On 19 Oct 98, The Graveshow wrote:
> Hate to burst everybody's bubble....but this is the exact plot to an
> episode of NBC's Homicide from around the exact same year......
> coincindence? I think not.
>
> in that episode the M.E. goes to a convention.....afterwards.....the
> M.E. at a bar with forensic friends begins discussing strange cases
> .....and she begins this onbe about a suicide.......
>
> Sorry...but this story aint even close to true.......
Well... in a roundabout sort of way the story *is* true; or at least it's
true that (as quoted in the original post): "Dr. Don Harper Mills
astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death."
What is conspicuously absent from the version of the story as circulated
endlessly on the Internet is the following rider: Dr. Mills told the story
as a hypothetical, clearly fictitious example of some of the legal
dilemmas that pathologists often face. In his own words, as quoted on the
Urban Legends site:
"I made up the story in 1987 to present at the meeting, for
entertainment and to illustrate how if you alter a few small
facts you greatly alter the legal consequences. In 1994 someone
copied it on to the Internet. I was told it had already garnered
200,000 enquiries on the Net. In the past two years I've had
around 400 telephone calls about it - librarians, journalists,
law students, even law professors wanting to incorporate it into
text books."
The site also notes not one but three TV shows in which this legend or
variants on it have materialized:
"This amusing hypothetical case showed up in the 16 January 1998
episode of the TV series Homicide. This tale is also said to
have been used in an episode of the TV show Law & Order, but in
that show District Attorney Ben Stone merely offered a
hypothetical example of the man who jumped off the Empire State
Building because he wanted a ham sandwich, only to be shot on
the way down by someone who thought he was committing suicide. A
1998 episode of the Australian TV show Murder Call also featured this
legend."
For more info:
http://snopes.simplenet.com/spoons/faxlore/faxlore.htm#faxlore
(Above URL taken out of context from a frameset, couldn't reference it
properly otherwise.)
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Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Town of Almonte site: http://www.almonte.com/
Business site: http://www.federalweb.com
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