I’ve been trying to grow out the mustache part of my facial hair for probably close to 35 years. I’m quite sure that there are babies still in utero who have thicker mustaches than I do.
This does NOT involve a crime but I always found the death of Karen Wetterhahn fascinating.
She was a chemistry professor at Dartmouth who accidentally spilled a few drops of a mercury compound on a gloved hand and ended up dying from mercury poisoning a year later from the incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn#Accident_and_death
Similarly Janet Parker. How did she get smallpox and no one else did?
I have always been fascinated with the Alan Chmurny case:
Brilliant, successful, happily married Ph.D. biochemist develops an awkward middle-age crush on a younger colleague which turns into a sick, years-long stalking. He uses his authority in the company to forge personnel records to make it look like the colleague is pursuing him. He’s eventually caught and tried for attempted murder for putting mercury in the air vents of the colleague’s car.
In the courtroom, moments after being found guilty, Chmurny swallows a cyanide capsule and dies a day later.
The defendant’s widow kept insisting that her husband was innocent, which reminded me of the OP’s story. As did post #282.
(The link may have a paywall.)
As part of my job as an environmental engineer, I take a hazardous waste operations refresher course every year. Her unfortunate death is frequently brought up to this day as a cautionary reminder to carefully evaluate the material that a protective glove is made of as compared to the chemical you are dealing with.
In her case, it was determined after the fact that dimethylmercury (the supertoxic chemical she was working with) easily passes through latex gloves like she was wearing for protection.
Another case of dimethyl mercury exposure.
At least the dangers of the chemical are more widely recognized than in the case of Karen Wetterhahn. They will hopefully start chelation therapy immediately instead of waiting three months for symptoms to appear. It may not matter, though.
This is because, other than the inadequate gloves, Wetterhahn was taking all possible precautions (including fume hood), and only spilled a couple of drops on her hand. It’s anyone’s guess as to what precautions the MIT student took or how much exposure they got.
Good to hear that it was unauthorized, but I wonder how the student got hold of such a toxic substance. It’s possible they synthesized it themselves, I suppose.
P.S. This substance seems like the chemical version of the criticality accidents at Los Alamos with the so-called demon core that killed Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin.
I am surprised no one is discussing the Lindsey Clancy case.
Perhaps because it’s so sad and so horrible?
Or maybe not.
Most likely, her own smallpox vaccine did not “take.”
BTW, her mother, who cared for her, had some pustules on her own skin, and several passersby on the sidewalk on the day of the lab accident did too. None of them developed any other symptoms of smallpox, nor did they pass it on to anyone else, that I know of.
(There’s a woman on another website who’s told the story about how, as a child, her own smallpox vaccine never “took”, and then when she was a teenager, she babysat a neighbor’s toddler who’d just received the vaccine, and as toddlers will do, he pulled her glasses off and scratched her nose. Guess what? A trip to the plastic surgeon for an outpatient procedure fixed the results; the family apologized but she told them it was really NBD from her viewpoint.)
It’s all over the place on women-dominated boards, which I know the Dope is not. I personally think her husband was NOT responsible for any of this, and no, he shouldn’t be locked up with Rusty Yates either. She was seeing multiple doctors, who didn’t seem to know about each other, and was on some pretty dreadful combinations of drugs - and she was an L&D nurse!
That’s really all I know about it; I haven’t followed it in detail.
More on the “or maybe not” side of this increasingly confusing mystery:
Depending on what else comes to light, perhaps the student / victim belongs in the stupid or evil MF thread instead / as well.
I think the important bit about the MIT contamination story from the university announcement is this, “Emerging information calls into question whether this compound was in fact synthesized. We are also able to disclose, with the student’s permission, that while the student remains under medical supervision, their initial blood test result, which was received today, shows no sign of exposure to mercury.”
I think the important question is how did this dumbass get admitted to the university.
…some of which she didn’t appear to be taking.
Whatever one’s opinion of her relating to the deaths of her children, I’d hope that few here are blaming mental health meds for what happened. Well before this case made the news, bad actors attacked antidepressant use and wrongly claimed that it caused mass killings.
Based on what I’ve seen about the content on some of those boards (and TikTok and other places) I think I agree with the observation that true crime is “InfoWars for liberal white women.”
Yeah, I’ve called out people more than once for using Natural News as a reference.
Which InfoWars? Pre-Onion, or post?
Pre. These people sound like they’d fit right in with Alex Jones.