Right in the kisser: Vincent Morrissey's police brutality lawsuit went to trial in New Haven, Conn., in 1997, and the alleged perp, West Haven police officer Ralph Angelo, was on the witness stand, claiming that Morrissey himself had provoked the encounter by swinging at Angelo. Morrissey's attorney, openly skeptical of Angelo's version of the incident, asked Angelo to demonstrate to the jury just how hard Morrissey had swung at him. Before the lawyer could clarify what he meant by "demonstrate," Officer Angelo popped the lawyer on the chin, staggering him and forcing an immediate recess.
Creme de la weird: In Milwaukee in 1997, Gary Arthur Medrow, 53, was charged with 24 counts of impersonating a police officer in connection with his unique obsession. What Medrow does, according to police (who had arrested him various times over 30 years for the same thing), is telephone a woman and try to convince her to lift another person in the room and carry her or him a short distance, sometimes telling the woman that he's a police officer and that it's an official request.
Can't possibly be true: Cathomas Starbird, a member of the Sausalito, Calif., school board, was sentenced to 15 days in jail in 1999 for assaulting a female friend of hers who had joined her and her husband to celebrate the husband's birthday. At the couple's houseboat after dinner, Starbird became furious at her friend, jumped on her, and bit her on the face because she had refused to engage in oral sex with the husband.India Scott of Detroit dated both Darryl Fletcher and Brandon Ventimeglia starting in 1993 and the next year gave birth to a boy. Neither man knew about the other, and she told each he was the father. For two years, Scott managed to juggle the men's visitation rights, but in March 1997, when she announced she was marrying a new boyfriend and leaving the area, both Fletcher and Ventimeglia separately filed for custody of "his" son. Only then did the men find out about each other. In May 1997, they took blood tests to settle the paternity once and for all. (Of course, the test revealed that the actual father was yet another man.)
Great art!: Featured at the Donn Roll Contemporary Museum in Sarasota, Fla., in 1996 was Charon Luebbers' Menstrual Hut, a 6-by-6-by-5-foot isolation booth to symbolize the loneliness that society has forced upon menstruating women. Accompanying it were 28 canvasses created by Luebbers pressing her face into whatever discharge was present in each of the 28 days of her cycle for one month, to show the contrast.
Least competent criminals: Ronnie Darnell Bell, 30, was arrested in Dallas in 1998 and charged with attempting, all alone, to rob the Federal Reserve Bank. (In the movie Die Hard with a Vengeance, knocking off the New York Federal Reserve Bank required a small army of men and truckloads of weapons.) According to police, Bell was initially confused because there were no tellers, so he handed a security guard his note, which read, "This is a bank robbery of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, of Dallas, Texas, give me all the money. Thank you, Ronnie Darnell Bell." The guard pushed a silent alarm while an oblivious Bell chatted amiably, revealing to the guard that only minutes earlier he had tried to rob a nearby Postal Service office but that "they threw me out."
Obsession: In January, Fort Worth, Texas, murder defendant Robert William Greer Jr. agreed to plead guilty to a 1988 killing provided that the judge keep him in the local jail for two more weeks before sending him to the penitentiary -- so that he could be assured of seeing the Super Bowl on TV. (Greer thought TV privileges in prison were less certain.) Greer was excited about the prospects that his favorite team, the Minnesota Vikings, would go all the way. Two days after his guilty plea, the Atlanta Falcons beat the Vikings to knock them out of the playoffs, but the guilty plea stood.
2004 CHUCK SHEPHERD
