Uncle John’s True Crime (24 page)

Though not a household name in the U.S., Mother Antonia’s work has made her one of the most famous and revered women in Mexico, but she says she has trouble seeing what all the fuss is about. “I don’t understand why people are so amazed. To give help is easy,” she says. “To ask for it is hard.”

*
*
*

“Madison, Wisconsin, police chief Richard Williams turned on his oven to roast some turkey but forgot that was one of his favorite hiding places for his gun. ‘Shortly thereafter: boom!’ police spokesperson Jeanna Kerr said, adding that Williams was given a one-day, unpaid suspension for violating his department’s firearms policy.”

—
News of the Weird

Los Angeles County has 10,000 cops who patrol 500 sq. miles and serve a pop. of 4.1 million
.

Just like guns and ammo, or death and taxes, the law and irony go hand in hand
.

I
RONY HITS THE STREETS

• “If you didn’t see me put this flyer on your windshield, I could have stolen your car,” read the ads for Ray Wright’s Philadelphia burglar alarm business. While he was placing them on other people’s windshields, his own car was stolen.

• In 1999 Roger Russell began a 2,600-mile walk across South Africa to promote crime prevention. Two days into his walk, Russell was robbed at gunpoint.

• Two plainclothes German police officers were making their way through a crowd of protesters to meet up with some uniformed cops. But the uniforms met them halfway and beat the two with nightsticks. The bruised officers sued the police department.

IRONY BEHIND BARS

• In 1853 a contractor named John Coffee built a new jail in the town of Dundalk, Ireland. During the project, Coffee went bankrupt. He became his jail’s very first inmate.

• In 2002 Albion State Prison in New York offered a class that became so popular among the most violent criminals that there was a waiting list to sign up. The subject of the class: quilting.

LEGISLATING IRONY

• A new anti-pornography law could not go into effect in Winchester, Indiana, because the editors of the town’s only newspaper refused to print the wording of the law on the basis that it was pornographic. For a new law to be official, it has to be printed in the newspaper.

• New York state assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun pled guilty to charges that she harassed her ex-boyfriend in 1999. According to testimony, she “burst into his home in the middle of the night, tailgated him in a car, and posed as a cosmetics seller to get his new girlfriend’s phone number.” Calhoun was co-sponsor of the state’s new anti-stalking legislation.

• On October 30, 2003, Congress released findings of a study that said toy guns don’t have any relationship to crime. That same day, the Capitol was locked down for an hour because two workers had brought toy guns to work as part of their Halloween costumes.

Good news for Wiccans: Witchcraft hasn’t been a crime in the New World since 1750
.

IRONY IN THE COURT

• A 1986 court case did not go well for the Otis Elevator Company. It might have had something to do with the fact that the jury—on their way to hear the case—got stuck for 20 minutes in an Otis elevator.

• A similar thing happened to the Pacific Gas & Electric Company in 2000. While on trial for “failure to trim vegetation around power lines,” a branch fell off a tree and knocked out power to the courthouse.

• In 1992 the U.S. Postal Service was defending itself against an unemployment discrimination lawsuit. In order to proceed, the defense had to mail a list of expert witnesses from Washington, D.C., to Dayton, Ohio. The list was sent via the USPS’s Overnight Express Mail delivery service, but did not arrive in Dayton for ten days.

• A production company won a $1.8 million judgment against a former employee accused of stealing the concept for a television game show. Name of the stolen show:
Anything for Money
.

DEATHLY IRONY

• Myra Davis was Janet Leigh’s body double in the 1960 Hitchcock classic
Psycho
. It was her hand that was seen in the famous shower scene in which Leigh’s character is stabbed to death. On July 3, 1988, Davis was found strangled in her Los Angeles home, murdered by a 31-year-old “caretaker and handyman”...just like Norman Bates.

• A 22-year-old California skier stole a piece of padded yellow foam from a ski lift pole, dragged it up the hill, and used it as a makeshift sled. He crashed into the newly unpadded pole, hit his head, and died.

CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET IRONIC?

• “Human Kindness Day” took place in May 1975, in Washington, D.C. Afterward, the cops announced that during the festivities, there were “600 arrests, 150 smashed windows, and 42 looted refreshment stands.”

• Love Your Neighbor Corp. of Michigan sued Love Thy Neighbor Fund of Florida for trademark infringement.

Actor/wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has a degree in criminology
.

Here are some real-life bumper stickers (with attitude) that our perps...er, readers have sent us over the years
.

M
Y CHILD WAS INMATE OF THE
MONTH AT THE COUNTY JAIL
.

Dangerously under-medicated!

Honk at me if you’ve never seen
an UZI from a car window

99% of Lawyers Give the
Rest a Bad Name

Bad Cop,
No Donut!

If it weren’t for physics and law
enforcement, I’d be unstoppable
.

Drive it like you stole it

Forget Gun Control, Ban Crime

T
HE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
A RUT
&
A GRAVE IS THE DEPTH

Hello, Ossiffer.
Just put it on my tab
.

I NEED SOMEBODY BAD.
ARE YOU BAD?

man cannot live on bread
alone...unless he’s in a cage
and that’s all you feed him

It
is
as bad as you think
and they
are
out to get you

E
VERYTHING
I N
EED
T
O
K
NOW
I L
EARNED
I
N
P
RISON

R
EMEMBER:
I
T
’
S PILLAGE FIRST,
THEN BURN
.

Skateboarding is NOT a crime!
(but most skateboarders are criminals)

Don’t like the way I drive?
Stay off the sidewalk!

Four out of five
voices in my head say, “Kill!”

Come to the dark side:
We have cookies

Don’t you make me release
the flying monkeys!

T
O
ERR
IS HUMAN
.
T
O
ARR
IS PIRATE.

Support Your Local Police
(
Leave fingerprints
)

JAIL SUCKS

If a cop refers to you as “EDP,” it means you’re an “Emotionally Disturbed Person.”

Marilyn Manson, Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne—those “wild children” of rock ’n’ roll are downright tame compared to the craziest musical act we’ve ever heard of. Murder, suicide, and sheep heads are all part of the package with the Norwegian “black metal” band known as...Mayhem
.

D
ISILLUSION

In the early 1980s, a radical underground music scene was forming in Europe. As far as these young musicians were concerned, rock was too tame, punk had gone mainstream, and the supposed “Satan-worshipping” heavy-metal acts like Black Sabbath, Dio, and KISS were all faking it. So, with no bands that were “heavy” enough for their taste, these young people made their own music that reflected their bitter attitude toward...well, everything. The two most prominent styles to emerge from the scene came to be known as “death metal” and “black metal.” To the untrained ear, both sound pretty much the same—blisteringly fast tempos; distorted guitars; screeching, unintelligible vocals; morbid lyrics (when you could hear them); and elaborate, gruesome stage acts. But of the two, black metal was the most melodic... and the most blasphemous.

THE GATHERING

One of the pioneering bands of black metal was an Oslo band called Mayhem. Formed in 1984, the original lineup consisted of guitarist/vocalist Øystein Aarseth (also known as “Euronymous”), bassist Jorn Stubberud (“Necrobutcher”), and drummer Kjetil Manheim. After going through a few singers (“Messiah” and “Maniac”), Mayhem was joined by Swedish vocalist Per Yngve Ohlin, who adopted the nickname “Dead.”

Dead was
the
quintessential black-metal singer: He buried his clothes for weeks underground to give them a “grave” scent; he slashed his own skin during performances; and, for inspiration, he inhaled rancid air from a plastic bag containing the decomposed remains of a crow. In 1990 Dead and the rest of Mayhem moved into a house together to work on their
first full-length album,
De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
—a Latin phrase that loosely translates to “Lord Satan’s Secret Rites.” During those album sessions, a style emerged that would come to define black-metal music. According to
Dark Legions
magazine:

High caliber? More Americans in their thirties own firearms than any other age group
.

THE SPLINTERING

Life in the Mayhem house was as intense as the music: Dead, who continually battled depression, didn’t get along with Euronymous. And on April 8, 1991, Euronymous came home to find Dead dead—with slit wrists and a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. (Next to him was a suicide note that read, “Please excuse all the blood.”) Before calling the police, however, Euronymous ran to the store and bought an instant camera...and then photographed Dead’s body in a variety of positions. (One of the photos later found its way onto the cover of Mayhem’s bootleg live album,
Dawn of the Black Hearts
.) According to legend, Euronymous also kept chunks of Dead’s scattered brain and mixed them into a stew, and used bone fragments from his skull to make necklaces that he gave to musicians whom he “deemed worthy.”

The well-publicized tragedy gave a huge boost not only to Mayhem’s popularity but to all of black metal. “People became more aware of us after that,” said Necrobutcher, the bassist. “It really changed the scene.” But the “scene” became too much for Necrobutcher to handle, and he soon quit the band.

THE REFORMATION

But Mayhem lived on...for a while. Singer Attila Csihar took over for Dead, while Varg Vikernes (“Count Grishnackh,” named after a
Lord of the Rings
villain) stepped in on bass. But once again, there was trouble in the band—Count Grishnackh, who suffered from paranoid delusions, became convinced that Euronymous was secretly conspiring to torture and kill him. On August 10, 1993, less than a year after joining the band,
Grishnackh went to Euronymous’s apartment and stabbed him 23 times, killing him.

Russia has almost twice as many judges as the United States does. It also has 80% less crime
.

The ensuing murder trial put Mayhem in the news again. And the trial revealed that not only did the bassist kill the guitarist, but Grishnackh was also responsible for a spate of infamous church-burnings that had plagued Norway for the past few years. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison. (He was released on parole 15 years later, in 2009.)

THE SHEEP OFFENSIVE

It seemed that with two members dead and one in jail, Mayhem would never rock again. Not so—in 1995 Hellhammer got a lineup together to start anew, this time with guitarist Rune “Blasphemer” Eriksen and original member Sven Erik “Maniac” Kristiansen on vocals. He even lured Necrobutcher out of retirement to play bass. Soon after, Mayhem
finally
released
De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
—an album that had been stalled amidst all of Mayhem’s mayhem. That was followed by
Wolf’s Lair Abyss
in 1997 and
Grand Declaration of War
in 2000. Mayhem were back in business—and were now a bona fide legend in the black-metal world. They managed to stay below the radar of the mainstream press... for a time.

But in 2003 the band made headlines again. During a show in Bergen, Norway, Maniac was cutting up a dead sheep on stage—a ritual that had become a regular part of their act—when its head somehow catapulted into the crowd, hitting 25-year-old Per Kristian Hagen. The sheep’s head knocked the young man to the floor, and he ended up with a fractured skull. Hagen filed assault charges against Mayhem. “The whole thing was an accident,” claimed Blasphemer (although he added, “but maybe it
would
be an idea for another show”). In the end, Hagen dropped the charges and the band had weathered yet another storm.

LONG DIE ROCK

With the band members now in their 40s, Mayhem is still at it. They made the news again in 2009 when they were arrested for trashing a hotel room in the Netherlands. And though they don’t expect everyone to like their music, they don’t want to be thought of as just a gimmick. According to vocalist Attila Csihar, “It took us 20 years of doing this before people realized we weren’t joking.”

Serial killer Rodney Alcala once appeared on
The Dating Game
.

Here’s the second installment of our tale of what may have been the biggest con job of the 19th century. (Part I is on
page 79
.)