The Most Beautiful Suicide – Evelyn McHale leapt to her death from the Empire State Building, 1947

This powerful photo taken by Robert C. Wiles was published as a full-page image in the 12 May 1947 issue of Life Magazine. It ran with the caption: “At the bottom of the Empire State Building the body of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in grotesque bier, her falling body punched into the top of a car”. Evelyn McHale is probably the most famous Empire State Building suicide victim. The young and prety Evelyn leaped from the 86th-floor observatory in 1947 and landed on the roof of a United Nations limousine parked on the street below. Her calmly elegant demeanor, her legs crossed at the ankles, the way the car’s metal folded like sheets and framed her head and arms—perhaps these were the reasons that McHale’s death was given its title as “the most beautiful suicide.” When she died, she was still wearing her pearls and white gloves.

Born September 20, 1923 and one of seven siblings, she was a child in Washington D.C. when McHale’s mother left the household and her parents divorced. Her father, a bank examiner, retained custody of all the children. After high school, McHale became a WAC, stationed in Jefferson, Missouri. She made her way to New York City where she worked as a bookkeeper and lived quietly with her brother and sister-law in Baldwin, Long Island. She met her fiancé Barry Rhodes, a Pennsylvania college student just discharged from the Air Force, and was a bridesmaid at the wedding of Rhodes’ younger brother.

On April 30, 1947, Evelyn took the train from New York to Easton to visit Barry for his 24th birthday. All seemed well between the couple, and the next day, Barry kissed his fiance goodbye as she boarded the 7:00 AM train to Penn Station. “When I kissed her goodbye, she was happy and as normal as any girl about to be married.” Their wedding was set to be held at Barry’s brother’s home in Troy, New York, that June.

Around 10:40 am Patrolman John Morrissey, directing traffic at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, noticed a white scarf floating down from the upper floors of the building. Moments later he heard a crash and saw a crowd converge on 34th street. Evelyn had jumped, cleared the setbacks, and landed on the roof of a United Nations Assembly Cadillac limousine parked on 34th street, some 200 ft west of Fifth Ave.

A photography student across the street, Robert C. Wiles, heard the loud crash of her body hitting the metal, and ran over too. Fortuitously, he had his camera and took a photo of her as she lay on the roof of the crumpled car. It was snapped just four minutes after she died and, despite the 1050-foot fall (320 m), her body looked intact. Remarkably Evelyn shows absolutely no evidence of trauma and appears disarmingly placid and composed – as if asleep. Around her, however, the crumpled sheet metal and broken glass show the violent destructive evidence of her jump. This apparent juxtaposition is what makes Wiles’ image so arresting and memorable. Some 60 years later it remains a haunting and affecting piece of photo-journalism.

According to reports she essentially “fell apart” when they moved her body. Her insides were basically liquefied. Later, on the observation deck, Detective Frank Murray found her tan (or maybe gray, reports differ) cloth coat neatly folded over the observation deck wall, a brown make-up kit filled with family pictures and a black pocketbook with the note which read:

“I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family – don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me. My fiance asked me to marry him in June. I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.”

Her body was identified by her sister Helen Brenner and, according to her wishes, she was cremated. There is no grave.

Interesting fact:

Since the Empire State Building was constructed in 1931 some 36 people have jumped from the building, including 17 from the 86th floor observation deck. Evelyn was the 12th suicide from the building and the sixth to clear all of the setbacks. She was one of five people in a three week period to attempt suicide from the observation deck. In response a 10-ft wire mesh fence was installed and guards were trained to spot potential jumpers. After the barrier was installed people just jumped from other parts of the building, usually from office windows.
References:-

Ghosts and Ghouls

American Officer Writes a Letter to His Son on Hitler's Personal Stationery

Richard Helms was a US Navy officer during World War II and later the Director of the CIA. At the end of the war in 1945, he wrote a letter to his young son on Hitler's personal stationery:

“Dear Dennis,” reads the letter from Helms, then a spy stationed in Germany. “The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe – three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins. He had a thirst for power, a low opinion of man as an individual, and a fear of intellectual honesty. He was a force for evil in the world. His passing, his defeat – a boon for mankind. But thousands died that it might be so.  The price for ridding society of bad is always high.  Love, Daddy."

Dennis Helms found the letter among the family papers in 2002. He donated it to the CIA Museum, where it is now on display.

The letter was among a trove of memorabilia that Dennis sent to the museum 66 years later, in May 2011, to form part of an exhibit that pays tribute to the CIA’s roots in a wartime agency called the Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS.

The OSS wing of the CIA’s museum, which opened in 2011, traces the short history of an organization that was founded in 1942 to aid resistance fighters and run spies behind enemy lines before morphing into the CIA four years later. The exhibit includes counterfeit German postage stamps created by the OSS with a skull superimposed on Hitler's image, the desk of OSS director William "Wild Bill" Donovan, and all manner of secret weapons and messaging systems.

Among the exhibits is a tribute to Virginia Hall, an OSS agent who posed as a French farmhand as she counted German military units prior to D-Day. Hall, who had a wooden leg, organized sabotage and trained Resistance fighters. The Gestapo knew her as the “limping lady,” and called her the most dangerous of all Allied spies. She later became one of the CIA’s first female officers.

The Helms memorabilia in the museum also includes a piece of Hitler’s personal china, snatched from the Fuehrer’s Berlin chancellery, as well as other photos and correspondence. But the letter on Hitler's stationery, said curator Toni Hiley, is “truly a treasure in our collection."

Dennis Helms, now 71 and a lawyer in New Jersey, said he found the letter when he was a teenager in the late 1950s, while he was living with his parents in Virginia.

"My mother was an avid scrapbook keeper," said Helms. "And I was prowling through one of the scrapbooks and I found this. I asked about it. (I thought it) was really cool. But I had no idea there'd be so much interest in it later on."

Helms said the letter was very out of character for his dad, who, like many veterans of World War II, spoke little about his experiences during the war. The elder Helms, according to his son, was also guarded in general. He was CIA director from 1966 to 1973, during the Vietnam era, and was a controversial figure in American life. In 1977, he pleaded no contest to failing to testify fully to Congress about the CIA’s efforts to oust Chilean president Salvador Allende.

"He was very unguarded in this (letter),” said the younger Helms. “He actually gave his opinion of things. Later on, after years in the agency, everything was based on fact. He never varied from that ... That's what makes this so unusual to me."

There are a few questions about the circumstances under which the letter was written. Richard Helms, who died in 2002 at age 89, can’t answer them. The letter is dated “V-E day” – Victory in Europe day, which was May 8, 1945 – but the stationery says Obersalzberg, a town in the Bavarian Alps that was the site of Hitler’s mountaintop retreat, the Eagle’s Nest. Helms was among the first intelligence officers to visit the Eagle’s Nest, but according to his memoir he was in France on V-E day.

Reference:

How a letter on Hitler’s stationery, written to a boy in Jersey, reached the CIA
The price for ridding society of bad is always high

Bhopal Disaster

Overview

In 1984, the accidental release of 40 metric tons of methyl isocyanate from a Union Carbide pesticideplant in the heart of Bhopal, India killed thousands of people and injured hundreds of thousands.

Toxicological Perspective

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The methyl isocyanate poisoning of Bhopal, India had many disastrous consequences. Hundreds of thousands of people were injured and around 15,000 died. The toxicological and environmental problems are ongoing. Due to a lack of political willpower, the toxic waste from the disaster has still not been cleaned up. Higher rates of Cancer and diseases affecting the central nervous system, liver, and kidneys were witnessed. Also, water analysis is poor due to continued contamination from benzene hexachloride and Mercury that persists to this day.

Background

The Union Carbide plant was established in Bhopal in 1969 and it began to produce the insecticide Carbaryl. methyl isocanyte is an ingredient of carbaryl, and on the morning of December 3, 1984, a holding tank containing 43 tons of methyl isocyanate overheated and released the toxic gas. Because methyl isocyanate is heavier than air, it traveled over the ground through the Bhopal city center. The transportation system collapsed, and many people were trampled to death in a mad rush to flee the visible gases. In total, 15,000 people died and 150,000-600,000 people were injured.

The contamination and deaths were a result of numerous factors:

• Recent documents obtained through discovery in the course of a lawsuit against Union Carbide for environmental contamination (before a New York Federal District Court) revealed that Carbide had exported "untested, unproven technology" to the Indian plant. Unlike Union Carbide plants in the USA, its Indian subsidiary plants were not prepared for problems. No action plans had been established to cope with incidents of this magnitude. This included not informing local authorities of the dangers of chemicals used and manufactured at Bhopal.

• Reports issued months before the incident by scientists within the Union Carbide corporation warned of the possibility of an accident almost identical to that which occurred in Bhopal. The reports were ignored outright and never made it to senior staff. Due to falling sales, staff had been laid off and safety checks became less and less frequent.

• Slip-blind plates that would have prevented water from pipes being cleaned from leaking into the MIC tanks via faulty valves were not installed. Their installation had been omitted from the cleaning checklist.

• At the time of the event, the MIC tank refrigeration unit was disabled to save money, and some of its coolant was being used elsewhere. A simple press of a button in the control room would have activated it to at least use the remaining coolant, but this was overlooked by staff.

• The gas scrubber was placed on standby, and therefore did not attempt to clean escaping gases with sodium hydroxide (caustic soda), which may have brought the concentration down to a safe level.

• The water curtain that may have reduced the concentration of the gas was only set to ~13 m and did not reach the gas; it was not designed to contain a leak of such magnitude. Though the audible external alarm was activated to warn the residents of Bhopal, it was quickly silenced to avoid causing panic among the residents. Thus, many continued to sleep, unaware of the unfolding drama, and those that had woken assumed any problem had been sorted out.

• The flare tower used to burn off gases before they are allowed to escape into the air was inoperational pending repairs.

• Doctors and hospitals were not informed of proper treatment methods for MIC gas inhalation. They were told to simply give cough medicine and eyedrops to their patients.

Union Carbide agreed to pay $470 million to the residents of Bhopal. That amount is lower than in the lawsuit and substantially lower than similar Asbestos cases Union Carbide was settling concurrently in the United States. By the end of October 2003, according to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department, compensation had been awarded to 554,895 people for injuries received and 15,310 survivors of those killed. The average amount to families of the dead was $2,200. Union Carbide also attempted to distance itself from the tragedy by blaming its subsidiary in India and even fabricated stories about a Sikh extremist group and disgruntled former employees bent on sabotaging the plant.

Health Effects Summary for MIC

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Immediate Health Effects  (0-6 months)

• Ocular: Chemosis, redness, watering, ulcers, photophobia
• Respiratory: Distress, pulmonary edema, pneumonitis, pneumothorax
• Gastrointestinal: Persistent diarrhea, anorexia, persistent abdominal pain
• Genetic: Increased chromosomal abnormalities
• Psychological: Neuroses, anxiety states, adjustment reactions
• Neurobehavioral: Impaired audio and visual memory, impaired vigilance attention and response time, Impaired reasoning and spatial ability, impaired psychomotor coordination

Long-term Health Effects

• Ocular: Persistent watering, corneal opacities, chronic conjunctivitis
• Respiratory: Obstructive and restrictive airway disease, decreased lung function
• Reproductive: Increased pregnancy loss, increased infant mortality, decreased placental/fetal weight
• Genetic: Increased chromosomal abnormalities
• Neurobehavioral: Impaired associate learning, motor speed, and precision

External Links

• Bhopal gas disaster's legacy lives on 25 years later (Telegraph.co.uk)

The Ayes of Texas

 State Capitol, Texas — Presidential candidate G.W. Bush prides himself on presiding over 121 executions with perfect oversight. State representative Tim Moore wanted to show how careful the legislative process was in the state. He sponsored a bill praising Albert Salvo, a man whose "unconventional techniques involving population control and applied psychology" had already been noted by the state of Massachusetts. The Texas politicians, never wanting to be outdone by any state, unanimously passed a resolution praising Albert Salvo. Salvo is better known as The Boston Strangler. 

Representative Tim Moore sponsored a resolution in the Texas House of Representatives in Austin, Texas calling on the House to commend Albert de Salvo for his unselfish service to "his country, his state and his community." The resolution stated that "this compassionate gentleman's dedication and devotion to his work has enabled the weak and the lonely throughout the nation to achieve and maintain a new degree of concern for their future. He has been officially recognized by the state of Massachusetts for his noted activities and unconventional techniques involving population control and applied psychology." The resolution was passed unanimously. Representative Moore then revealed that he had only tabled the motion to show how the legislature passes bills and resolutions often without reading them or understanding what they say. Albert de Salvo was the Boston Strangler.



Back in 1971, Rep. Tom (not "Tim") Moore, Jr. of Waco, Texas — knowing that his fellow legislators in the Texas House of Representatives often passed bills and resolutions without fully reading or understanding them — pulled an April Fool's joke on the House by sponsoring a resolution commending Albert de Salvo for his unselfish service to "his county, his state and his community." The resolution read, in part:

This compassionate gentleman's dedication and devotion to his work has enabled the weak and the lonely throughout the nation to achieve and maintain a new degree of concern for their future. He has been officially recognized by the state of Massachusetts for his noted activities and unconventional techniques involving population control and applied psychology.

The joke, of course, was that Albert de Salvo was more commonly known as the Boston Strangler, assumed to be responsible for the murders of thirteen women in the Boston area between 1962 and 1964. (Technically, de Salvo was never convicted or put on trial for any of those killings — he was sentenced to life in prison for sexual assaults on several other women and confessed to the thirteen murders as well. He was stabbed to death in prison in 1973, and whether he actually committed the murders he confessed to has been a subject of controversy ever since.) As he expected, Rep. Moore saw his resolution passed unanimously; he then withdrew it and explained that he had offered the motion only to demonstrate a point. (A bit of sardonic humor offered at the time claimed that perhaps Moore was wrong: maybe the legislators had been paying 
attention.) 

Although we would hope our elected representatives would pay enough attention to their jobs not to pass resolutions commending murderers, that Moore's stunt succeeded wasn't necessarily as outrageous as it might seem. Federal and state legislators see a steady stream of resolutions that have no real legal impact and are offered mostly as public relations measures on behalf of one group or another. Poring over each and every one would take an inordinate amount of a legislator's time (especially in states like Texas where the legislature might be in session only relatively briefly and infrequently, creating a large number of bills and resolutions to be voted upon in a very short time). If a fellow legislator introduces a resolution to honor some favored person or group, you're expected to rubber stamp it as a gesture of good will — after all, you'll want him to return the favor when you need to boost your popularity with your constituents by extending similar honors to some of them. 

The invocation of then-Texas governor George W. Bush's name at the beginning of the 2000 example quoted above made little sense other than as a pre-presidential election attempt to malign him by linking his name to an absurd piece of legislative business, as Rep. Moore'sresolution was introduced many years before Bush was first elected governor of Texas. 

Sources:
Tom Moore Jr
Source from Wikipedia
               

Barbados vs Grenada: The Craziest Game in History of Soccer

You would think a basic winning tactic in Soccer would be to kick the ball between the posts. Your opponent's posts, that is. The team that is best at this wins the match.

Most of the time that's true, but an infamous game between Barbados and Grenada in 1994 turned logic upside-down.

Going into the last group game in a Caribbean Cup tournament (the Shell Caribbean Cup), Barbados needed to beat Grenada by two goals in order to reach the final. A draw after 90 minutes would result in extra time whereas anything less than winning by two goals would see Grenada through to the final. The catch, however, was that the organisers had decided that in the case of extra time a golden goal would count as two goals.

Barbados took an early 2-0 lead, but Grenada made it 2-1 with seven minutes remaining. Barbados were heading out unless they scored a goal—any goal!

One Barbadian striker realised that his team were unlikely to score another goal against Grenada, with only a few minutes to go and Grenada playing an ultra-defensive tactic. Instead, he decided that their best chance of winning was to make the game go into extra time and score a golden goal, which would count as two goals.

So he promptly powered the ball past his own stunned goalkeeper to make it 2-2.

Now, Grenada needed to score a goal—at either end—to avoid extra time and to go through to the final. The Grenada players, initially stunned by the goal and suddenly realising what was going on, turned around and headed for their own net.

Now the comedy really starts as the Barbadians had anticipated this move and rushed to defend the Grenada goal—in addition to their own—until the whistle went for extra time. Now be honest, who could make up a story like this?

In the end, Barbadian ingenuity was rewarded as one of their strikers scored the winning goal four minutes into extra time, which sent Barbados to the final.

As was to be expected, the Grenadians were not amused. Grenada manager James Clarkson was furious. "I feel cheated, the person who came up with these rules must be a candidate for the madhouse.

"The game should never be played with so many players on the field confused. Our players did not even know which direction to attack; our goal or their goal. I have never seen this happen before. In Soccer, you are supposed to score against your opponents in order to win, not for them."

It took a few seconds to sink in, but when Grenada had realized what happened, they knew what to do. They had to score an own goal as well to avert the extra time. With only 5 minutes remaining the crowd witnessed the spectacle of Barbados now defending both goals. They managed to hold on. Once extra time began, the Barbadians switched back to normal tactics and scored the decisive goal. The rules meant they had won by 4-2. A place in the final round was rightfully theirs.

Video Link: Barbados vs Grenada