Lead Stories
Loose Body Parts
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Jack Wilke filed suit in August against police in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, after he asked for his wife’s personal effects following her suicide and they gave him only a container holding some of her internal organs….As part of a wrongful-firing lawsuit in Charleston, West Virginia, it was revealed in August that a box of remains allegedly belonging to murder victim David Allen Williams, which the medical examiner sent to Williams’s sister in 1998 and she subsequently spent $850 to cremate, were actually deer bones….The teeth, nose, and partial scalp that startled a woman when she found them in her attic in Mohegan Lake, New York, in September were later revealed to be souvenirs her late husband had kept of his 1981 plastic surgery.
Northern California cell phone users who were placed on hold after dialing 911 this summer did not receive the traditional recorded messages of reassurance. Instead panicked callers were forced to listen to energy-saving tips or California Highway Patrol recruiting notices.
A September San Francisco Chronicle profile highlighting consumer advocate Doug Carlson’s successes in getting sluggish or recalcitrant postal supervisors to do their jobs better described Carlson’s lifelong fascination with the post office: “As a kid, he followed the postman around. He got his first post office box when he was 15.” A law-school graduate and now a university administrator, Carlson tours mail-processing facilities because “it’s fun to watch” and said he reads the postal manual as a “hobby.”
In the Last Month
