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From: pieterb@gramercy.ios.com (Pieter D. Breitner)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Book Review -- Dead Men Do Tell Tales
Date: Tue, 26 Dec 1995 10:41:10 -0800

_Dead Men Do Tell Tales; The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Antrhopologist_, William R.Maples, Ph. D. and Michael Browning, Doubleday 1994, ISBN 0-385-47490-3.

This is not a book for the squeamish, and I ordinarily wouldn't have recommended it here, but within a couple of chapters in the first third of the book I found passages relevant to several recent AFU threads.

Someone recently asked if hermetically-sealed caskets cause more rapid decomposition of bodies buried in them; the answer is no.

There was a UL about an I'm-tougher-than-you-are contest where the winner (?) decapitated himself with a chain saw. Although the story of how it happened may be untrue, there are documented cases of chain-saw suicides, and one of a table-saw suicide. Exact details were not printed, though.

Also reported is a case of a young man who was seen to fall in front of an oncoming subway train in New York City. At first it was ruled a suicide, but upon request by the deceased's very Irish Catholic family, Medical Examiner Milton Helprin re-examined the body and found small burns on the right thumb and index finger and the head of the penis, and ruled it an accidental death due to electrocution from urinating on the third rail.

Autoerotic asphyxiation is given as the probable explanation for the man who fixed a chain around his waist and had his Volkswagen drag him around, ending with his accidental death; apparently waist constriction is used by some as a "safer" alternative to a neck ligature.

Finally, in many a trivia collection I have seen it averred that there is no Unknown Soldier from the Vietnam War due to advances in identification techniques, and learned that this is not so. The head of the identification project was upset that he had not been given more time to make a positive identification of the remains, though; given a little more time, he felt he could have.

A fascinating book, with illustrations guaranteed to get rid of tiresome dinner guests.

--

Pieter "insert witty epenthetic here" Breitner

"Proctor and Gamble threatened lawsuits. They said that people were influencing consumers' purchasing habits with these rumours. This always seemed a little hypocritical to me, coming from a company that spends millions to convince people they need lemon-scented douches." -Bob Church-