ISDP December 2011: Rocking the Classics

The headline—“Man borrows car, finds body in trunk”—ignores the key olfactory element. The story, in fact, reads like a classic myth: Pandora’s Box, Lot’s Wife, or even Orpheo and Eurydice.

Kirby Mack needed to borrow a car. Friend James Sheets II told Mack he could use a gold-colored sedan parked outside the Tampa hotel room he was renting.

There was one condition: Don't look in the trunk.

But Mack “noticed a foul odor” coming from the trunk and opened it.

The body later was identified as 79-year-old real estate developer Henry Shell, who had been reported missing since Monday.

While we’re on the topic of cars, a couple from New Baltimore, Michigan is suing a car dealership for selling them a 2006 Ford Explorer that, they claim, smells like the dead body it once contained.

Here’s how the pros would deal with the problem . . .

Another intriguing headline: “Police investigate torso found in suitcase off Thruway in Yonkers.” The head, legs, and hands were missing. Is there an olfactory connection? You betcha.

The discovery was made about 1:40 p.m. Monday, when Yonkers Department of Public Works employees came across the suitcase, which they told police was giving off a foul odor. The employees had been clearing brush in the area.

Then there’s this:

Neighbor Jim Molan, who has lived nearby for 20 years, said he recalls two other bodies that were found dumped several years ago, a few hundred yards to the north. He figures this is a convenient disposal area, just off the Thruway.

And this:

This apparently is not the first time bodies have been dumped in the area, as at least two other bodies have been discovered in the vicinity in the past. Mamaroneck village police, in a similar case, were unable to identify a woman's torso that was found in a suitcase that washed up on the beach in 2007. Two legs washed ashore in Long Island that belonged to the torso.

The headline from the Austin American-Statesman is not compelling: “Detective: Man convicted of murder wrote note saying wife shot herself.” However the lead paragraph gives us another nominee for the 2011 Norman Bates Award, one John Malcolm Nordstrom III.

A man who killed his wife and then lived with her decomposing body for about a month last year wrote in an apparent draft suicide note that she had shot herself, according to testimony at his murder sentencing trial Wednesday.