny part was in the newscast, when the anchorman said, “The dead man was driving his truck south on Route 222.”
This really deserves a movie treatment of some sort.
First it was reported that a woman was arrested for animal cruelty for having 174 feral chihuahuas. Then the follow-up was that people were fighting over what to do about the poor little devils link.
About eight years back I read a story about a 64 year old man who was killed in a car crash on Christmas day at 4 P.M. in the Poconos. Witnesses at the scene said that he had been driving below the speed limit on a two lane road when the car following him tried to pass him, in a legal passing zone (which are few and far between in this mountainous area).
The old guy (on Christmas no less) found his gas peddle and sped and sped up preventing the car from passing him (yeah ego!!!), but apparently didn’t realize how close he was to the sharp curve (and his demise) ahead. Luckily in it was only his car that crashed.
The guy had just retired, had kids and grand kids, and had left the family party to pick up some last minute items for Christmas dinner.
I guess it stuck with me because it is a horrible story on so many levels, but as someone who drove there and been a victim of many “mopes turned Speed Racer when you try to pass” like him, I just love the instant Karma.
I cannot forget the story of a man killed by kids dropping a brick from the Kelton Avenue overpass onto 1-70 traffic. Don’t think they every found those kids.
I’m not sure if it’s obscure, but at times I find myself re-watching the Colonel Russell Williams police interrogation video and watching him turn from a confident authority figure to a disgraced serial killer. It’s fascinating to think of an intelligent role model who had a secret life of B&E, rape, and eventually murder.
I read a story in the Las Vegas paper about two** ice-cream truck drivers** that were having a turf war that escalated to assault and attempted murder. I guess they were doing a little demo-derby in the streets.
That’s not the good part. Both these guys had Eastern European sounding names, both about 23 letters long with very few vowels. It made an interesting story.
This would have been in the late 60s or early 70s. A local paper reprinted a story from the London press in which the accompanying photo showed this quite ordinary-looking woman crossing a London street by taking **huge **strides. Apparently she’d been noticed doing this and some reporter asked her why.
Well, she said, she figured that if she took fewer, but larger, steps her shoe soles would last longer since they’d be hitting the ground less often. Interesting, said the reporter - so how’s that working out for you?
It turned out that the greater force hitting the ground each time more than counteracted the fewer steps, and her shoes were actually wearing out faster rather than slower. Oh, said the reporter, but you’re still doing it, even though it achieved the opposite of what you wanted?
Oh no problem, she said - I now glue linoleum to the soles of my shoes, and they last for ages!
I treasure this as a shining example of pursuing a course of action when the original purpose has been lost, forgotten or failed.
I recall that back in the late 70’s in KY a family was coming home from a revival meeting and died in a wreck. A relative said they would all be resurrected and that God performed an amazing miracle once every few hundred years to impress the non believers.
I remember one from the early '90s where a newlywed couple were on a boat and somehow the husband ended up falling overboard, where he was eaten by a shark. That wasn’t the worst part, though–they caught the shark, and it spit out the guy’s torso.
And now, because that seems too farfetched to be true, I had to go hunt it up. It wasn’t. The only thing I misremembered was that they weren’t on a boat–they were scuba diving.
There are a couple that weren’t big stories that stand out in my mind. The first was probably 45 years ago, in California they showed pictures on TV of a man who’s parachute failed to open. He tried to fly. I guess in that situation one would try anything. I very nearly wept over that.
Then a few years ago on a news cast a very brief story said that Lizzie Borden was proven innocent recently and through DNA they proved the maid did it. My question was how did they still have enough DNA evidence to know that?
In the 80’s there was a short-lived daily newspaper, the St. Louis Sun. The only thing it’s remembered for is the headline for a story about a man who bit a woman on the buttocks.
Didn’t it turn out that he was on some kind of medication that caused his personality change? An anti-depressant or something? But yeah, for his brain to make him that sadistic - damn.
One was a small item about a guy whose family bought him a skydiving lesson for his birthday, something he’d always wanted to do, and they all got to watch in horror when his chute didn’t open. I keep that one in case I ever start thinking maybe I’d like to go skydiving.:eek:
The other needs background: my dad used to tell me stories about mysterious goings-on in WWII in the Pacific, and how planes would just disappear sometimes. He told me about planes going into clouds and just never coming out (cue spooky music). He said some pilots wouldn’t fly if there was even a single cloud in the sky.*
So fast forward to the 70s, and I read a small article about a plane that just disappeared on a sunny day. The article was brief, but it had the last line worded something like “and it was a clear day, except for one lone cloud.” To me it was creepy - it was like the article was written as if you had to know my dad’s stories. Like it was a Twilight Zone episode and Rod was implying in the coda that the “single cloud” was the clue for the close reader that things were not quite so innocent as they appeared. That mysterious forces used the clouds to capture planes, a la the Bermuda Triangle.
*note: these stories might not have been actually true. I’m just reporting how he told them to me.
There’s an absolute horror of a video of … maybe a pleasure craft that sank … anyway there are people in boats rescuing folks from the water, but the sharks are picking off those bobbing around, the sharks get purchase on some poor fellow and push him out away from the rest, he’s bellowing.
Here’s another story that stuck with me just for the hilarity of the last sentence as compared to the Cujo scenario in the first:
HANOVER, Pa.—A rural-route mail carrier was trapped inside her car for nearly two hours at a home near Hanover after a pair of dogs attacked her tires, flattening three of them.
Robin Barton had to summon help by cell phone on Wednesday. When the police arrived, the dogs attacked the cruiser’s tire as well.
Authorities were preparing to tranquilize the dogs Judge and Justice, a Rottweiler and a pit-bull mix, before the surprised and apologetic homeowner arrived.
Stephanie Dekelbaum, the dogs’ owner, called them “generally sweethearts” and blamed the attack on a tire toy the dogs had recently been given.