Today’s Unusual Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Two cases of asphyxiation during unusual autoerotic activity with automobiles were reported by the Associated Press on June 19, 1999. Significantly, both these cases involved hydroelectric shovels on tractors.
In one case, a forty-two-year-old Asian man was found hanging by his neck, suspended by a rope attached to the raised shovel of his John Deere Model 410 diesel-powered backhoe tractor. The victim was last seen alive by his parents at 10:30 the previous night, when he left their shared rural home. Shortly thereafter, they heard the tractor engine start, as on prior occasions, but did not investigate further. The following morning the victim’s father noticed that his son’s bed had not been slept in and heard the tractor engine idling. Outside he found the body of his son, dead and cold. The victim was suspended in a semi-sitting position by a cloth safety-harness strap wrapped around his neck and clipped to a rope that was hooked on the raised shovel of the back hoe tractor. He had used a ligature to achieve partial autoerotic asphyxiation. Investigators hypothesized that he had lost consciousness and accidentally hanged himself.
Two years before his death, the victim had purchased his tractor as a Christmas gift to himself and named it “Stone”. He used the tractor in occasional ditch-digging jobs and wrote about it in a Christmas newsletter to his friends, in which he enclosed Stone’s picture. He also wrote about his tractor in a long poem alluding to “flying high in the sky” with his friend Stone.
The second case involved a sixty-two-year-old white man who was found dead in a barn pinned under the hydraulic scoop of his John Deere 1520 Model 145 tractor. A neighbor found the victim lying on the ground with the scoop of the tractor on his back. The engine was no longer running, but the ignition was in the “on” position. The victim was nude except for a pair of red women’s shoes with 8-inch heels, ankles were taped to a 4-foot-long segment of pipe, and his legs were spread. A yoke was attached to the center of this pipe. This yoke was attached to the front loader bucket by a chain. Two ropes led from the victim to the tractor’s control lever for raising and tilting the bucket. Fully raising the bucket would have caused the complete suspension of the victim’s inverted body by the ankles.
These unusual cases all emphasize how little we really know about people’s relationships with their vehicles.
Culled from: Car Crash Culture
Corpses Du Jour!
One of my favorite books is Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook. It is exactly what it says it is: a bizarre and oft-disturbing scrapbook collected over the years by Los Angeles area police detective Jack Huddleston, whose career spanned from 1921 to the early 1950’s.
Here are a couple of men who died with their cars:
Come on, everyone, all together now:
He thinks his tractor’s sexy!