news & blues

Curses, Foiled Again

Randy King, 53, admitted stealing an antique wrought-iron fence from a house in Duluth, Minn., after police confronted him with the evidence: the fence itself, which King had installed around his own house, a few blocks away. Officers came looking for him because the victim told them King had tried to buy her fence the month before. (Duluth News Tribune) Police arriving on the scene of a hotel robbery in Lewiston, Idaho, needed mere minutes to track down suspect Donald Mosley Jr., 40. He was next door, at a bar named The Alibi. (Lewiston Tribune) During one of his frequent visits to his exwife’s son in Washington County, Ore., Donald Wayne George, 64, shared some digital family photos with the man to copy to his own computer. He forgot they included images of the son’s 5-year-old daughter in sexual poses and having various sex acts with George. When the pornographic photos appeared on the screen, George shouted, “No, no, no,” according to Deputy District Attorney Paul Maloney, adding that the father erupted in anger, to which George responded flippantly, “Call the police, I’m going to jail.” George received 25 years in prison. (The Oregonian)

Downsizing

Washington state’s Corrections Department said it expects to save $22,000 a year by providing inmates with shorter socks. (The Seattle Times)

Rocket Science

James McGovern, 22, died instantly while mixing rocket fuel in the yard of his home in Kennett, Pa. Fire officials noted that McGovern was a chemical engineer with experience handling volatile materials and a passion for launching high-elevation rockets. “It was his hobby,” said A.J. McCarthy, assistant fire chief at Longwood Fire Company, “and he won awards doing it.” (Pottstown’s The Mercury)

Overreactions

James Hill, 51, and Troy Holt, 47, pleaded guilty in Anderson County, Ky., to shaving a man’s beard and forcing him to eat it at knifepoint after a disagreement that victim Harvey Westmoreland, 41, said began over a riding mower he sold to Holt but that Holt insisted was about a woman. Asked what it was like to eat his beard, Westmoreland said, “Well, did you ever chew on a sponge? That’d be about what it would be like.” He added, “I remember it pulling. I’d say it pulled out as much as he cut off.”

(Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader) Ronald Miner, 30, told police in Lincoln, Neb., that his girlfriend, Tressa Amerson, 19, became upset because “she believed he ‘broke her car,’” according to a probable cause affidavit, and “grabbed a knife and attempted to cut the tattoo of her name off his neck.” An officer reported that a 2-by-2-inch “Tressa” tattoo appeared to have “two scratch marks that ran across the tattoo.” (The Smoking Gun)

When Gratification Can’t Wait

Even though Alabama is the only state that still bans sex toys, Sherri Williams opened a new location for Pleasures, her “one-stop romance shop” in Huntsville, Ala. Williams claims it’s the first in the nation with three sex-toy drive-through lanes. Toys, lubricants and stimulants are delivered through the drive-through drawers in brown paper bags.

Williams attracted media attention by challenging the sex-toy ban. The Alabama Supreme Court upheld it, but she has managed to circumvent it because state law does permit the sale of items designed for the “stimulation of human genital organs” if they’re for “a bona fide medical, scientific, educational, legislative, judicial or law enforcement purpose.” Pleasures requires customers to fill out a medical questionnaire describing the health-related reasons for their purchase. (The Huntsville Times)

Way to Go

British banker Colin Birch, 44, hanged himself from a tree after hiring two escorts to verbally abuse him, telling him he “deserved to die.” According to police investigators in Kent, Birch, a married father of two who’d lost his job as an assistant vice president at Deutsche Bank, convinced the women he was merely playing a sado-masochistic game and was wearing a safety harness. “The girls believe they were used to help kill him without realizing what they were doing,” a police official said. “It was death by hooker.” (Britain’s Daily Mail)

News and Blues is compiled from the nation’s press. To contribute, submit original clippings, citing date and source, to Roland Sweet in care of The New Times.