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STRANGE DEATHS
Suffering from terrible toothache, Turkish farmer Ismail Ayyildiz decided to go on a drinking spree with some friends in order to relieve the pain. Once happily intoxicated, he got out his gun and announced that he was going to perform some DIY dentistry. Placing a handgun inside his mouth with the barrel facing outwards, he fired it at the troublesome tooth. Unfortunately, his hand shook at just the moment he pulled the trigger and the bullet shot straight into his skull. He died later in hospital.
A millionaire grandfather committed suicide after his relatives made him listen to Frank Sinatra's My Way continuously for four months. Australian Donald Gruner, 89, loathed Sinatra's voice, so, in order to get their hands on his fortune, his grandchildren locked him in his bedroom for 101 days with the track on permanent repeat play. Mr. Gruner's torment came to light when his granddaughter confessed to the crime, but the police were unable to bring charges because of lack of evidence.
A Turkish wedding guest decided to show his appreciation of the marriage he was attending in the traditional manner - by firing 12 shots into the air. But such was his enthusiasm that he forgot he was indoors. The bullets bounced off the concrete ceiling, killing two guests and wounding nine more.
Firefighters in California were baffled to find a corpse dressed in wetsuit, flippers and face-mask in an area of scorched earth after a forest fire. Even more confusingly, a post mortem revealed that the man died from massive internal injuries rather than burns. It turned out he had been swimming in an area of ocean from where the fire authorities dredged water to dump on the blaze. The man was caught in one of the huge buckets carried by helicopter from sea to Forrest and was then dropped to the ground from 300ft.
When an Egyptian farmer's son saw one of his father's chickens falling down a 60ft well, he went to the rescue. Eighteen-year-old Allam Sabet al-Sayyed failed to rematerialise, so his 20-year-old brother, Sayyed, climbed down to investigate - he also disappeared. Their younger brother, Ahamad, then descended, to be followed, in succession, by their 14-year old sister, zeinab, and two cousins. Eventually, when the farmer noticed that virtually his entire family had gone missing, he called the police, who found the bodies of his six relatives at the bottom of the well, all dragged to their deaths by an undercurrent of water. The chicken was pulled out alive.
Hitting on the novel idea that he could end his wife's incessant nagging by giving her a good scare, Hungarian Jake Fen built an elaborate harness to make it look as if he had hanged himself. When his wife came home and saw him she fainted. Hearing a disturbance a neighbor came over and, finding what she thought were two corpses, seized the opportunity to loot the place. As she was leaving the room, her arms laden, the outraged and suspended Mr. Fen kicked her stoutly in the backside. This so surprised the lady that she dropped dead of a heart attack. Happily, Mr. Fen was acquitted of manslaughter and he and his wife were reconciled.
Desperate to wreak his revenge on a deceased work colleague, ex-police officer Arthur J Smith dressed up in dark glasses, black wig and false moustache and paid a visit to the dead man's widow. Seeing her collecting rocks in her garden, he fired several shots at her, all of which missed. Undeterred, he began to beat the woman over the head with nearby rocks. But the stress of the assault was too much for him and, before he could finish the job, he suffered a fatal heart attack. His intended victim made a full recovery.
Robert Overacker from Camarillo, Los Angeles, rode his jet ski along the Niagara River, towards the Niagara falls, planning to leap off his vehicle just as it plunged over the edge. The parachute strapped to the 39-year-old's back was supposed to be opened by a device on his jet ski the very moment that his backside left the seat. Unfortunately, his chute remained firmly shut and he went sailing over the brink.
Krzysztof Azninski and two of his friends had been drinking heavily one Sunday when they decided to stage a toughness contest, a traditional pastime in which young Poles compete to prove their manliness. Putting on the traditional toughness bonnets, they began with a breath holding competition. This progressed to hitting each other with blocks of wood and banging nails into their own flesh. One of the contestants then put his hand on a chopping block and challenged Krzysztof to cut it off with an axe. This he tried to do, partially severing the man's wrist, before going one step further and demanding that his friends try to chop his head off. One took up the challenge and beheaded him. The two remaining contestants then sung a folksong entitled Roll The Head Of The Giant before burying the body.
According to a San Francisco Chronicle report on the deaths of 17 members of a Seventh Day Adventist church in Lake Victoria, congregation member Julius Mwinyi gave the following evidence to a coroner's court in Tanzania: "we were on a pilgrimage to a religious festival at Mwanza. Our canoes were linked together and we began singing hymns. A cruiser passed by and some youth shouted obscenities at us, suggesting that we should test our faith by walking on the water like Jesus. Our minister shouted back, telling them that he would do just that. Seventeen members of the Church stood up, cried out 'Hallelujah!' and stepped out of their canoes. They sank like stones." After hearing that the police had failed to recover all the bodies, Julius lamented, "It's the crocodiles. I suppose they are God's creatures, but all the same, I'd wipe them out."
A Priest conducting a baptism service at a pool in the town of Larose, Louisiana was killed as he set foot into the water still carrying the microphone with which he had been taking the service. "It all happened so quickly, we can hardly believe it," said one distraught member of Pastor Michael Davis's flock. "He finished his sermon, stripped down to his bathing suit, and shouted, 'prepare for rebirth and follow me.' Then there was a blinding flash and an almighty explosion, and the next thing we saw he was floating on his back and the microphone had melted.
A 39-year-old Spaniard was busying himself having carnal relationships with a chicken when both he and the bird were crushed by a rock.
1994's Most Bizarre Suicide
At the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the American Association for Forensic Science, AAFS President Don Harper Mills astounded his audience in San Diego with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story.
"On 23 March 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound of the head. The decedent had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide (he left a note indicating his despondency). As he fell past the ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the eighth floor level to protect some window washers and that Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide anyway because of this."
"Ordinarily," Dr. Mills continued, "a person who sets out to commit suicide ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended.
That Opus was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not have changed his mode of death from suicide to homicide. But the fact that his suicidal intent would not have been successful caused the medical examiner to feel that he had homicide on his hands. "The room on the ninth floor whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing and he was threatening her with the shotgun.
He was so upset that, when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the window striking Opus.
"When one intends to kill subject A but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. When confronted with this charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant that neither knew that the shotgun was loaded. The old man said it was his long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her - therefore, the killing of Opus appeared to be an accident. That is, the gun had been accidentally loaded. "The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to the fatal incident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.
The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus. There was an exquisite twist. "Further investigation revealed that the son [Ronald Opus] had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March 23, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through a ninth story window.
"The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide."
