Off the wall news.

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Michael J. DeWitt, 39, was arrested for DUI in Fort Wayne, Ind., in February after he drove erratically into the parking lot of an Indiana State Police station early in the morning and told officers that he was there "to get a room." (A Holiday Inn was next door.) (Police later said they matched DeWitt's Hummer to the vehicle that minutes earlier had collided with a car nearby and left the scene.)

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A 47-year-old registered sex offender died of a heart attack in Palm Beach County, Fla., in January; his body was found, nude, in front of his home computer on which he had been viewing pornography.

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Another 47-year-old man was killed late at night, in February in Belle River, Ontario, when his snowmobile collided with a tree stump embedded in Lake St. Clair. The man had been waging a notorious, three-year campaign to have the stump removed from the lake because of the danger it posed to nighttime snowmobilers.

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William Davis filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against the Murfreesboro, Tenn., police in December because, when they raided his home after complaints from neighbors, they seized and destroyed the 114 dead cats and one dead dog that Davis kept in freezers and which he said had "emotional value" for him.

In addition, according to the petition filed in Chancery Court for Rutherford County (and uncovered by TheSmokingGun.com), the carcasses were potential business property, in that he was planning to start his own pet cemetery, and also one of the cats, he claimed, was destined for the Guinness Book of World Records because it had been so large at birth. [TheSmokingGun.com, 1-5-07]

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George Dalmas III, 48, a 20-year, mid-level CIA employee, pleaded guilty in Fairfax, Va., in December to breaking into 10 homes and stealing many items of expensive jewelry, plus 1,074 pairs of women's underpants, all of which Dalmas carefully maintained, in that, said the prosecutor, he was most of all a pack rat. [WPXI-TV (Pittsburgh)-AP, 12-1-06]

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Joshlynn Leigh, 30, was arrested in December at a Pennsylvania state police barracks as she arrived for fingerprinting in preparation for being hired by the agency. Leigh was discovered to have driven to the barracks in a stolen car (the same one that was the subject of a warrant against her in Georgia for auto theft). [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12-27-06]

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The West Tennessee Detention Facility (Mason, Tenn.) made a video pitch for California inmates, hoping some would volunteer to be outsourced under that state's program to relieve overcrowding.

The hard-timers should come east, the video urged, because of West Tennessee's "larger and cleaner jail cells, 79 TV channels, including ESPN, views of peaceful cow pastures, and ... the 'Dorm of the Week,' (with its inmates) staying up all night, watching a movie and eating cheeseburgers or pizza," according to a March description in Nashville's Tennessean. "You're not a number here," said one inmate.

"You come here, it's personalized." (California's outsourcing program is facing a lawsuit from the prison guards' union, anxious about job loss.) [The Tennessean, 3-6-07]

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Walter C. Stevens, 81, thought he had buried his allegedly disreputable past, but an underground water problem at his former residence in Sierra Vista, Ariz., brought it back.

When an area in the yard flooded, a plastic bag emerged, containing videotapes that the FBI now says Stevens had made in the 1970s and 1980s of himself having sex with underage girls in Japan, South Korea and Thailand. [Arizona Republic, 2-21-07]

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According to a Beijing Youth Daily report distributed by Reuters news service in February, an unidentified Chinese businessman posted an online job offer for a "substitute" mistress.

That is, in order to save his marriage, he had agreed to allow his wife to beat up his mistress and thus needed a stand-in to absorb the whipping, to spare the real mistress.

He offered the equivalent of about $400 per 10 minutes of pain. [Reuters, 2-26-07]

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In Omaha, Neb., in February, Kevin Oliver, 36, was convicted of criminal impersonation for tricking two women into giving him urine samples by convincing them, falsely, that he was a recruiter for T-Mobile and needed the samples to complete their employment applications. [MSNBC-AP, 2-1-07]

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The New York City children's services agency took away former "breatharian" David Jubb's 20-month-old son in February after Jubb refused to let physicians treat the boy's fractured ankle.

Breatharians believe that humans can subsist primarily on air and sunlight.

Jubb said he has evolved since those days and now eats, but extremely few calories' worth, and he drinks his own urine.

He acknowledged that his child's diet is absent the generally recommended nutritional building blocks for infants, according to a New York Post report. [New York Post, 2-5-07]

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Super-charismatic Stacy Finley, 34, pleaded guilty in January in Shreveport, La., to defrauding 22 middle-class victims by somehow convincing them to pay a total of $989,000 to have medical scans done of their bodies by overhead satellite and to be administered secret therapeutic drugs while they slept, by CIA agents who would sneak into their homes. [KTBS-TV (Shreveport), 1-19-07]

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A 17-year-old was arrested in January in Sheboygan, Wis., and charged with stealing a snowmobile from the Sheboygan Yamaha lot.
However, the next morning, even before the dealer realized the vehicle was missing, the boy had brought it in for service. [Sheboygan Press, 1-30-07]

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Following a three-year investigation by federal and local authorities in Orange County, Calif., the owners of at least 10 massage parlors were arrested in March and accused of running prostitution establishments.

Among the investigators' findings was that, to reduce the cost of supplying condoms, the salons urged customers to use plastic food wrap, which management bought in large quantities.

Said District Attorney Tom Rackauckas, "I really don't think about (plastic food wrap) in the same way anymore." [Los Angeles Times, 3-22-07]

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The Scandia Family Fun Center, which operates a super thrill ride (168 feet high, spinning at 60 miles an hour, pulling 3.5 g's) called the Screamer, in Sacramento, Calif., decided in March that because of neighborhood residents' noise complaints, riders would be prohibited from screaming (and subject to ejection from the park). [KOVR-TV (Sacramento), 3-31-07]