Global Oddities

Police were hunting Monday a convicted arsonist who escaped from London’s Pentonville prison by clinging to the underside of the security van that brought him there.

Julien Chautard, 39, gave prison officers the slip shortly after he was counted off the van, newspapers reported.
His disappearance Friday evening was not noticed before the van was cleared to drive out of the jail.
It was only when CCTV footage was checked seven hours later that officers noticed a shadow under the van that had not been there before.
Chautard had been sentenced earlier in the day at Snaresbrook Crown Court to seven years imprisonment for two counts of arson, Scotland Yard said.
Police said he has connections in France and also has links to the Hackney, Edgware and Kings Cross areas of north London.
“The circumstances around the escape will be fully investigated,” the Ministry of Justice said.
Source Reuters, March 30, 2009

A man on a rampage fatally stabbed his 17-year-old sister, decapitated his 5-year-old sister in front of a police officer and then headed toward his 9-year-old sister before officers shot him amid what their chief described as “a killing field.”
There is no clear motive yet for the events that unfolded about 5 p.m. Saturday in this tony Boston suburb that is also home to Gov. Deval Patrick. But there is no doubt at the carnage wrought by 23-year-old Kerby Revelus against his three sisters in the two-family home they shared with their parents and grandmother.
Bianca was killed as a cake for her 5th birthday sat on the kitchen table. Sarafina, 9, dialed 911 and watched police shoot her brother as her elder sister, Samantha, lay dead on the floor.
Sarafina was hospitalized Sunday at the Boston Medical Center with defensive wounds to her hands and stab wounds in her abdomen and one of her legs.
“In policing, we see the raw human emotion every day, but to think that a human being could afflict such an atrocious, violent act on his own family is unbelievable,” Milton police Chief Richard G. Wells Jr. told The Associated Press.
“When I walked up to the first officer (on the scene), I could see the whole story right in his face. This just told me that this was something very bad,” Wells said.
Kerby Revelus had recently served jail time on a gun charge, Wells said, but the details would not be released until courts opened Monday. Police had been called to the same house in 2004 after a domestic violence report of Revelus allegedly punching one of the women living in the home, Wells said.
Saturday’s attack came about 24 hours after Revelus had gotten into a fistfight with a man living next door, Wells said.
Source: AP, March 29, 2009

A 60-year-old Washington woman arrested for drunken driving three times in three days while vacationing in Wisconsin has been sentenced to a month in jail. The woman was arrested first at 2 p.m. March 11, 2008. A deputy saw her try to drive out of a ditch, wearing only one shoe and had a blood-alcohol level of 0.21, authorities said. The legal driving limit is .08.

Twenty-four hours later, the woman was arrested after her car got stuck in snow in a park campground that was closed for the winter. The woman told an officer she had had four or six cups of wine.

“I am still finishing up the box of wine in my car from yesterday,” authorities reported she told the officer.

Authorities found a box of Black Fox wine in the car.

The woman spent 12 hours in jail. She was released and headed west, but was arrested a short time later after someone reported her driving “all over the road,” according to a police report.

An officer found a partial bottle of wine in her car. She had a blood alcohol-level of 0.16.

Court records released Wednesday show the woman was sentenced last week to 30 days in jail and fined more than $3,000.

Source: AP, March 26, 2009

Two disgraced Roman Catholic priests have been sentenced to prison in a case involving the misappropriation of more than $8 million from their church, a theft one judge called “greed unmasked.”

John Skehan and Francis Guinan were accused in 2006 of skimming money from collection plates and bequests at their church in Delray Beach, Florida, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on real estate, travel, rare coins and girlfriends.
Skehan, 81, was sentenced Tuesday to 14 months in prison and seven years probation after pleading guilty in January to a charge of grand theft of over $100,000.
Guinan, 66, was sentenced Wednesday to four years in prison after taking the case to trial and being found guilty of a lesser charge of theft under $100,000.
Judge Jeffrey Colbath imposed the prison term on Skehan despite requests from prosecutors, defense lawyers and the Diocese of Palm Beach for probation only, the Palm Beach Post reported.
“The court finds the defendant is not merely sorry because he got caught, but is truly shameful, embarrassed and remorseful,” the newspaper quoted Colbath as saying.
“The crime of the defendant was pure greed unmasked. There was not a shred of moral necessity to excuse the defendant’s crime,” he added.
Judge Krista Marx said Guinan must be punished for “unmitigated greed and unmitigated gall,” Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel newspaper reported.
“No matter how many good works you have performed in your many years as a priest, your legacy will always be one of thievery and deceit,” she said.
When the priests were charged in September 2006, police said they had channeled money from collection plates into secret slush funds, using some of it for church projects and part for vacations, property and gambling trips to Las Vegas and the Bahamas.
Investigators said Skehan, a priest for more than 50 years, invested heavily in rare coins, owned a cottage and a pub in Ireland, a $455,000 penthouse condominium in Singer Island, Florida, and another apartment in Delray Beach.
Forensic accountants hired by the diocese found that $8.7 million had been misappropriated from the St. Vincent Ferrer Church during the tenures of Skehan and his successor, Guinan.
Source: Reuters , March 26, 2009

The British teen who claimed that an even younger boy fathered her child has a different story to tell after DNA test results showed young Alfie Patten wasn’t the dad.
Chantelle Stedman, 15, said she had only slept with Alfie, age 13. Their story touched off international outrage over the moral standards of parents and their children.
But The Telegraph reported that other boys a few years older than Alfie had come forward saying they too had slept with Chantelle.
Now The Mirror confirms that while they don’t know who is little Maisie’s dad, it definitely isn’t Alfie.
“The result will be a blow to Alfie who was “devastated” by the boys’ claims and “adored” Maisie,” the newspaper reported. “He was convinced he was the dad after a single night of unprotected sex with Chantelle.”
Stedman’s daughter Maisie was allegedly conceived when Alfie was 12. Chantelle’s parents said they let the lad spend the night with their daughter, who was 14 at the time, at their public housing unit near Eastbourne, 70 miles southeast of London.
Alfie told The Sun he plans to look after his newborn daughter. But in an interview, the boy admitted he didn’t know what the word “financially” meant and acknowledged he doesn’t even get an allowance.
Alfie’s father, who reportedly has nine or 10 children of his own, gamely promised to have a “birds and the bees” chat with his son.
Not all were reassured.
Sir Bernard Ingham, once press secretary to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told the Associated Press that people from across Britain’s political spectrum are in despair over the country’s social breakdown.
Source: Daily Telegraph (Britain), March 26, 2009

Police are seeking a woman they said used a false identity to get breast implants and liposuction, then skipped town. Huntington Beach police said Monday that a 30-year-old woman opened a line of credit in someone else’s name in September 2008 and had the procedures worth more than $12,000 performed at the Pacific Center For Plastic Surgery.

Employees said she never returned for follow-up visits.

The woman turned herself in Tuesday and was released on $20,000 bail. She faces charges of commercial burglary, grand theft and identity theft.

Source: AP March 24, 2009

A woman attempting to reconcile with her estranged husband handcuffed herself to him as he slept and then bit him on his torso and arms as he phoned for help, police said.

Helen Sun, 37, told police she wanted to have a conversation with Robert Drawbough without him leaving. She changed the locks on their bedroom door and, while he was sleeping Monday, handcuffed herself to him, authorities said.

Drawbough was able to dial 911 from his cellphone. Nearly out of breath, he told dispatchers he woke up handcuffed, was still bound to his wife and was holding her down, according to a recording released by police.

Dispatchers heard Drawbough scream in agony, apparently as his wife bit him.

“Owwww!,” Drawbough shouts repeatedly. “Are they almost here? Oh God. I need help!”

Asked by dispatchers why his wife was attacking him, Drawbough said was because he divorced her, adding that she had a history of violence.

Drawbough was treated at a hospital, police said.

Sun told investigators that restraining Drawbough was the only way she could get him to speak to her, authorities said.

Police charged Sun with third-degree assault, disorderly conduct, reckless endangerment and unlawful restraint.

She was being held on $15,000 bond after an appearance Tuesday in Bridgeport Superior Court, according to a court clerk. Sun was represented by a public defender who did not immediately return a message left by The Associated Press.

Drawbough has been living in Los Angeles, but returned to Connecticut about a week ago, police said.

He told police his wife is obsessive and a danger to him and his friends and family. He said his wife hired private investigators to follow him, according to police. The status of their divorce was unclear.

Sun’s mother said the couple had been married about eight years.

Source: AFP, March 24, 2009

A 25-year-old transsexual Spaniard claims to be pregnant with twins after artificial insemination in the first such case in Spain, local media reported on Sunday.

“I am six-and-a-half weeks pregnant,” Ruben Noe Coronado Jimenez, initially named Estefania, told the popular magazine Pronto, saying he took treatment to restart his menstrual cycle.
In photos posted on his blog, where he also wrote about the pregnancy, Coronado has a shaved head and a beard.
He said he had retained his female status to be able to undergo fertility treatment, but would start the administrative process this month to officially change his gender to male in accordance with newly passed legislation.
As a result, Coronado said, he would give birth as a man.
A law that went into effect last year allows Spaniards suffering from “a sexual identity problem” and undergoing hormonal or endocrinal treatment to change their sexual status without undergoing surgery or a sex change.
The insemination took place at a private clinic, Coronado told the magazine, adding that if all went well he would give birth by Caesarean section in September.
Source: AFP, March 23, 2009

Spanish police said Friday they had detained a man who received a parcel in the mail from Venezuela containing a dinner set that was made with 20 kilos (44 pounds) of cocaine.

The 35-year-old was arrested as he received the package containing the 42-piece dinner set made up of cups, plates and bowls at his home in Barcelona, police said in a statement.
The package was sent to Barcelona from Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city, via London in the middle of February.
Police suspect the man had been recruited by a Venezuelan drug trafficking gang to receive the package which he was supposed to hand over to members of the group who would then extract the cocaine from the dinner set.
Barcelona has been the scene in recent days of several creative attempts to smuggle cocaine into Spain, the main entry point for the drug into Europe.
Earlier this month police detained an Ecuadorian woman at Barcelona airport who tried to smuggle liquid cocaine hidden in spray cans of products to starch clothes or clean glass into Spain.
Police also arrested a 66-year-old Chilean man at the airport at the beginning of the month after discovering that his broken leg was supported by a “cast” made out of cocaine.
Source: AFP March 20, 2009

The head of a Ghanaian king executed by Dutch colonists in the 1830s is to be returned to its homeland for burial, say authorities in the Netherlands.

Badu Bonsu II, leader of the Ashanti tribe, is believed to have been decapitated in retaliation for the killing of two Dutch emissaries.

The Leiden museum, which has been storing the head, said it hoped it could now have a dignified burial.

Ghana had said the king would not be at rest if the head remained where it was.

King Bonsu is thought to have been executed after the two officials were killed during a rebellion against European rule in the country, hanging their heads on his throne as a trophy.

At some point, the king’s head was taken from Ghana to the Netherlands, and has been kept in a jar of formaldehyde at the Leiden University Medical Centre ever since.
Source: BBC news online, March 20, 2009