Saturday 13 September 2014

A seriously weird crime

Every now and again something appeals to the mucky schoolboy who still lingers deep (well, perhaps not that deep) within me. Here is one such that I'm filing in the 'would you believe it?' box. At first I thought it was a figment of Frank Zappa's imagination, but it turns out to be true. There actually was a man in Illinois who robbed female students under gunpoint, tied them up and then administered enemas to them. The 'enema bandit', as he became known, seems to have got away with it for a number of years before he was arrested in 1975  and sentenced to six terms of 6 to 12 years for his strange crime. (He protested vehemently against his sentence as he thought he'd had a bum rap). Thankfully, none of his victims were hurt: probably the butt of many jokes but not hurt. I like to think that the ladies were very magnanimous and turned the other cheek in forgiving their assailant, leaving the distressing events behind them. Michael Kenyon was his name and he is immortalised in Zappa's song 'Illinois Enema Bandit'. I give a You-Tube clip below and it's worth listening to, if only for the introduction. It gets a bit 'Zappary' after a while but it begins well.

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