Free Republic

SEPTEMBER 21--Meet Angela DeHart. The West Virginia woman, 23, is facing a pair of felony charges for allegedly stealing a hearse containing a body and driving home in it early yesterday. According to police, the hearse--parked outside the Ritchie and Johnson Funeral Home in Beckley--was swiped shortly after midnight on Tuesday. The driver, cops reported, had briefly left the hearse unattended--with its door open--while he entered the funeral home. The driver, Kenneth Bly, “pulled into the parking lot…in order to unload a corpse” from the 1996 Cadillac Fleetwood hearse, according to a court affidavit. As Bly moved toward the funeral...

ISLAMABAD, May 6 : Al Qaeda confirmed Osama Bin Laden was dead on Friday, dispelling some of the fog around the killing of the “holy warrior,” and vowed to mount more attacks on the West. The announcement by the Islamist network, which promised to publish a taped message from Bin Laden soon, appeared likely to silence doubts expressed by some that he had died at all. In a statement online, it said Bin Laden’s blood “is more precious to us and to every Muslim than to be wasted in vain.” Supporters of the Pakistani religious party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam burn a...

Taliban demands to see proof of Al Qaeda leader's death White House may also release video of his burial at sea Three sets of photos taken - during raid, at Afghanistan airbase and at sea U.S. used 'multiple means' to identify Bin Laden One report said he had a 'massive head wound above his left eye, with brains and blood visible' The White House was today split on whether to release the gruesome pictures of Bin Laden's corpse as conspiracy theorists and the Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1382828/Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-picture-White-House-split-release-corpse-photo.html#ixzz1LOn5QMGN

It was like a scene from "Weekend at Bernie's" when a Colombian soccer team recently got an unexpected fan. Friends brought a coffin with the body of a 17-year-old boy into a soccer match Sunday between Cucuta Deportivo and Envigado, according to Colombia Reports. Christopher Jacome, a big fan of Cucuta, was gunned down Saturday in a local park while playing soccer, according to the paper. Friends of Jacome took his body from the funeral home after the wake and brought it into General Santander Stadium for the game. "They don't let in the fanatics, but yes, a cadaver. This...

Kim Jong-il's Physical State Poor During December Visit to Musan - Rumor amongst locals that this visit to Musan will be his last - In need of assistance as he uses a stick throughout - Looked drawn and on his last legs - People despair that nothing will change whether he dies or not A source in Musan, North Hamgyeong Province, relates that on a tour of Musan Mine at the beginning of December, those that saw his face report him confiding that "This visit to the Musan mine could be Kim Jong-il's last steps." Flatly rejecting conjecture that Kim...

COSTA MESA -- A woman drove around with a decomposing corpse for months before the body was discovered by police. Officers made the gruesome discovery on Monday while responding to a report of an illegally parked car. Police say the woman tried to cover the mummified corpse with pieces of clothing. The car was blocking a driveway in the 2000 block of Tustin Avenue in Costa Mesa. Officers could smell a foul odor coming from the car, and after seeing a leg underneath the clothing, broke a window to get access inside. Inside the car, officers also found a box...

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was said to no longer be capable of functioning in his position. Diplomatic sources said Mubarak's condition has rapidly declined over the last month and his schedule was severely restricted. They said Mubarak was avoiding meetings with most non-Arab leaders to prevent leaks of his true condition. "He is a walking corpse," a senior Arab diplomat who recently attended a meeting with Mubarak said In July, the sources said, Mubarak underwent a lengthy examination at a French military hospital outside Paris. They said the examination took place amid alarm by presidential aides and close relatives over...

A German woman arrested on suspicion of trying to smuggle a corpse onto a plane says her husband was still alive when they reached Liverpool airport. Gitta Jarant told Bild newspaper on Friday she hopes to get the remains of her husband Willi from Britain as soon as possible to have him cremated -- and then return to Berlin. Jarant and her daughter were arrested at Liverpool's John Lennon airport on Saturday suspected of failing to give notice of Willi's death. She told the paper the 91-year-old former pilot had died at the airport just before the flight. "I'm not...

On Obama's use of the word "corps"... this has been making the rounds, but I thought for those who haven't seen it, it is worth posting.

Navy "Corpse-men" everywhere ask: Where's the Mainstream Media? Remember the 1992 Presidential campaign, when then-Vice President Dan Quayle was visiting a Trenton elementary school and was holding spelling flash cards as children were spelling the words on a blackboard in front of him? During this exercise, a 12-year old student wrote his given word, "potato" on the blackboard. As the Vice President checked the flash card containing the word, he informed the student that "he was close, but left a little something off; the "e" on the end." The student, who knew that he had, in fact, spelled the word...

Yes, those are the words of the president, last night at the Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Washington. After listing his administration's accomplishments and vowing that "our most urgent task is job creation," Obama pledged to keep fighting for a national health care system. "We knew this was hard," Obama said. And then he described a letter he received from a campaign worker who suffered from breast cancer and has since died...

Here is video showing the dangers of being so heavily dependent on a teleprompter. President Obama was speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast and was telling about a Navy Corpsman who assisted the suffering people of Haiti. But as his head bobbed back and forth between his two teleprompters, he read the word "Corpsman" and pronounced it "Corpse Man" twice. . . . (VIDEO)

Ambulances race to Byrd's home By: Manu Raju September 22, 2009 10:16 AM EST Ambulances and fire trucks were dispatched to the Northern Virginia home of Sen. Robert Byrd Tuesday morning. A neighbor of the 91-year-old West Virginia Democrat said several ambulances were outside his residence in McLean, Va., and a Byrd spokesman said the senator suffered a fall in his home. An officer at the McLean Fire Department said that a unit was dispatched at 9:10 to the address where Byrd lives, but he declined to comment on the substance of the response. Byrd – the longest-serving senator in...

Chinese police report finding bodies of 56 North Korean would-be refugees in Yalu river By Michael Rank Chinese police have reported how the bodies of 56 North Koreans attempting to flee to China, including seven children, were found floating in the Yalu river in 2003. An official notice issued by police in the border town of Baishan in Jilin province describes how 53 corpses were discovered by local people on the morning of October 3, 2003, followed by three more at 5 a.m. the following day. “An examination found that the dead were all citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic...

42.90 Euros Per Arm The German company Tutogen's business in body parts is as secretive as it is lucrative. It extracts bones from corpses in Ukraine to manufacture medical products, as part of a global market worth billions that is centered in the United States. Anatoly Korzhak, a pensioner and former engineer, died in Kiev on August 5, 2004. His body was picked up at 2 a.m. and taken to the forensic medicine institute in the Ukrainian capital. That same night, Korzhak's daughter, Lena Krat, received a telephone call and was asked to come to the institute as soon as...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A funeral director accused of leaving a woman's body to decay in a parked hearse after her relatives failed to pay the bill was arrested on a felony charge of abusing a corpse, police said Wednesday. Watson and Sons Funeral Home embalmed the remains of Edna Kathleen Woods, 52, after she died of natural causes in November 2007, said Gadsden police Sgt. Jeff Wright. Relatives wanted the body cremated but failed to sign the necessary paperwork or pay owner Harold Watson Sr., he said. After storing the corpse at his funeral home for more than a year,...

Residents of Akure, the Ondo State capital are still finding it difficult to believe the explanation by Governor Olusegun Agagu and the state Commissioner for Health, Dr. Kehinde Adedeji, that the missing parts of a corpse deposited at the mortuary of the State Specialist Hospital, Akure were truly eaten by strange rats who have found better diet in human bodies. Although rodents, which experts have said make up more than a third of all living mammal species, adapt to all terrestrial habitats, it remains a mystery that they could survive in a functional mortuary. In Akure, people now joke that...

[ Still Standing He wanted to be known as a stand-up guy, even in death. To fulfill his last wish, the body of 24-year-old Angel Pantoja Medina, who was found dead underneath a bridge in Puerto Rico, was propped upright in the living room of his mother's San Juan home. A local funeral home used a special embalming treatment to keep the body standing upright for his three-day wake.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) ― The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated sexual assault charges against three young men accused of digging up a corpse so one of them could have sex with it. In a 5-2 decision, the court said Wisconsin law makes sex acts with dead people illegal. The ruling reinstates third-degree attempted sexual assault charges against twin brothers Nicholas and Alexander Grunke and Dustin Radke, all 22. The charges carry a punishment of up to 10 years in prison. A circuit court judge and an appeals court had dismissed those charges, saying Wisconsin law does not ban sex...

Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama says Israel is a "constant wound" and a "constant sore" that infects "all of our foreign policy." Obama, under fire for attracting praise and support for his presidential run from the terrorist group Hamas, spoke to Atlantic Monthly at length about his views of the Middle East. Asked if he thought Israel represented a drag on America's reputation overseas, Obama said: "No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse...

HOUSTON -- Police have charged three suspects accused of using the skull of a corpse buried in a Kingwood cemetery to make a bong. Kevin Wade Jones, 17, Matthew Richard Gonzalez, 17, and a 16-year-old boy were all charged with one count of desecrating a corpse. The suspects are accused of digging up the skull of an 11-year-old boy buried in a cemetery for African American war veterans and using it to smoke marijuana.

The controversial public display of Padre Pio's body is attracting a new kind of Irish holidaymaker who likes to combine sunshine and spirituality. Thousands of these 'tourist pilgrims' are travelling to view the mystic monk's remains in San Giovanni Rotondo, before heading off for some secular sight-seeing around the rest of Italy. But the stigmatic saint, whose body has been exhumed 40 years after his death, is the main draw in these religious vacations to the Puglia region. Tour operators are tapping-into this growing market for trips with a sacred flavour. Around 750,000 pilgrims from all over the world have...

NEW YORK (AP) - Two men wheeled a dead man through the streets in an office chair to a check-cashing store and tried to cash his Social Security check before being arrested on fraud charges, police said. David J. Dalaia and James O'Hare pushed Virgilio Cintron's body from the Manhattan apartment that O'Hare and Cintron shared to Pay-O-Matic, about a block away, spokesman Paul Browne said witnesses told police. "The witnesses saw the two pushing the chair with Cintron flopping from side to side and the two individuals propping him up and keeping him from flopping from side to side,"...

NEW YORK - Two men wheeled a dead man through the streets in an office chair to a check-cashing store Tuesday and tried to cash his Social Security check before being arrested on fraud charges, police said. David J. Dalaia and James O'Hare pushed Virgilio Cintron's body from the Manhattan apartment that O'Hare and Cintron shared to Pay-O-Matic, about a block away, spokesman Paul Browne said witnesses told police. "The witnesses saw the two pushing the chair with Cintron flopping from side to side and the two individuals propping him up and keeping him from flopping from side to side,"...

Pair wheel corpse to store to cash check By MARCUS FRANKLIN, Associated Press Writer Tue Jan 8, 11:04 PM ET Two men wheeled a dead man through the streets in an office chair to a check-cashing store and tried to cash his Social Security check before being arrested on fraud charges, police said. David J. Dalaia and James O'Hare pushed Virgilio Cintron's body from the Manhattan apartment that O'Hare and Cintron shared to Pay-O-Matic, about a block away, spokesman Paul Browne said witnesses told police. "The witnesses saw the two pushing the chair with Cintron flopping from side to side...

Strange as it may seem, the dead have quit rotting in German cemeteries -- they are turning into wax-like corpses. Will the use of burial chambers solve the problem? Or is extensive soil reconditioning the only viable alternative? Cemeteries are supposed to be the quietest places on earth. But that notion may soon have to be laid to rest: Exhumation experts are currently conducting large-scale digging operations in German graveyards, belying the very concept of eternal peace. Corpses are no longer decaying in many German cemeteries. Instead, the deceased become waxen, an uncanny process that has become so rampant it...

French seeking emperor's corpse Last Updated: 1:23am GMT 09/12/2007 He was the last emperor and the first president of France but for 120 years the Emperor Napoleon III's remains have lain in England. Exiled: Napoleon III of France and the Empress Eugénie Now the French want them back. Tomorrow Christian Estrosi, the secretary of state for overseas territories, will arrive in Britain to request the return of the remains of the exiled emperor and his wife, Empress Eugénie, which lie in a crypt in St Michael's Abbey in Farnborough, Hampshire. Mr Estrosi said: "This trip will be for me an...

Man Claims Panic Led Him to Chop Up Dead Pal's Body, Stuff It In Barrel Wednesday, July 25, 2007 BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — A man charged with improperly disposing of a corpse claims he chopped up his friend's body, stuffed the parts in a metal drum and rolled it into a river in a panic after the friend died of a drug overdose, police said. The drum, with the body parts inside, was found floating in the Pequonnock River in Bridgeport last week. Felix Rivera, 23, was charged Tuesday with improper disposal of a dead body after he told police his...

LONDON (AP) -- A first-class passenger on a flight from New Delhi to London awoke to find the corpse of a woman who had died in the economy cabin being placed in a seat next to him, British Airways said today. The flight's economy section was full, and the cabin crew needed to move the woman and her grieving family out of that compartment to give them some privacy, the airline said. The first-class passenger, Paul Trinder, told the Sunday Times newspaper that he was sleeping during a February flight from India and woke up when the crew placed the...

February 21, 2007 (SAN FRANCISCO) - A Haight-Ashbury man returning home from an extended vacation tripped and fell on a corpse in his bedroom after finding his apartment had been ransacked, police said. Authorities have not released the name of the resident or the victim, identified only as a white male, but are treating the death as suspicious, said Sgt. Neville Gittens. The resident had just come back from a two-week visit in Humboldt County when he made the grisly discovery Monday, Gittens said. "That is really sad, just terrible," said Kiersten Frey, who has lived on the block for...

Les services secrets saoudiens auraient acquis la conviction que le fondateur d'Al-Qaïda est mort. Si elle était prochainement confirmée, l'information tomberait à pic pour le président américain Georges Bush fortement malmené par les sondages à moins de deux mois des élections. L'information que nous révélons aujourd'hui résulte d'une note de renseignement classifiée « confidentiel défense » émanant de la Direction générale des services extérieurs (DGSE). Les services secrets français l'ont transmise jeudi 21 septembre au Président de la république, au Premier ministre, au ministre de l'Intérieur et de la Défense. Nous vous en livrons le contenu in-extenso. : « Selon...

Friends Say Buckalew Told Them He Did It Out Of Boredom POSTED: 12:52 pm EDT June 29, 2006 ST. JOHNSBURY, Vt. -- A Vermont teenager has been sentenced to prison for breaking into a tomb and cutting the head off a corpse. Nickolas Buckalew, 18, of Morrisville, Vt., pleaded guilty two charges. One was a felony count of intentionally removing or injuring a tombstone. The other was a felony charge of intentionally disinterring and carrying away the remains of a human body. Buckalew was sentenced to between one and seven years in prison and was given credit for serving 14...

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian builders who drank their way to the bottom of a huge barrel of rum while renovating a house got a nasty surprise when a pickled corpse tumbled out of the empty barrel, a police magazine website reported. According to online magazine www.zsaru.hu, workers in Szeged in the south of Hungary tried to move the barrel after they had drained it, only to find it was surprisingly heavy and were shocked when the body of a naked man fell out. The website said that the body of the man had been shipped back from Jamaica 20 years...

BERLIN (Reuters) - A 53-year-old German woman who was driving her dead mother across country to save on mortuary transportation costs was fined by police for disturbing a dead person's peace. "You're not allowed to transport dead people in your private car," said Ralf Schomisch, police spokesman in Koblenz, where the car was found after a tip-off from a mortuary. "The corpse was on the back seat without a seat belt, which in this case didn't really matter. But it was covered up with clothing. It is a misdemeanour."

DELAND — A man who is accused of allowing his mother's dead body to decompose inside her house so he could continue to cash her Social Security checks is being sought by DeLand police. An arrest warrant was issued for Robert Eugene Bea, 50, after police discovered a woman's decomposed body inside the home at 411 West Voorhis Avenue in DeLand on March 24. Police believe the woman is Bea's mother, Veronica Bea, and that he was aware she had died but had not told anyone. It is not clear how or when she died but police said there were...

CINCINNATI (AP) - A dead woman dressed in white was positioned in a chair in front of a television set for 2 1/2 years because she told her caregiver that she didn't want to be buried and planned to return, the coroner said. "Don't show my body when I'm dead," Hamilton County Coroner Dr. O'dell Owens said Monday in describing Johannas Pope's wishes. "Don't bury me. I'm coming back." Pope, 61, died Aug. 29, 2003. Her caretaker and friend, whose name has not been released, left the woman upstairs in the home with the television and air conditioning on while...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Halloween is long gone, but New Yorkers will be able from Saturday to pay to view a roomful of human cadavers, fileted limbs and dissected organs as part of a gruesome yet realistic exhibit on the human body. On November 19, 22 whole bodies and more than 260 organs will go on display in lower Manhattan's South Street Seaport, allowing visitors to see bodies damaged by obesity, black lungs ravaged by cigarette smoke, and close-ups of the central nervous, digestive and circulatory systems. To highlight function, one of the cadavers is in an athletic pose, holding...

Chinese Man Digs Up, Eats Corpse May 23, 2005, 11:00 PM China has reportedly sentenced a man to two-and-a-half years in prison, for digging up a woman's corpse and eating parts of her body. The official Xinhua News Agency says the man dug up the woman's remains the same day she had been buried. The news agency says a court ruled the man should be imprisoned instead of hospitalized for mental illness, because he was capable of controlling his actions.

Playing dead BY DAVE BARRY (This classic Dave Barry column was originally published on Feb. 19, 1995.) My advice to you, if you ever get invited to play the part of a corpse in an opera, is: Ask questions. Here are some that I would suggest: 1. Does the plot of this opera call for the corpse to get shoved halfway off a bed headfirst by people shrieking in Italian? 2. If so, is this corpse wearing a nightgown-style garment that could easily get bunched up around the corpse's head if the corpse finds itself in an inverted position with...

There is new information in the case of a decomposed female's body that was found at an Eastside apartment complex earlier this month. Thursday, Tucson Police detectives spoke with the woman's brother who was supposed to be caring for his sister. On April 5th, Tucson police made a welfare check at their home. Nothing prepared them for the gruesome discovery. The badly decomposed body of Brenda Burton was found in a bedroom with quilts piled high on top of her. Missing was her 50-year-old brother, Samuel, who family members say was supposed to be taking care of her. Theresa Morton,...

Giant rare bloom gives off stench   The plant is said to be the largest flower in the world A giant rare flower is emitting a stench of rotting flesh after blooming overnight. The titan arum at Kew Gardens, in west London, will keep its smelly bloom for only one or two days. Commonly known as the "corpse flower" by Indonesians in its native Sumatra, the blood-red flower is 2.11m tall and last bloomed at Kew in 2003. The stench, likened by one visitor to "dirty nappies", attracts the insects needed to pollinate the flower. The plant, Latin name...

A Serbian woman has been jailed for 18 months for marrying a dead man. Vinka Mijovic, 32, from Garas, was furious when wealthy Miodrag Tomovic, 68, died before he could marry her. So she bribed a local registrar to sign a marriage certificate saying the couple had both turned up for the wedding, and bribed two pals to be the best man and a witness to the fake event. She kept the death a secret for two weeks before suddenly announcing it and organising a lawyer to get his fortune turned over to her. But the scam was exposed after...

Taipei - A Taiwan man killed his friend two years ago and has been sleeping beside the corpse since then, Taiwan television channel (CTI) reported on Tuesday. CTI said the man, identified only as Chiu, killed his friend with an iron bar during a quarrel when they were drinking at Chiu's home. Chiu wrapped the corpse up in a quilt, tied up the bundle with ropes and left it on his bed. Policeman Chung Ta-nian said: "When the body decomposed and gave out a bad smell, Chiu placed camphor balls and sprayed disinfectant in his bedroom to suppress the bad...

Body Found At UN Headquarters In NYC; Had Been Shot UNITED NATIONS (AP)--A body was found inside United Nations headquarters on Monday, a U.N. spokesman said, and U.N. security and the New York police department were investigating the matter. A U.N. spokesman said the person had been shot and that the body was discovered inside the third floor lounge at about 11:30 a.m. EST (1630 GMT). He declined to give any details on the deceased person pending notification of the family. "The United Nations confirms a tragic shooting death at the U.N.," the spokesman said, speaking on customary condition of...

Puppy chews on corpse of owner By SIMONE WEICHSELBAUM & JENNIFER JENKINS weichss@phillynews.com A black Labrador Retriever puppy chewed on his owner's dead body for days before a relative discovered the corpse and rescued the animal yesterday. Police believe George Burhart, 75, died of natural causes earlier in the week, and his rambunctious 8-month-old pup, Shadow, gnawed on the body because he was hungry and could not conceive that his master was dead. "It's just a shame, he looked like a nice dog," said Jessica MacMillan, 16, who saw Shadow yesterday afternoon after Burhart's brother found his sibling's body and...

Human Corpse Exhibit Stirs Outrage POSTED: 3:35 PM EST February 3, 2004 UPDATED: 5:58 PM EST February 3, 2004DALIAN, China -- Hidden in a maze of factories in the heart of this northeastern Chinese port city is the house Gunther von Hagens built -- and, for many, a place where nightmares are created.Inside von Hagens' sprawling, well-guarded compound, behind a leaning metal fence pocked with holes, are more than 800 human beings - 200 of his staffers and 645 dead bodies in steel cases from almost a dozen nations. The anatomist, whose exhibits of preserved human corpses have riled religious...

Corpse of homeless man lay rotting on Japanese city street for two months Justin McCurry in Tokyo Friday December 19, 2003 The Guardian (UK) For two months, the body of an elderly man was ignored by passersby as it lay rotting on a street corner in Osaka, a short walk from a department store and a big railway station. The police in Japan's second city said yesterday that the corpse, thought to be that of a homeless man in his late 60s or early 70s, had begun to decompose by the time the authorities were called in to take it...

LAFAYETTE, Ga. - A former crematory operator accused of dumping decaying bodies around his family business pleaded innocent Tuesday to some charges and contested the validity of hundreds of others. Ray Brent Marsh, 29, faces multiple counts of burial service fraud, making false statements, abuse of a dead body and theft. He remains free on bond. At Tuesday's arraignment hearing, Marsh pleaded not guilty to 122 counts of burial service fraud and 47 counts of making false statements. His lawyer, Ken Poston, said Marsh was withholding pleas on 179 counts of abuse of a body and 439 counts of theft...

Detectives investigating the desecration of a Muslim woman's body that was covered with bacon as it lay in a hospital morgue have arrested three men and discovered a cache of 2,000 photographs of corpses.Another desecration of a corpse at Hillingdon Hospital mortuary in west London in 1996 - when the body was marked by a pen - has also emerged during the inquiry by Scotland Yard .Neither the family of the first victim or the police were notified at the time of the desecration. The hospital has apologised to the woman's family, who are said to be "very distressed", and...