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Strange Crimes

Blimey! At least he didn't cook him.

A chainsaw-wielding chef who murdered an ex-councillor over a "trivial" feud has been jailed.

Jonathan Stasiuk slashed 73-year-old Gerry White with the power tool before strangling him at the Lake Community Gardens on the Isle of Wight in May. The pair were trustees of the gardens and had argued over how they were run. Stasiuk, 60, admitted murder part-way through his trial at Southampton Crown Court. He was jailed for life with a minimum of 25 years. He had initially pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-50405193
 
Judge not lest ye be judged!

Back in May, three Indiana judges got into a fight. It was the crescendo of an incident brimming with colorful details: a gaggle of judges drinking the night before a judicial conference, a failed attempt to visit a strip club called the Red Garter, a brawl in the parking lot of an Indianapolis White Castle.

The altercation apparently started sometime after 3 a.m., when one of the judges, Sabrina Bell, raised a middle finger at two men yelling from a passing SUV, and ended after one of those men shot two of the judges.

In between, the three judges took a number of actions that "discredited the entire Indiana judiciary," according to an opinion posted by the Indiana Supreme Court this week, suspending the judges.

The court found that the three — Andrew Adams, Bradley Jacobs and Sabrina Bell — had "engaged in judicial misconduct by appearing in public in an intoxicated state and behaving in an injudicious manner and by becoming involved in a verbal altercation." Adams and Jacobs engaged in further judicial misconduct "by becoming involved in a physical altercation for which Judge Adams was criminally charged and convicted."

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/14/779339897/3-indiana-judges-suspended-after-white-castle-brawl-that-left-2-of-them-wounded
 
Just wanted to get some fresh air.

A 26-year-old woman has appeared in court accused of trying to open a passenger plane door during a flight from the UK to Turkey.

A cabin crew member was scratched as she tried to stop the door of the Jet2 flight to Dalaman opening on 22 June.

The plane was escorted back to Stansted Airport by two RAF fighter jets.

Chloe Haines, of High Wycombe, appeared before Chelmsford magistrates charged with assault and acting in a manner likely to endanger an aircraft.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-50492318
 
Jail time, cause idiots like this will never learn, I cannot be doing with people who are this idiotic, looking for fame was she? It says she cant leave from any UK airport, long walk then
 
This story is as sad as it is strange, but I couldn't think of a more appropriate place to post it ...
Police: Mother took daughter from care facility, killed her

An elderly woman who feared she was developing dementia removed her mentally disabled adult daughter from a care facility, then fatally stabbed her in a suburban St. Louis hotel before attempting to kill herself, police and relatives say.

Marjorie Theleman, 78, was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the death of her 51-year-old daughter, Sharon Theleman, after police were summoned to a hotel in Fenton, Missouri, because the pair had not checked out.

Sharon Theleman was pronounced dead at the scene. Her mother, who attempted to suffocate herself with a plastic bag, remained hospitalized Wednesday, according to a police news release. She left a typed note explaining her actions and a handwritten note telling housekeeping to call police, a police detective wrote in the probable cause statement.

Police said she was expected to survive. But one of her two sons, Scott Theleman, who lives in the Dallas area, said he has been told his mother is in a coma and has a “50-50 chance of surviving.” He said his mother lived in a retirement community and wanted to have his sister moved there from a group home because his sister’s mobility was declining.

“She was concerned about Alzheimer’s,” he said of his mother. “Her mother had it. She had spent many years trying to avoid it but felt she was heading that way.”

“From what I understand, the note I haven’t seen said she was doing this as a favor to her sons, so we didn’t have to carry the burden of a handicapped sister and declining mother” he said. “I don’t approve of that at all but that’s apparently what the note said.” ...
FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/bac4cf0dc26d488894798d4b49008f08
 
Just wanted to get some fresh air.

A 26-year-old woman has appeared in court accused of trying to open a passenger plane door during a flight from the UK to Turkey.

A cabin crew member was scratched as she tried to stop the door of the Jet2 flight to Dalaman opening on 22 June.

The plane was escorted back to Stansted Airport by two RAF fighter jets.

Chloe Haines, of High Wycombe, appeared before Chelmsford magistrates charged with assault and acting in a manner likely to endanger an aircraft.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-50492318
I was just reading (I believe in the Strange Folk thread) of a similar incident a few years ago. The airline at that time indicated that the airplane door could not be opened by cabin occupants, though that would not make any sense if it's an emergency exit (unless the cabin crew have to activate the opening mechanism somehow). Anyone know the actual situation regarding this?
 
I was just reading (I believe in the Strange Folk thread) of a similar incident a few years ago. The airline at that time indicated that the airplane door could not be opened by cabin occupants, though that would not make any sense if it's an emergency exit (unless the cabin crew have to activate the opening mechanism somehow). Anyone know the actual situation regarding this?

The Actual Situation with the Airliner and its Doors

Jet2's current fleet consists of Boeing 737 / 757 jets. These airliners are manufactured to comply with US FAA guidelines and regulations. This means each door has 3 hierarchical levels of "security": Closed, Latched, and Locked. Each of these 3 levels must be mechanically implemented and electronically monitored. Each door's status at all 3 levels must be continuously displayed to both the flight crew and however many cabin crew members are authorized to operate the doors.

The doors would have had to be at the top level of security ("Locked") once the plane took off. Once locked into their in-flight configuration the locking mechanisms would have to be proactively disabled for a door to be opened at all.

Bottom Line: Unless Ms. Haines had access to relevant master controls (separate from the door) she probably had no chance of unlocking any door, much less unlatching and opening it.

Which leads to ...

The Actual Situation with the Incident

The BBC news item doesn't give any details about the incident. A more informative account has to be found elsewhere, such as this CNN item:

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/jet-2-flight-passenger-bill-intl-scli/index.html

As it turns out, Ms. Haines was drunk and disruptive at some point once the plane was in flight. To the best of my ability to piece together what happened, she allegedly assaulted one or more of the cabin crew who attempted to placate and then restrain her. One account I saw claimed she'd advanced to / toward the cockpit and attempted to enter it. Another claimed she'd announced she was going to "kill you all" before doing whatever she did toward messing with the airliner's door(s).

In other words, she pitched a massive drunken tantrum. The door-opening bit was an apparent threat she either announced or seemed to be trying to enact. It was the overall tantrum - not just the door-opening attempt - that caused her to be subdued, arrested, and subsequently billed by Jet2 for circa US$ 105,000 to cover the costs of dealing with her misbehavior and diverting the flight.
 
The airline at that time indicated that the airplane door could not be opened by cabin occupants, though that would not make any sense if it's an emergency exit (unless the cabin crew have to activate the opening mechanism somehow).

But you think it would make sense to be able to open a cabin emergency door when the plane was in the air ?
 
Here's one of those stories that makes you wonder why the obviously obsessive repeat perpetrator is allowed to wander around unsupervised.
That much is evident from the last line ...

Police: Woman stabbed another in belief she was wearing fur

A woman with a history of attacks on people wearing fur has been charged with attempted murder for stabbing a woman she believed was wearing the material at a church outside Cleveland, police said.

Meredith Lowell, 35, is being held on a $1 million bond ...

The victim had brought children she was babysitting to the church for choir practice, and Lowell stabbed her twice in the arm and once in the abdomen with a kitchen knife ...

A man wrestled Lowell to the floor and held her until officers arrived ...

The victim remained hospitalized Thursday ... Her condition was unclear. It’s also not clear whether the victim was wearing real fur. ...

Lowell was arrested a year ago on suspicion of attacking someone she believed was wearing fur at a Whole Foods store in University Heights.

A police report said Lowell punched and then tried to cut a woman wearing a jacket with fake fur on its hood with the serrated blade of a Swiss Army knife. The jacket was gashed, a police photo shows, but the woman was not cut.

Lowell was indicted in January on one count of felonious assault in Cuyahoga County. An online court docket shows she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity last month. The case is pending.

And in March 2012, Lowell was indicted in federal court in Cleveland after authorities said she posted on Facebook that she wanted to hire a hit man to kill someone wearing fur.

Lowell wrote that she would be willing to pay between $830 and $850, according to an FBI affidavit.

An undercover FBI agent contacted Lowell, who asked that a person be killed with a gun or a knife at a Cleveland Heights library and that she planned to be there when the murder was carried out, authorities said.

Lowell told the agent she wanted to set up an animal rights militia and specified that a victim at the library should be at least 12 years old and at least 4 feet tall, the affidavit said. She was arrested in February 2012.

Those charges were dropped in January 2013 when it was determined she could not be “rehabilitated to competency,” court records show.
SOURCE: https://apnews.com/404a5fa3cb33492bb27220cd3e2d7f2c
 
I thought the airplane door is pressurised so it's impossible to open from the inside at all, until landing
Hold on the crazy fur woman, she couldn't be rehabilitated so they let her go, well, that seems ok then
 
I thought the airplane door is pressurised so it's impossible to open from the inside at all, until landing ...

Airliner cabins are pressurized, but not all that much. Resistance from internal air pressure would only be evident with a door that opened inward (into the interior). Higher relative air pressure inside the fuselage would facilitate rather than hinder opening an outward-opening door.

Those Boeing jets had to be certified compliant with FAA guidelines, meaning the doors had to be demonstrably immune to pressurization influencing their operation.

The latches and locks are what hold the door closed. Air pressure isn't a contributing factor, because the doors are required to secure and stay secured even if pressurization is lost.
 
A police report said Lowell punched and then tried to cut a woman wearing a jacket with fake fur on its hood with the serrated blade of a Swiss Army knife. The jacket was gashed, a police photo shows, but the woman was not cut.

On one of the few occasions in my life when I felt under imminent threat of violent if not fully homicidal attack, it was directly related to my wearing a black fun fur coat (also involved: candlelight and the fortean sudden springing to life of a lighter that had been resting on a table...).
 
On one of the few occasions in my life when I felt under imminent threat of violent if not fully homicidal attack, it was directly related to my wearing a black fun fur coat (also involved: candlelight and the fortean sudden springing to life of a lighter that had been resting on a table...).

I once ran round in circles in an underground Hungarian bar in a Grim Reaper costume with my back on fire. Shouting obscenities, flapping my arms at the flames to put them out, highly entertaining for everyone but me.
 
I once ran round in circles in an underground Hungarian bar in a Grim Reaper costume with my back on fire. Shouting obscenities, flapping my arms at the flames to put them out, highly entertaining for everyone but me.
In the case I referred to, a mentally disturbed man -- possibly psychotic -- was sitting across from me in a darkened room, a table with a single candle burning between us. When the lighter suddenly sprang to life and jumped off the table of its own volition, he must have snapped, because suddenly his expression changed, and in a chilling voice intoned the words, "You... Better... Go... Now..." However, the way the words were spoken, I couldn't determine if he was going to use my getting up and heading for the door as the excuse he was looking for to kill me, so I remained sitting there. Not trembling, not even afraid, really, but aware that some bad shit could very easily go down at any moment. (Need I add that he was considerably bigger and stronger than me?!)

Fortunately, after what seemed like an eternity, he snapped back out of it, and told me that when the lighter popped off onto the floor, I suddenly appeard to him as the Devil incarnate. The fun fur coat looked almost like the upper half of a Sasquatch costume (long black strands of "hairy" fun fur), and somehow that merged in his unstable mind with the candle flame to make it appear that I was surrounded by the flames of Hell.

I just wanted to get the hell out of there, and he wanted cigarettes, so we walked up to a nearby gas station, where the staff recognized him as a miscreant who'd been up to something in there the previous night, and were immediately getting the police on the phone. The last words I ever heard from his mouth were, "Hey, let's go, they're calling the cops!"

I didn't look at him, nor did I respond. And that, thank god, was the end of that!
 
In the case I referred to, a mentally disturbed man -- possibly psychotic -- was sitting across from me in a darkened room, a table with a single candle burning between us. When the lighter suddenly sprang to life and jumped off the table of its own volition, he must have snapped, because suddenly his expression changed, and in a chilling voice intoned the words, "You... Better... Go... Now..." However, the way the words were spoken, I couldn't determine if he was going to use my getting up and heading for the door as the excuse he was looking for to kill me, so I remained sitting there. . . .
Hey wait! Thank you for explaining how you got OUT of that situation, but how on earth did you get INTO it in the first place? Was it a bad date or something? Or did you used to just hang out with random people, or what?
 
When the lighter suddenly sprang to life and jumped off the table of its own volition
Did this happen often when you were present? was this due to a lighter malfunction, earthquake or poltergeist?
Just like Edwin Drood, the Indrid Drood mysteries are left unfinished!
 
Hey wait! Thank you for explaining how you got OUT of that situation, but how on earth did you get INTO it in the first place? Was it a bad date or something? Or did you used to just hang out with random people, or what?
I was wondering if anyone would be curious how I got myself into that situation! (So thank you for asking.)

I failed to mention that the events in question occurred in the wee hours of the morning (somewhere around 4 or 5 a.m., pre-dawn). Which probably makes the whole thing even weirder. The circumstances were as follows:

I had been at an afterhours club I occasionally went to on the weekends, and it must have been shut down by the authorities once again that night (as otherwise it would stay open at least 'til 7 or 8 a.m.); as is often the case in such situations, we were looking for somewhere to keep the party going, and this guy somehow made his place sound like something custom-made for our wishes, so we all piled into a couple of cars and headed over there (it was very close to the afterhours club). I think the idea was: his place was only a few blocks away, and we could go there to keep out of the cold while waitnjg to see if anything better was going to get going (when a spot got shut down early, word would spread and often something else would start up within the hour).

When we got there, the other revellers -- without coming inside -- decided to go pick up some other people, and to meet us back there. Somehow or other, I was left alone there with the psycho. (Another thing I didn't mention here is that, earlier in the "evening", I had overheard one of the people running the club saying to keep an eye on this particular guy, since he'd been acting strangely (possibly harrassing some young women?), so that warning was definitely running through my head as I sat there, counting the minutes I had remaining within this mortal shell. :)

While there, I was expecting the others to return at any moment, but they got caught up in some drama somewhere else and were delayed. This was some time back, well before the age of smartphones, and I did not have any such device on me at the time. (Well, tbh, I still don't...) I should add that I had often been to the homes of "randoms" with groups of people after nights out like this (though never, I admit, alone), and nothing remotely resembling this situation had ever arisen before. People who frequented that particular club were generally friendly and easy-going, not psychotic serial-killers!)
 
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Did this happen often when you were present? was this due to a lighter malfunction, earthquake or poltergeist?
Just like Edwin Drood, the Indrid Drood mysteries are left unfinished!
OK, I'll try to undrood things a little bit! ;)

No, I don't recall another incident where something jumped off the table like that. It was a regular coloured plastic, rectangular lighter, standing vertically without apparent activity (until it suddenly sprung off the table and onto the floor). I have no idea what might have caused that to occur (unless it was indeed some sort of poltergeist effect related to an unconscious fear I might have had regarding the situation in which I unexpectedly found myself).

Oh, and in case you were possibly wondering what the hell I was doing wearing a Sasquatch-like fun fur coat: I had bought it on a lark, thinking it might come in handy on the rare occasion when I needed something costumey and slightly ridiculous to wear. When I started going out to late night clubs in the cold season, however, I discovered that the fun fur coat was the ideal form of outerwear for such outings: it could survive any amount of abuse intact, no worse for wear; even in the coldest outdoor temperatures, one felt hot within it even with just a t-shirt on underneath; and it could easily be scrunched up and shoved within a small plastic bag (which could itself be shoved into some out of the way or hidden corner), thereby allowing one to avoid the unnecessary expediture of coat check fees, which could be extravagantly outrageous.

Hope that helps! :)
 
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Here's a good reason not to share photos of yourself online:
Stalker story

A J-Pop star was tracked down by her stalker and assaulted when he worked out where she was by looking at the reflections in her eyes on her selfies posted at her social media.

Shall we just agree personal privacy is a thing of the past, now?
 
I failed to mention that the events in question occurred in the wee hours of the morning (somewhere around 4 or 5 a.m., pre-dawn). Which probably makes the whole thing even weirder.
It is indeed extremely weird that anyone would voluntarily be up and about at that hour.
While there, I was expecting the others to return at any moment, but they got caught up in some drama somewhere else and were delayed.
Oh, how this brings back memories of being twenty-something, hanging out with my twenty-something friends! Just like being a teenager, but with no safety net of parents or school officials! It's a miracle that any of us survived!!!

Congratulations on your survival, Indrid Drood!

It was a regular coloured plastic, rectangular lighter, standing vertically without apparent activity (until it suddenly sprung off the table and onto the floor).
:eek:
 
". . . Muttermilch.jpg"
How I admire that woman's audacity and resourcefulness! Now I want to bespritzen someone!
 
I can't decide where to put this story, because it involves a con and the perpetrator does seem a bit "dumb" (recommending it for other threads). Nonethelss, I'll put it here because it is generally "strange."
Sheriff: Woman faked being kidnapped so she could steal car

A North Carolina woman ran to man’s house Wednesday to say she had just escaped an attempted kidnapping by a stranger.

Virginia Saavedra, 37, then allegedly took advantage of the Good Samaritan’s kindness by stealing his truck before leading authorities on a high-speed chase, according to the Randolph County Sheriff’s Office.

Upon hearing Saavedra’s story, the man let her sit in his truck to warm up while he called 911, news outlets report. Saavedra allegedly then stole the truck, which was spotted by deputies responding to the man’s 911 call.

Deputies tried to stop the truck, but Saavedra led them on a 26-mile chase into a neighboring county, they say. Deputies soon boxed the truck in and it got stuck on a grassy shoulder. Deputies said Saavedra then tried to reverse the stolen truck and rammed a patrol car before trying to flee. She was arrested on more than a dozen charges including driving the wrong way on a divided highway and felony assault with a deadly weapon on a government official.

She gave authorities a fake name upon her arrest, but was correctly identified when she got to jail, deputies say. ...

SOURCE: https://apnews.com/7754ddadd7e2729b4a58248844e8940f
 
An unidentified gunman reportedly opened fire with a Kalashnikov rifle in the lobby of the Federal Security Services (FSB) building before fleeing the scene
 
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