Lead Story
In July the town council in Peru, Vermont, ordered Roland Williams out of his house for a month while authorities cleaned the place up. Williams had been purchasing large quantities of dog food and cola every day to feed hundreds of rats that had gathered on his property. And New York City officials reported in May that a woman feeding cereal to rats in her apartment and singing to them also slept in a chair so they could have her bed.
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In May 1993 Eric Jason Fann, then 21, was in jail in Kansas awaiting extradition to serve time in Texas for burglary. According to his later confession, Fann so feared Texas prisons that he threatened to kill President Clinton, figuring such a threat would get him a federal prison sentence instead of the Texas time. In July 1994 he was convicted and indeed sentenced to 30 months in federal prison, but the sentence is to start at the end of his Texas sentence.
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Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Shawn Belschwender.
