Monthly Archives: February 2014

Today’s Machiavellian Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In 1937 the chief warden of San Quentin prison in California devised the Spot. Almost Machiavellian in concept, it simply consisted of a circle of grey paint, two feet in diameter, in which the offender had to stand for four hours, twice a day. He was not allowed to move at all, the only relief permitted being a two-minute toilet break, morning and afternoon. Very few prisoners showed any desire to be put on the spot a second time.

Culled from: Rack, Rope & Red-Hot Pincers

Today’s Foul Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Tourists staying at a Los Angeles hotel bathed, brushed teeth and drank with water from a tank in which a young woman’s body was likely decomposing for more than two weeks.  Elisa Lam’s corpse was found in the Cecil Hotel’s rooftop water tank by a maintenance worker who was trying to figure out why the water pressure was low on Tuesday, February 19, 2013.  Lam’s parents reported her missing in early February. The last sighting of her was in the hotel on January 31.  Detectives are now investigating the 21-year-old Canadian’s suspicious death.  It was not clear whether the water presented any health risks. Results on tests on the water done Wednesday by the Los Angeles Public Health Department were expected later in the day.  People who stayed at the Cecil since Lam’s disappearance expressed shock about developments.  “The water did have a funny taste,” Sabrina Baugh told CNN on Wednesday. She and her husband used the water for eight days.  “We never thought anything of it,” the British woman said. “We thought it was just the way it was here.”  What she described was not normal.  “The shower was awful,” she said. “When you turned the tap on, the water was coming black first for two seconds and then it was going back to normal.”  The hotel remained open after the discovery, but guests checking in Tuesday were told not to drink it, according to Qui Nguyen, who decided to find a new hotel Wednesday.  Nguyen said he learned about the body from a CNN reporter, not the hotel staff.

Culled from: CNN
Generously submitted by: Ben

The toxicology came back negative and it turns out that Lam suffered from mental illness, so she probably killed herself, but they listed the cause of death as “accidental”.  This surveillance video of Lam getting in the elevator and acting strangely was released.  Crazy people think that it shows that she was killed by ghosts or was possessed by demons or something.  I suppose that’s true; the ghosts and demons inside her own head.

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ_E6l1P86U[/tube]

Today’s Frozen Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In what is quite possibly the most bizarre result of global warming yet, a melting glacier in the Northern-Italian Alps is slowly revealing the corpses of soldiers who died in the First World War. After nearly a century, the frozen bodies appear to be perfectly mummified from the ice. With the remains also comes the story of the highest battle in history—‘The White War’.

The year is May 1915. The newly unified Italy decides to join the Allied Forces in the First World War, which by then is 10 months underway. Italy, eager to expand its borders, decides to wage war against Austria in an effort to annex the mountain areas of Trentino and Southern Tirol. The conflict results in what is now known as ‘The White War’: a cold, four-year-long standoff between Italian mountain troops, named ‘the Alpini’, and their Austrian opponents, ‘the Kaiserschützen’. The battle was fought at high altitude, with special weapons and infrastructure like ice-trenches and cable transports. Often the sides would use mortar fire to try and incur avalanches—‘the white death’—on each other’s camps, claiming thousands of lives.

Now, thanks largely to decades of global warming, the Presena glacier running through the battleground is slowly melting away. And with that melting the remains of the White War are slowly emerging. Remarkably well-kept artifacts have been streaming down with the melting water of the glacier since the early 90s: A love letter dated from 1918, to a certain Maria that was never sent. An ode to an old friend, scribbled down in a diary. A love note picturing a sleeping woman, signed, in Czech, “Your Abandoned Wife.”

Now, after almost a century, the bodies are following suit. Because of the cold, the remains often surface completely intact, still wrapped in their original uniforms. Last September, two Austrians emerged from the ice, aged 17 and 18, both blue-eyed and blonde—with bullet holes in both of their skulls.

“The first thing I thought of were their mothers,” Franco Nicolis from the local Archeological Heritage Office told the Telegraph. “They feel contemporary. They come out of the ice just as they went in. In all likelihood the soldiers’ mothers never discovered their sons’ fate.”

The local community has been laboring for years now to reveal the remains of this largely forgotten war. In 2004, Maurizio Vicenzi, a local mountain guide and head of the Peio’s war museum, discovered the bodies of three soldiers hanging upside down from an ice wall at an altitude of 12,000 feet—victims of one the highest front lines in history. Multiple findings followed. In one rare find, a team discovered a hidden ice tunnel, that, after being melted open with huge ventilators, turned out to house an enormous wooden structure used as a transportation station for ammunition and supplies

. 

All bodies that have since emerged pass through the office of Daniel Gaudio, a forensic anthropologist tasked to trace the identities of the war victims. Despite the fact that in most cases he’s able to extract the DNA from the corpses, he rarely succeeds. They’re missing contextual information, he says, that is necessary to determine the possible whereabouts of the families of the war victims.

To date, more than 80 bodies have appeared from the depths of the glacier. And more will surely follow. On the Italian side alone more than 750,000 soldiers died in battle, according to historian Mark Thompson, author of The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919. Next summer, archeological teams will continue their search for more remains of icy melee. And the bodies are certain to keep on coming—climate change looks certain to continue, even accelerate, the thaw.

For now, it’s winter. Not far from the place where the soldiers were first discovered lies Peio, a ski resort where Italians, Austrians, Germans and Russians are once again sharing the same mountain. They do so more peacefully now.

Culled from: Motherboard
Generously submitted by: Bethaney

Today’s Disgruntled Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Douglas Crabbe. What a dick.

On August 18, 1983, in the town of Yulara in Australia’s Northern Territories, a 36-year-old man named Douglas Crabbe was refused service at the Inland Hotel bar because he was already intoxicated. After getting into a confrontation with the bar’s staff, Crabbe was ejected from the premises.  He then walked about 500 meters to where he’d parked his Mack Truck, uncoupled one of its two trailers, and then drove the 25-ton truck at high speed around a turn, through a parking lot and straight into the wall of the Inland Hotel. Witnesses said the sound was like a bomb going off, and the truck penetrated the building to the length of its one trailer. Crabbe left the engine running, climbed down, smiled at one of his victims, stepped over the bodies, and left. He was captured a few hours later at a construction site and arrested without a struggle.  Four people were killed instantly, and a fifth died during emergency surgery a short while later. Sixteen people were badly injured. The building was so severely damaged that the truck lodged in it was the only thing holding up the roof.  Douglas Crabbe was sentenced to five consecutive life terms in prison, with his earliest possible parole (denied) being August of 2013.

Culled from: Murderpedia
Submitted by: Aimee

Guess he got a bit Crabbe-y when he was kicked out of the place. – Aimee

Today’s Frozen Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Authorities on a North Dakota reservation are investigating whether a woman found dead in a mobile home with an empty propane tank died from the cold.  Debbie Dogskin’s body was discovered Tuesday morning (February 4, 2014) at her Fort Yates home.  Sioux County Sheriff Frank Landeis says the temperature on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation dropped to 1 degree below zero overnight.  Landeis says he believes Dogskin “just froze to death”. Autopsy results are expected by Friday.  People have been struggling to stay warm as propane prices more than doubled due to a national shortage.  Tribal officials have declared a state of emergency because about 5,000 homes on the reservation are heated by propane. Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II says many residents are on fixed incomes and can’t afford the more expensive fuel.

Culled From: The Associated Press
Submitted by: Aimee

The conditions on many of our nation’s Indian reservations are inexcusable, especially in this day and age. – Aimee

Today’s Odd, Violent, Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Suzanne Basso was an odd woman by any standard. Massively obese, she was obsessed with everything Irish, though she herself had no Irish blood at all. She spun fanciful stories about herself, such as claiming to be heiress to a Nova Scotia oil fortune. She also had a violent temper and was believed to have had something to do with the death of her husband Carmine Basso.

In 1997, Basso met Louis “Buddy” Musso in New Jersey. Musso was 59, and though he lived independently and worked at a local grocery store, he was mildly mentally retarded and was overly trusting. Basso had little trouble wooing Musso and despite the misgivings of his family and friends, he left New Jersey to travel to Texas with his new girlfriend in June of 1998, believing they would marry.  Basso was more interested in Musso’s Social Security checks. She became his representative payee, meaning his checks went directly to her; she cut off all contact with Al Becker, a longtime friend of Musso’s who had been his payee for twenty years, and she dodged attempts by Becker and Musso’s niece to check up on his welfare. She also took out life insurance on Musso, with an extra payout to be received if he died through violent crime.

Suzanne Basso and her victim, Buddy Musso.

Through all this, Musso lived in squalor with Basso and her grown son, James O’Malley, whom it is widely suspected she was having a sexual relationship with. They, along with friend Bernice Ahrens, her son Craig, daughter Hope, and Hope’s fiance Terence Singleton, regularly tortured Musso. He was forced to sit or kneel for hours on a plastic mat, and if he tried to move out of position he was kicked with steel-toed boots, beaten, stomped or burned with cigarettes.

On August 25, 1998, Musso received an especially severe beating, with the overweight Basso jumping on him while he was on all fours. Musso asked for somebody to call an ambulance. Instead, his six tormentors bathed him using a solution of bleach and Pine-Sol and a wire brush. He died during this “bath.”  Musso’s body was dumped in a ditch outside Houston, Texas and was found a couple of days later. Every inch of his body was bruised, cut or burned; the medical examiner could not determine which had been the fatal injury. Even his palms and soles were bruised, and he’d suffered a hinge skull fracture, broken ribs, whip marks and burns that appeared to come from a cigarette or a hot poker.

Basso was sentenced to death and was executed by lethal injection on February 5, 2014. she was 59 years old, the same age as her victim.

Culled From: Murderpedia
Submitted by: Aimee

We can argue over whether or not putting Suzanne Basso to death is justice for the death of Buddy Musso, but few would disagree that nothing could ever be adequate retribution for what Musso went through before his death. – Aimee

Today’s Fizzy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The father and stepmother of a five-year old girl who died after she was forced to drink more than two liters of water and grape soda will stand trial for murder and aggravated child abuse, a judge ruled Friday, two years after her death.  Randall Vaughn and Mary Vaughn did not enter a plea at Friday’s arraignment, but were ordered to stand trial in October, authorities said. Both were held on $500,000 bond, and neither had an attorney representing them yet.  In early 2012, Alexa Linboom drank some of her stepmother’s grape soda after she was told it was off-limits. Prosecutors say that as a punishment, her stepmother Mary and father Randall made her drink several 12-ounce bottles of grape soda, and then refused to help her when she was clearly hurt. “Our position is it was a matter of several hours after the child started exhibiting serious symptoms, after the child was screaming out in pain, went into a paralyzed state, and became unconscious,” prosecutor Berkeley Bell said.  The excessive drinking caused the child’s brain to swell and rupture, and she was blue and unresponsive with an “abnormal body posture that indicates severe brain damage” when the Vaughns brought her to the hospital, the Associated Press reports. She died Jan. 3, 2012 of acute fluid intoxication, and her death was ruled a homicide.

Culled from: Time
Generously submitted by: Aimee

Today’s Distasteful Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In 19th century Jamaican jails, slaves were ‘bowed’ (a naval term meaning to stretch out with block and tackle) for flogging.  An account in the Jamaican Christian Record for 1830 provides the distasteful details:

A female… about 22 years of age, was then laid down, with her face downwards; her wrists were secured by cords run into nooses; her ankles were brought together and placed in another noose; the cord composing this last one, passed through a block, connected with a post. The cord was tightened, and the young woman was then stretched to her utmost length.

A female then advanced, and raised her clothes towards her head, leaving the person indecently exposed.  The boatswain of the workhouse, a tall athletic man, flourished his whip four or five times round his head, and proceeded with the punishment.  This instrument of punishment was a cat, formed of knotted cords.  The blood sprang from the wounds it inflicted.  The poor creature shrieked in agony…

Culled from: The History of Torture