Lead Story
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Michael McPhail, 26, was arrested in Spanaway, Washington, in October after his wife told police she’d caught him having sex with the couple’s four-year-old female pit bull (and allegedly provided cell-phone photos to back up her claim). McPhail is believed to be the first person charged under the state’s new bestiality law, passed after a man died last year in Enumclaw while having sex with a horse. And in November a lawyer representing 20-year-old Bryan Hathaway of Superior, Wisconsin, moved to dismiss the bestiality charge against his client. Since the deer that Hathaway allegedly had sex with was dead at the time (he reportedly found it in a ditch) it did not qualify as an animal under state law, the motion argued: “The statute does not prohibit one from having sex with a carcass.”
Questionable Judgments
News of the Weird has reported several times on a series of incidents in which a man has called the manager at a fast-food restaurant, identified himself as a police officer investigating an employee there, and convinced the manager to subject the employee to a strip search and other sexual humiliation while he listens in. Law enforcement officials long believed that the calls–more than 70 since 1995 in at least 32 states–were the work of one man. Finally last year David Stewart, a Florida prison guard, was charged with making a 2004 call to a McDonald’s outside Louisville, Kentucky: the caller got the middle-aged assistant manager and her fiance (who didn’t work there) to imprison an 18-year-old employee for nearly four hours and force her to strip naked, dance around, assume various poses, and ultimately perform oral sex. The manager was convicted for her role and the fiance accepted a plea bargain, but in October a jury acquitted Stewart; the employee’s $200 million suit against the McDonald’s Corporation is scheduled for trial in February.
Once Again Weird
