People sometimes ask me what's the weirdest story I've ever cover. It's a hard question to answer.
There have been so many.
Like the one about the mid-west family that figured out a pretty effective way to perform a "do-it-yourself mummification" in the basement of their home.
It's the story of mother and her kids who apparently were so grief stricken over the death of their husband and father that they just couldn't bear the thought of being separated from dear old dad.
So what did they do?
Well they decided to lay their deceased father out on some sort of lawn chair down in the basement of their home. The subterranean chamber had a concrete floor with a drain at the center of it and, whether the family knew it initially or not, it proved to be the perfect place to plop old pop.
Because, according to cops, over the next several months all of the fluids in the deceased man's body sort of drained out of his rear end and ran right down through the drainage hole in the floor.
Police also told me they believed this make-shift mummification process must have taken quite a while to complete, leaving one to only imagine the rich bouquet of scents and smells that must have permeated the house during the hot and muggy months of a mid-west summer.
But finally success!
The corpse was transformed into something that certainly looked to my eyes very mummy-like.
Picture if you will a human skeleton that has been shrink-wrapped in its own skin--a shiny and thick layer of yellowish beef jerky.
How do I know? Well I was in town doing a story for "A Current Affair," one of the local cops was gracious enough to flash me a picture that was never released to the public, an image that is forever seared into my twisted memory.
And how, you may ask, did the local cops get involved? And how did the family's secret get out in the first place?
Well it seems for several years after daddy had been turned into a mummy, life went on at the family's home, with dad truly getting the King Tut treatment.
In the police photo shown to me, the body was laid out on clean, crisp sheets of a bed upstairs, the head propped up on some fluffy white pillows.
And Dad, still the mummified man of the house, appeared to be wearing a fresh pair of p.j.
That's right for several years, dead old dad lay around bedridden as if he were merely nursing a bad head cold or hangover.
In fact the family often left the t.v. at the foot of the bed running when they were away, just so dad would have something to keep him occupied.
And unfortunately it was during one of the times when all the family members were away from home that this unusual domestic arrangement finally came to an end.
For it seems, on one such occasion, someone forgot to tie up the family dog. (Those of you with a sense of the macabre probably see where this is going).
Fido, a frisky hound, found father laying there in his nice clean jammies and went after him like a giant chew toy.
The mutt apparently had been gnawed on dad for only a short time when the family came home and made the discovery, much to their horror.
For some reason the family then decided to contact authorities after failing to do so for so long.
And when cops and social workers finally got a look inside the home, the decision was promptly made that for the safety and sanity of the young children daddy dearest needed to find a better final resting place than the master bedroom.
The part of the story I'll never forget, aside of course from that freaky photo the cop showed me, was the written description of the corpse in a police report.
According to the document the mummified body was actually in very good shape, except of course for the portions that had been chewed on by the dog, and the fact that "a colony of moths" had taken up residence inside dad's skull. Wow, you really can't make that stuff up.
Chapter Two
But as weird as that story was, I still don't think it was nearly as weird as the story of Billy Tipton, the cross-dressing jazz musician from Spokane Washington.
Billy was born a female, anatomically speaking that is, but then spent virtually her entire adult life masquerading man.
A secret sexual charade that must have been very effective. Indeed so successful was Billy's gender bending act that as a man Billy became a fairly well-known recording artist and band leader--a husband--even a father to three adopted sons.
In fact Billy's three boys didn't learn the truth about their "dad" until literally the day of Billy's death back in 1989 at the age of 74.
I flew to Spokane Washington and did a story for "A Current Affair" on Billy shortly after the death. I opened the story with the following lines:
"He was great on piano. He was tremendous on sax. Billy backed up Sinatra. He played with the Duke. Yet for all his many musical accomplishments Billy Tipton will probably best be remembered for his ability to act. Because you see Billy Tipton was actually a woman...a jazzy gender-bender who for nearly sixty years turned the entire world into a stage...while composing for herself a brand new life as Mr. Billy Tipton."
One of Billy's adopted sons...Billy Tipton Jr...was with his father when he died and he described to me the bizarre and rather poinant moment as follows"
"One of the paramedics turned to me and asked if my dad had had a sex change at any time in his life...and I became outraged at this...at first it was a...it was a great shock...I couldn't believe that this had happened. But it was only moments later that I told myself...I said 'Hey nothing 's changed...no matter what he was...I loved him just the way he was.'"....more later......mw
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