News Of The Weird - June 27, 2006

Written by American City & County Administrator

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

Elizabeth Bragg, 23, was convicted in January in Huntington, Ind., when her 4-year-old stepdaughter suffered a car injury. According to the prosecutor, Bragg, intending to punish the girl for misbehaving, told her other kids to “hang on” but then unfastened the belt in the misbehaving girl’s car seat, and slammed on the brakes several times, causing the girl to bang her head.

In Mont-de-Marsan, France, Christophe Fauviau, 46, was sentenced to eight years in prison in the death of a young tennis player who ingested a sports drink Fauviau admitted to spiking with a tranquilizer. Fauviau said he spiked 27 young players’ drinks before their tournament matches against his son Maxime and his rising-star daughter Valentine.

Dieterich Doerfler Sr. was arrested in Seminole County, Fla., in March and charged with shredding his adult son’s child pornography collection, which police said he did in order to help the son avoid a probation violation.

Eleven women in the area around the nation’s capital have bonded, according to a February Washington Post story, around a tall, athletic man of German heritage (with a master’s degree and who tans easily), whom none has ever met. The man, known as donor 401, is the one whose sperm each of the women chose to be inseminated with, selected from a biographical catalog of the Fairfax Cryobank. That the women’s 12 offspring have a common father has provided powerful motivation for them to learn about each other, as a way of learning about 401 (who has now retired as a donor, though there is still a waiting list for his stored sperm.)
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD