Lead Stories
Crime California-style: In August in Toronto two jewelry-store robbers made a successful getaway after they stole a car in front of the store and drove it to their getaway car–parked a half block away.
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In March the police department in Nagasaki, Japan, began an investigation of several officers who allegedly helped a suspect get a gun while in custody. According to a witness, the officers promised the man a lighter sentence if he would buy a gun from a friend over the phone, have it delivered to the police station, and then let the officers confiscate it so that they could get a prized weapons-charge arrest entered in their records.
In March, “Slim Jim” James Schmedding was hospitalized with a serious head injury after participating in a stunt for radio station KQCC-FM of Rock Island, Illinois. Schmedding had volunteered to be packed in a 55-gallon drum and rolled down a flight of stairs. When he didn’t fit inside, he agreed to remove all the padding from the barrel to make room.
In May in Australia identical twins John and William Bloomfield died of heart attacks minutes apart at age 61. In Madisonville, Kentucky, in June, twins Welbert and Wesley Cannon, 20, were both hit by a freight train just two miles from the spot where their father was fatally hit by a freight train in 1987. And in July in Los Angeles, Avi Gesundheit passed away.
