FORTEAN FOLLOW-UPS
Updates on stories from previous issues, including Wally on the move and more creepy toy stories.
CORPSE KEEPERS [FT407:8-9]
Police in Hiroshima City, Japan, were surprised to receive an early morning call on their emergency number from Toshiko Ujibe, 76, who told them: “There’s an unpleasant odour coming from my son’s corpse, and I don’t know what to do.” Rather than provide advice about the smell the despatcher instead sent both the police and the fire department to the flat that Ujibe had shared with her 53-year-old son, Kenji (or Satoshi in some reports). On arrival, they found a man lying face up on his futon with multiple lacerations around his neck; he had clearly been dead for some time. On being questioned, Ujibe said that Kenji had died a while ago, and post-mortem examination showed that her son had probably died 10 or so days earlier, in mid-May. Decomposition made it difficult to determine the exact cause of death, including whether the lacerations had been inflicted before or after Kenji died. As it was not considered likely that she would have called police about the smell if she had killed her son, Ujibe was not held as a suspect in his death but was still arrested on suspicion of violating a law prohibiting a person from damaging, abandoning, or possessing a corpse, which carries a maximum sentence of three years’ imprisonment. Soranews24.com, 25 May 2021; New York Post, 26 May 2021.
When neighbours noticed a build-up of mail in the doorway of wealthy recluse Bruce Roberts’s house in the exclusive North Shore district of Sydney, they called police, who found Roberts, 50, slumped dead over a heater. They also found A$1million (£548,000) in cash and 19 firearms, but as Roberts was a hoarder and the house in a terrible state of disrepair it took more than a year to clear it. It was not until a year into the clearance that the mummified body of Shane Snellman, a known petty criminal last seen in 2002 shortly after being released from jail, was discovered. It seemed that Snellman, 39 at the time of his death, had attempted to burgle Roberts’s house and Roberts had shot him dead, then kept the body hidden in a roll of carpet for over 15 years. Also found in the house were 70 cans of air freshener that Roberts had used to mask the stench of the decaying burglar. Times, 21 May 2021.
SLENDER MAN [FT316:4, 317:30-37, 320:24, 361:24]
In June, a Wisconsin judge ordered the release of Anissa Weier, 19, from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. She had been sentenced to 25 years there in 2017 and had served three and a half years for her part in the stabbing of a classmate to please the Slender Man, a character from a Creepypasta meme.
The stabbing, in May 2014, took place because Weier and her friend Morgan Geyser, both 12 years old at the time, believed the Slender Man was real and that if they sacrificed someone to him, they would become his servants and keep him from killing their families. They lured Payton Leutner, also 12, into woods near their homes after a sleepover and Geyser stabbed her 19 times, encouraged by Weier, leaving her for dead. However, Leutner survived, and crawled out of the woods where she was found by a passing cyclist.
Despite prosecution attempts to demonstrate that Weier is still dangerous, Judge Michael Boren agreed to her conditional release. In court Weier vowed she’d never let herself “become a weapon again” and promised to comply with whatever conditions Bohren imposed.
As part of these conditions, she will be monitored by Department of Health Services case managers to track her progress until she is 37 years old, the length of her original sentence. Geyser, who was sentenced to 40 years in a mental health facility for her part in the crime, remains in custody. yahoo.com, 1 July 2021.
PORN PAYOUT [FT400:17]
A Michigan federal Judge ordered Beth and Paul Werking to pay $30,441 (£26,125) to their son David after they threw out his massive collection of pornography and sex toys while he was staying with them after his divorce. The amount was arrived at after a valuation by expert Dr Victoria Hartmann, although even she could not assign a value to 107 of the items. Paul Werking had told his son “Frankly, David, I did you a big favour getting rid of all this stuff”, but he did not agree and took them to court. nypost.com, 27 Aug 2021
WALLY THE WANDERING WALRUS [FT411:4-5]
Wally the wandering walrus, last reported in Cork, disappeared from the harbour there in early September. After three weeks without a sighting, he turned up in Iceland. Seal Rescue Ireland confirmed that it was indeed Wally after spotting distinctive scars on his flippers in photos from Iceland. To get there, Wally added another 900km (560 miles) to his epic trek, which had already totalled 4,000km (2,485 miles) and taken in Ireland, England, France, Spain and the Scilly Isles.
While Wally’s trek seems to be taking him away from Europe and back to his home in the Arctic Circle, on the same day that he was reported in Iceland, another Walrus turned up in the Netherlands, the first seen there in 23 years. It was spotted on the
beach at Schiermonnikoog by Ralf van Hal, a researcher at Wageningen University. Apparently, before turning up on the Dutch coast, the walrus had been spotted off Denmark and Germany, but it doesn’t seem to have created quite the media stir that Wally has. BBC News, nltimes.nl, 21 Sept 2021.
UNSETTLING TOYS [FT411:10]
For fans of unsettling toys, there is now a specific Facebook group, Spooky Doll Hour. It’s a group where you can share pictures, memes and videos relating to spooky dolls, but for one hour only each day, 10.16pm – 11.16 pm New South Wales time (UTC + 10). Anyone posting outside that slot is warned that they will be “removed from the group and haunted by a doll for the rest of your life”. Guardian, 14 Sept 2021.
On moving into his new house in Walton, Liverpool, one of the first things teacher Jonathan Lewis, 32, did was to knock a hole in a plasterboard wall covering a void under the stairs to investigate where a wire was connected. Peering through the hole by the light of a torch, Lewis was startled to find a pair of eyes staring back at him. They belonged to a rag doll – and the rag doll was holding a note. It read “Dear reader/new home owner, thank you for freeing me! My name is Emily. My original owners lived in this house in 1961. I didn’t like them so they had to go. All they did was sing and be merry. It was sickening. Stabbing was my choice of death for them so I hope you have knives. Hope you sleep well.” Some of Mr Lewis’s friends were quite disturbed by the message and urged him to move out immediately, but he is more relaxed about the whole thing, saying: “I’ll be honest – I found the whole thing hilarious. I’d probably do the exact same thing.” Liverpool Echo, 19 Sept 2021.