These people can’t handle the truth!
CRIME SPREE
A Panama City Beach, Florida, man called 911 from a store in 2009 and said that he’d been robbed: He was getting into his car after leaving the store, he said, when a man “dressed in black” hit him and took $100 in cash from him. Police watched the store’s surveillance video and saw the “victim” walk out of the store, sit in his car for a while, then go back inside to call 911. When confronted, the man admitted he lied…because he was afraid to tell his wife that he’d spent the $100. He was arrested.
In August 2009, more than 100 friends and family of cancer patient Trista Joy Lathern, 24, held a benefit in her honor at a tavern in Waco, Texas. They raised more than $10,000 for her…and she used the money to get breast-augmentation surgery. Lathern had lied to her family and friends about having cancer (she even shaved her head so she’d look like she’d undergone cancer treatment). When the hoax was found out, Lathern told police she wanted the boob job…in order to save her marriage. Her husband filed for divorce shortly after her arrest.
Aaron Siebers, 29, of Denver, Colorado, used a small knife to stab himself in the legs, arms, and upper body one day in November 2009. He then called police and said that he’d been attacked by three men who were either Hispanic…or possibly skinheads. Police questioned his story, and Siebers finally admitted that he’d faked the attack. Why? Because he didn’t want to go to his job at a video store. He was arrested.
A woman wearing a bandanna over her face posted a video on an Internet site in January 2010 in which she claimed that she had HIV/AIDS—and that she had infected more than 500 men in Detroit, Michigan, with the disease. And, she said, she planned to infect more, because she wanted to “destroy the world.” Within a few days, more than half a million people had watched the video. Detroit police were able to quickly identify the woman: Jackie Braxton, 23, a Detroit adult-film actress. After she was arrested, she admitted to making the video—and said it was a hoax. (She volunteered to take an HIV test, and it came back negative.) Braxton said she started the hoax to raise awareness about AIDS. Police decided she had not committed a crime.
Bonus: Braxton apparently did raise awareness in Detroit: Michael McElrath, a spokesman for the city’s health department, said that after the video went viral, the number of men who went to clinics for HIV testing in Detroit more than doubled.
In the U.K., it’s considered treason to place a postage stamp bearing the Queen’s image upside down.
A customer walked into Goomba’s Pizzeria in Palm Coast, Florida, in 2009 and demanded his money back: His calzone, he said, hadn’t been made properly. The owner of the pizzeria jumped over the counter and pistol-whipped the customer. Police were called, and the restaurant’s owner, Joseph Milano, was arrested. The victim, Richard Phinney, was taken to the hospital. A few weeks later, police learned that Joseph Milano wasn’t really Joseph Milano; his name was actually Joseph Calco—and he was a New York mobster who was in the Witness Protection Program. He was supposed to be lying low—and it was illegal for him to have a gun. Calco was arrested.
Bonus: A few weeks after finding out that Milano had lied about his identity, police found out that the victim, Richard Phinney, had lied about his, too—when the real Richard Phinney came forward and reported that his identity had been stolen. The victim’s real name: Jack Kilburne, who was wanted for failure to pay child support. He was also arrested.
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“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”
—Marcel Proust
The “naked recreation and travel” industry has grown by 233% in the past decade.