Stranger Than Fiction

I'm in several Yahoo groups for all sorts of mystery-related associations and reading groups. All kinds of great information comes through on these lists but every once in awhile members will share some crazy news they've read. I read two items over the past two days that I just felt like I had to share.

One's pretty funny; the other is pretty disturbing.

Shall we start with funny?

This is from The Writer's Forensics Blog (http://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com/), which is written by D.P. Lyle, MD. For regular readers of my blog, you might remember that Dr. Lyle is the doctor who helped me with the poisoning scenario in my book.

He has a regular category he sometimes posts called Stupid Criminals. In this post, he tells the story of a woman, who at the time of her crime was serving on a jury for a credit card theft case in the Bronx.

During the trial, guess what she did? She stole a credit card from a fellow juror and went on a shopping spree!

Well the credit card noticed the unusual activity and alerted the man from whom the credit card was stolen. He called the police who tracked the activity and found a security camera revealing the woman shopping.

This case hasn't wrapped up yet, because the woman is claiming that the man was hitting on her and gave her his credit card to use. Yeah, right!

Ok, now for the disturbing item.

This originally comes from a Memphis newspaper I think. The body of a woman who has been missing since January was found last week UNDER a MOTEL BED INSIDE a metal frame with a mattress and box spring on top. It appears the body had been there SINCE HER DISAPPEARANCE!

That means her body was inside that bed for almost three months in a hotel room that has been rented out to people since her body was put there!

Her body was eventually found because a fould odor was reported by motel staff. Uh, you think? A body rotting beneath a boxspring and mattress for a few months? I can't believe it took three months to smell that!

According to the police the room has been rented out five times in that three month period and been cleaned "numerous" times as well.

And nobody smelled anything wrong? Noone sleeping on top of a rotting corpse sensed anything amiss? Their nose never wrinkled at a putrid scent rising from beneath them?

It just grosses me out thinking about it.

To make the whole thing just a little bit weirder, or maybe more pathetic, the police knew that the missing women had been living at the hotel and that she'd been staying in that room. While they went to the motel and spoke with some staff members, they never went inside the room to investigate!

OK, maybe I've seen one too many CSI episodes, but that just seems plain remiss.

Anyway, after reading this, I'm thinking maybe I need to start lifting up the boxspring and mattress on hotel beds before I snuggle in for the night. I don't EVER want to find out afterwards that I was sleeping on a corpse!!