Jul
31
ATLANTA - Flight attendants discovered the body of a 61-year-old woman in the restroom of a plane shortly before the flight landed in Atlanta Wednesday morning, a spokeswoman for the airline said.
It was unclear how Michaele O’Neil Carnahan died, and how long she was in the restroom.
The crew on the Los Angeles-to-Atlanta flight noticed the restroom was occupied on final approach, just before Flight 950 touched down at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport at 5:51 a.m., spokeswoman Keyra Johnson said. Atlanta police were notified and met the plane at the gate, Johnson said.
“Delta extends its condolences to the family and commends our flight crew and medical professionals onboard who handled this incident with the utmost professionalism and respect for which they are known,” spokeswoman Betsy Talton wrote in an e-mail.
The body was taken to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab in suburban Atlanta for an autopsy scheduled for Thursday, said GBI spokesman John Bankhead. Authorities were awaiting the results to determine the cause of death, Bankhead said.
Bankhead said Carnahan was on her way from her home in Ventura, Calif., to Florida for a wedding.
Atlanta police stationed at the airport respond to calls about dead bodies on airplanes a couple of times a year, said Officer Eric Schwartz, a police spokesman. Talton said the situation was rare, but flight crews are trained to handle “a number of situations on board.”
Airlines are not required to track or report the medical incidents they handle, so an exact tally of in-flight deaths is hard to determine. MedAire, an Arizona-based company that staffs doctors on the ground to advise flight crews in a medical emergency, counted 89 deaths for the flights they handled in 2006, which represents about one-third of the world’s commercial flights.
If the death rate is similar for the rest of the flights, annual deaths on airplanes could exceed 260.
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Jul
21
PITTSBURGH - A woman suspected of cutting open a pregnant woman’s uterus and stealing the baby has been charged with homicide, unlawful restraint and kidnapping, police said Sunday.
Andrea Curry-Demus, 38, of Wilkinsburg, is charged in the death of Kia Johnson, 18, of McKeesport. Curry-Demus is accused of taking the baby boy to a Pittsburgh hospital and claiming it was her own.
Johnson’s body was found Friday in Curry-Demus’s apartment. The body was positively identified through dental records, Allegheny County Medical Examiner Karl Williams said Sunday.
In the criminal complaint, police said that video surveillance at the Allegheny County Jail from Tuesday afternoon shows Curry-Demus talking with Johnson for several minutes. The women were at the jail visiting different inmates, police said.
The clothing Johnson is seen wearing on the surveillance tape was consistent with the garments found on her body, police said.
Allegheny County Police Superintendent Charles Moffatt said the jail was the last time Johnson was seen alive.
Curry-Demus was being held in county jail on Sunday and it was not immediately clear whether she had an attorney. A lawyer who had represented her previously did not immediately return a phone message left Sunday.
No one was home at the McKeesport home of Johnson’s father on Sunday.
In the criminal complaint, police said Johnson’s body was found bound at the wrists and ankles with duct tape, and there were layers of duct tape and plastic covering much of her head. Her body was wrapped in a comforter and garbage bags and placed under the headboard of the bed in the master bedroom.
Williams said Johnson appeared to have been dead for about two days. She “had a wound to the abdomen consistent with the removal of a baby,” Allegheny County Police Superintendent Charles Moffatt said.
“A very sharp instrument” was used to cut open Johnson’s belly, he said.
Authorities said Johnson was 36 weeks pregnant, and they were trying to determine whether she was alive when the baby was removed. They also are awaiting toxicology tests to find out whether she was drugged. Test results are not expected for several weeks.
Police said in the complaint that Curry-Demus denied meeting Johnson but that she told investigators that her fingerprints would be on the duct tape and plastic used to wrap the body.
Curry-Demus showed up at the hospital Thursday with a newborn that still had the umbilical cord attached, police said. Tests later proved that she was not the mother.
Police said Curry-Demus initially told investigators she bought the baby for $1,000 from the its mother. She later said two people brought a pregnant woman to her apartment Tuesday evening, removed the baby the next day and gave it to her. She said she then took the newborn to her sister’s apartment and told her she had just given birth, police said.
Curry-Demus’ sister told investigators she didn’t see anyone else in Curry-Demus’ apartment when she visited twice Wednesday morning, police said. On the first occasion, Curry-Demus repeatedly went into the bedroom alone, closed the door and stayed there for several minutes. On the second occasion, Curry-Demus showed her sister the baby and claimed to have just given birth, police said.
Wilkinsburg Police Chief Ophelia Coleman said Sunday the child was “under observation.” Williams earlier said the baby was “apparently doing well.” The hospital has declined to release any information about the child.
In 1990, Curry-Demus, then known as Andrea Curry, was accused of stabbing a woman in an alleged plot to steal the woman’s infant. A day after that stabbing, Curry-Demus snatched a 3-week-old baby girl from a hospital after the child’s 16-year-old mother had gone home for the night. The baby was found unharmed with Curry-Demus at her home the next day.
Curry-Demus pleaded guilty in 1991 to various charges from both incidents and got three to 10 years in prison, according to court records. She was paroled in August 1998.
Jun
17
LONDON - A quadriplegic sailor set off on a journey around the British Isles Monday in a boat she controls with her breath.
Hilary Lister, 36, set sail alone in her boat from Dover on the southeast coast of England, steering her specially adapted yacht by blowing and sucking on straws to adjust the sails and tiller.
She had planned to leave a week ago, but malfunctioning electronics and a broken mast delayed her launch.
As she set sail on Monday afternoon, Lister said she was feeling confident.
“We’ve broken everything that can be broken and everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong, so we’ve got to be OK now,” she told journalists.
Lister will sail about 18 hours a day and will come into shore every night. An inflatable boat will sail alongside her and a crew will provide support on land. She expects the journey to take around three months.
Lister, who is paralyzed from the neck down, has already broken sailing records. In August 2005 she became the first quadriplegic to sail solo across the English Channel. She was diagnosed as a teenager with reflex sympathetic dystrophy, a degenerative disease, and took up sailing in 2003 as a way to boost her self confidence.
Her latest project will raise money for her sailing charity.
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Jun
7
WASHINGTON - The actress who played Wonder Woman on TV in the 1970s says she didn’t do anything extraordinary when she discovered a body this week on the Potomac River in Washington.
Lynda Carter tells The Washington Post she was alone in a boat when she saw the body Wednesday. She says she didn’t have a cell phone with her, so she yelled to some fishermen and asked them to call police. Carter waited until rescuers arrived and directed them to the body.
District of Columbia police say the body of 47-year-old Helen Johnstone of Washington was found floating on the river Wednesday. The medical examiner’s office has not declared an official cause of death.
Carter says she “did what anybody would have done.”
May
31
TOKYO - A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing.
Police found the 58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man’s closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.
The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing from his kitchen over the past several months.
One of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home Thursday after he had left, and he called police believing it was a burglar. However, when they arrived they found the door locked and all windows closed.
“We searched the house … checking everywhere someone could possibly hide,” Itakura said. “When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side.”
The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked into the man’s house about a year ago when he left it unlocked.
She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman “neat and clean.”
May
29
MEMPHIS, Tenn. - A woman who defied medical odds and spent nearly 60 years in an iron lung after being diagnosed with polio as a child died Wednesday after a power failure shut down the machine that kept her breathing, her family said.
Dianne Odell, 61, had been confined to the 7-foot-long metal tube since she was stricken by polio at 3 years old.
Family members were unable to get an emergency generator working after a power failure knocked out electricity to the Odell family’s residence near Jackson, about 80 miles northeast of Memphis, brother-in-law Will Beyer said.
“We did everything we could do but we couldn’t keep her breathing,” Beyer said. “Dianne had gotten a lot weaker over the past several months and she just didn’t have the strength to keep going.”
Capt. Jerry Elston of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department said emergency crews could do little to help. The local power company reported spotty power outages in the area because of a tree that fell on a power line.
Odell was afflicted with “bulbo-spinal” polio three years before a polio vaccine was discovered and largely stopped the spread of the crippling childhood disease.
She spent her life in the iron lung, cared for by her parents, other family members and aides provided by a nonprofit foundation. Though confined inside the 750-pound apparatus, Odell managed to get a high school diploma, take college courses and write a children’s book about a “wishing star” named Blinky.
“Dianne was one of the kindest and most considerate people you could meet. She was always concerned about others and their well-being,” said Frank McMeen, president of the West Tennessee Health Care Foundation which helped raise money for equipment and nursing assistance for Odell.
Odell accepted her life with grace, McMeen said.
“Everyone she encountered came to her because they cared about her,” he said, “so she grew up in her 61 years thinking every person is good.”
Odell’s iron lung, similar to those used during the U.S. polio epidemics that peaked in the 1950s, was a cylindrical chamber with a seal at the neck. She lay on her back with only her head exposed and made eye contact with visitors through an angled mirror. She operated a television set with a small blow tube and wrote on a voice-activated computer.
The positive and negative pressures produced by the machine forced air into her lungs and then expelled it.
Iron lungs were largely replaced by positive-pressure airway ventilators in the late 1950s that give users much more freedom of movement. But a spinal deformity from the polio kept Odell from wearing a more modern, portable breathing device.
Joan Headley of Post-Polio Health International in St. Louis said about 30 people in the United States still rely on iron lungs but few users are confined to them all the time. No one keeps records, she said, on the longest confinement.
Caregivers could slide Odell’s bedding out of her iron lung for basic nursing care but only briefly, McMeen said.
Though Odell could not leave the iron lung, she was able to be moved in the machine out of her home. For Odell’s 60th birthday, in February 2007, friends and family held a party for her, with about 200 guests, at a downtown hotel in Jackson, a town of about 50,000 residents. She had a 9-foot birthday cake and letters from around the country, McMeen said.
In a 2001 interview with The Associated Press, Odell said she wrote her children’s book to show youngsters, especially those with physical disabilities, that they should never give up.
“It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you see someone do the same thing,” she said.
May
21
Woman nabbed for alleged DUI at same crash spot
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TRUCKEE, Calif. - Call it drunken driving deja vu. For the second time in five months, a 23-year-old California woman has been arrested after she allegedly crashed her car while driving under the influence at the exact same spot north of Lake Tahoe.
And to top it off, Truckee Police say that in both cases, her blood alcohol content was more than three times the legal limit.
Police say Melissa Dennison of Truckee crashed at about noon on Sunday on Glenshire Drive just south of the Glenshire Bridge. They say she was extremely intoxicated and had trouble standing or walking. Her blood alcohol level initially was measured at .346. The legal limit is .08.
Sgt. J. Litchie said Dennison also had been charged with a DUI in January when she crashed at the same spot and registered a blood alcohol level of .380.
If convicted of the second offense, she faces up to 10 years in prison and fines in excess of $2,000.
A telephone message The Associated Press left at a listing for Dennison in Truckee on Tuesday was not immediately returned
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May
21
TRUCKEE, Calif. - Call it drunken driving deja vu. For the second time in five months, a 23-year-old California woman has been arrested after she allegedly crashed her car while driving under the influence at the exact same spot north of Lake Tahoe.
And to top it off, Truckee Police say that in both cases, her blood alcohol content was more than three times the legal limit. Police say Melissa Dennison of Truckee crashed at about noon on Sunday on Glenshire Drive just south of the Glenshire Bridge. They say she was extremely intoxicated and had trouble standing or walking. Her blood alcohol level initially was measured at .346. The legal limit is .08.
Sgt. J. Litchie said Dennison also had been charged with a DUI in January when she crashed at the same spot and registered a blood alcohol level of .380.
If convicted of the second offense, she faces up to 10 years in prison and fines in excess of $2,000.
May
10
Happy Mother’s Day: Woman pregnant with 18th child
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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - It’s a happy Mother’s Day for an Arkansas woman - she’s pregnant with her 18th child. Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year’s Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.
“We’ve had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us,” she said, laughing.
The Duggars’ oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.
The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children - whose names start with the letter J - are home-schooled.
Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.
The new show looks at life inside the Duggar home, where chores - or “jurisdictions” - are assigned to each child. One episode of the new show involves a “jurisdiction swap,” where the boys do chores traditionally assigned to the girls, and vice versa, Duggar said.
“The girls swapped jurisdictions, changing tires, working in the garages, mowing the grass,” she said. “The boys got to cook supper from start to finish, clean the bathrooms,” among other chores.
Duggar said she’s six weeks along and the pregnancy is going well. She and her husband, Jim Bob Duggar, said they’ll keep having children as long as God wills it.
“The success in a family is first off, a love for God, and secondly, treating each other like you want to be treated,” Jim Bob Duggar said. “Our goal is for each one of our children to be best friends, and everybody working together to serve each other makes that happen.”
The other Duggar children, in between Joshua and Jennifer, are Jana, 18; John-David, 18; Jill, 16; Jessa, 15; Jinger, 14; Joseph, 13; Josiah, 11; Joy-Anna, 10; Jeremiah, 9; Jedidiah, 9; Jason, 7; James, 6; Justin, 5; Jackson, 3; and Johannah, 2.
Apr
27
100-year mystery: Did Indiana woman get away with murders?
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LAPORTE, Ind. - Asle Helgelien didn’t believe Belle Gunness’ claims that his brother, missing for months after answering the widow’s lonely hearts ad, had left her northern Indiana farm for Chicago or maybe their native Norway.
Suspicious after a bank said his brother, Andrew, had cashed a $3,000 check - a large sum in 1908 - the South Dakota farmer came to LaPorte and discovered his brother’s remains in a pit of household waste.
A century later, modern forensic scientists hope to solve once and for all what appears to have been a web of multiple murders, deceit, sex and money orchestrated by a woman dubbed Lady Bluebeard, after the fairy tale character who killed multiple wives and left their bodies in his castle.
Many locals believed Gunness staged her death in a farmhouse fire, 100 years ago Monday, before Asle Helgelien’s arrival to cover up years spent poisoning and dismembering more than two dozen people.
Forensic anthropologist Andi Simmons grew up in the area east of Chicago hearing tales of the LaPorte black widow.
“There was always a sense of, what if she’s still out there? What if she’s lurking around,” said Simmons, who decided to explore the case as part of her thesis.
Gunness probably killed at least 25 people and possibly as many as 33, Simmons said. The exact number isn’t known because authorities never thoroughly searched the farm property after Helgelien found his brother’s remains.
“When you look at the numbers, she should be a household name,” Simmons said.
The official account was that Gunness died in the fire at age 48, along with three foster children and another woman who has not been identified.
Bruce Johnson, chairman of LaPorte’s Gunness 100th Anniversary Committee, said some residents wish the story would fade away. But programs leading up to the anniversary of her death have drawn many who are eager to share their own tales.
John Olsen, 87, of nearby Schererville, said at a recent anniversary program that Gunness, a Norwegian immigrant, had a reputation among Norwegian families as a great foster mother.
He said Gunness took in his aunt, Jennie Olsen, at 7 months old after her mother died. Jennie decided to stay with Gunness when she got older, even after her father remarried.
“Jennie had many opportunities to come and join her siblings … and went back to Belle because Belle was the only mother she had ever known,” Olsen said. “And Belle gave her an excellent home.”
However, Jennie Olsen’s body was the second discovered when authorities began digging after the 1908 fire, and many believe she had been killed two years earlier because she uncovered her foster mother’s secrets.
The woman arrived in Chicago from Norway in 1881 at age 21, and married three years later. After her first husband died, Gunness moved to LaPorte, where she met Peter Gunness. They married in April 1902, but he died later that year when a sausage grinder and jar of hot water fell on him.
In both cases, family members believed the husbands’ deaths were suspicious, Johnson said. And in both cases, Gunness collected thousands in insurance money.
After Peter Gunness’ death, his widow advertised in Midwestern Norwegian-language newspapers for a potential mate. One read: “A woman who owns a beautifully located and valuable farm in first class condition, wants a good and reliable man as partner in same. Some little cash is required and will be furnished first class security.”
Though Gunness was a plain, 5-foot-8 woman who weighed as much as 280 pounds, her letters were eloquent, Johnson said.
“She wrote wonderful letters, very encouraging,” he said. “She would tell them about how lovely LaPorte was.”
The coroner declared Gunness dead after her dentures were found in the fire debris two weeks later. But many believe she paid someone to plant the dentures - which Simmons said were found intact and not burned.
When authorities determined the fire was arson, suspicion turned to a handyman who had worked for Gunness and had been her lover. He was convicted of arson but acquitted of murder.
For a quarter of a century, Gunness sightings were reported all over the country.
The last came in 1931, when a woman named Esther Carlson died in Los Angeles while awaiting trial on charges she killed her employer. Carlson resembled Gunness, was about the same age, and there was no record of her before 1908, Simmons said.
Simmons’ team exhumed a body believed to be Gunness’ from a Chicago-area cemetery in November. The casket contained body parts from two children - but they did not belong to the foster children reported to have died in the fire. They could be remains of other victims whose remains had been buried in the basement and were inadvertently scooped up in the ashes, Simmons said.
“Now we don’t know whether we’re adding two more people to our body count,” she said
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