8 THE ADULTEROUS WOMAN Caught in the act of adultery, this woman was brought before Jesus by the scribes and Pharisees, who pointed out that the law required that such an offence be punished by stoning. Jesus ignored them at first and then said, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’ One by one her accusers slithered away, and she was not punished. (John 8:3–ll)
6 People Whose Names Were Changed by Accident
1 IRVING BERLIN (1888–1989), songwriter He was born Israel Baline, but the sheet music for his first composition, ‘Marie from Sunny Italy’, credited the song to ‘I. Berlin’. Baline preferred the mistake over his actual name.
2 WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897–1962), novelist After William Falkner’s first book, The Marble Faun (1924), was published, he discovered that a ‘u’ had been inserted into his last name. He decided to live with the new spelling rather than go through the hassle of correcting the error.
3 ULYSSES S. GRANT (1822–85), general and US president The future Civil War general was born Hiram Ulysses Grant. The prospect of entering the US Military Academy with the initials ‘H. U.G.’ embarrassed him, so the new cadet reversed the order of his names and started signing himself U.H. Grant. He soon learned that Rep. Thomas L. Hamer, who had sponsored his appointment to West Point, had mistakenly enrolled him as Ulysses Simpson Grant, ‘Simpson’ being the maiden name of Grant’s mother. Grant, finding nothing objectionable in the initials ‘USG’, adopted the new name.
4 BUDDY HOLLY (1936–59), singer and songwriter When Charles ‘Buddy’ Holley signed his first contract with Decca Records, his last name was misspelled as ‘Holly’. Reasoning that others in the recording industry would make the same error, Buddy kept the new spelling.
5 DIONNE WARWICK (1940– ), singer When her first record, ‘Don’t Make Me Over’ was released in 1962, a printing error made Dionne Warrick over into Dionne Warwick.
6 OPRAH WINFREY (1954– ), television personality Her parents intended to name her ‘Orpah’ after Ruth’s sister-in-law in the Old Testament. However, the name was misspelled ‘Oprah’ on her birth certificate. Winfrey has used it ever since.
– C.F.
8 Almost Indestructible People
1 GRIGORI RASPUTIN The Russian mystic and orgiast held enormous political power at the court of the Romanovs from 1905 until his murder in 1916. That this decadent, vulgar peasant should hold such sway over the Empress Alexandra infuriated a group of five power-hungry aristocrats, who set out to destroy him. They arranged for Rasputin to take midnight tea at the home of Prince Felix Yussupov. Some accounts say that Rasputin drank voluminous amounts of poisoned or opiated wine and remained unaffected, to Yussupov’s great consternation. The frightened Prince contrived an excuse to go upstairs, where the waiting gang furnished him with a gun, then followed him downstairs. According to Rasputin’s daughter, Maria, the men assaulted her father and ‘used him sexually’. Then Yussupov shot him. Again, according to Maria, they viciously beat Rasputin and castrated him, flinging the famed penis across the room. One of the conspirators – a doctor – pronounced the victim dead; but Yussupov, feeling uneasy, began to shake the body violently. The corpse’s eyelids twitched – and opened. Suddenly, Rasputin jumped to his feet and gripped Yussupov by the shoulders. Terrorised, Prince Felix pulled himself free; Rasputin fell to the floor, and the other men dashed upstairs. In the midst of the brouhaha, they heard noises in the hallway: Rasputin had crawled up the stairs after them. Two more shots were fired into him, and again he was beaten with harrowing violence. The men (still doubting his death) bound Rasputin’s wrists. Carrying him to a frozen river, they thrust his body through a hole in the ice. Rasputin was still alive. The icy water revived him, and he struggled against his bonds. When his body was found two days later, his scarred wrists and water-filled lungs gave this proof, as did his freed right hand, which was frozen in the sign of the cross.
2 SAMUEL DOMBEY Dombey was a black gravedigger in post-Civil War Orleans. Because he worked for such low rates, his fellow gravediggers decided to put an end to their competition. They called upon a certain Dr Beauregard, reputed to have magical powers, to use his $50 ‘supreme curse’ involving an owl’s head. The next morning, as Dombey began to dig a new grave, he heard a loud explosion. Someone, apparently injured, staggered from a nearby clump of bushes. There Dombey found a gun which, overloaded with buckshot, had blown up. Later, a much-bandaged Dr Beauregard threatened to curse anyone who questioned him. The gravediggers took matters into their own hands. They placed a keg of explosive powder under the cot in the tool shed where Dombey took his daily nap and lit it while he slept. The explosion blasted Dombey out the doorway and plopped him 20 feet away. The tool shed was completely destroyed, but Dombey was unhurt. The local police nicknamed him Indestructible Sam. But the best (or worst) was yet to come: Indestructible Sam was soon captured by masked men and taken in a boat to Lake Pontchartrain. Sam’s hands and feet were tied, and he was dumped into the depths of the lake. These particular depths, however, turned out to be only 2 feet; Sam wriggled free of his bonds and walked ashore. Next, Dombey’s foes tried arson – and as Dombey ran from his burning home, he received a full load of buckshot in his chest. Firemen saved the house and rushed Sam to the hospital, where he lived up to his nickname. Sam had the last laugh. He continued to dig graves, and died at 98, having outlived every one of his jealous competitors.
3 MICHAEL MALLOY In 1933, a down-and-out drunken Irishman became the victim of an extraordinary series of murder attempts. Malloy was a bum who frequented the speakeasy of one Anthony Marino in the Bronx. Marino and four of his friends, themselves hard up, had recently pulled off an insurance scam, murdering Marino’s girlfriend and collecting on her policy; pitiful Michael Malloy seemed a good next bet. The gang took out three policies on him. Figuring Malloy would simply drink himself to death, Marino gave him unlimited credit at the bar. This scheme failed – Malloy’s liver knew no bounds. The bartender, Joseph Murphy, was in on the plot and substituted antifreeze for Malloy’s whisky. Malloy asked for a refill and happily put away six shots before passing out on the floor; after a few hours, he perked up and requested another drink. For a week Malloy guzzled antifreeze nonstop. Straight turpentine worked no better, and neither did horse liniment laced with rat poison. A meal of rotten oysters marinated in wood alcohol brought Malloy back for seconds. In an ultimate moment of culinary inspiration, Murphy devised a sandwich for his victim: spoiled sardines mixed with carpet tacks. Malloy came back for more. The gang’s next tactic was to dump the drunk into a bank of wet snow and pour water over him on a night when the temperature had sunk to -14°F. No luck. So Marino hired a professional killer, who drove a taxi straight at Malloy at 45 mph, throwing him into the air – and then ran over him again for good measure. After a disappearance of three weeks, Malloy walked into the bar, told the boys he’d been hospitalised because of a nasty car accident, and was ‘sure ready for drink’. Finally, the desperate murderers succeeded – they stuffed a rubber hose into Malloy’s mouth and attached it to a gas jet until his face turned purple. The scheme was discovered, and four members of the five-man ‘Murder Trust’ (as the tabloids dubbed Marino & Co.) died in the electric chair. One New York reporter speculated that if Mike Malloy had sat in the electric chair, he would have shorted out every circuit in Sing Sing.
4 DR ARTHUR WARREN WAITE’S FATHER-IN-LAW AND MOTHER-IN-LAW Dr Waite was a New York dentist whose wife was the only daughter of a rich drug manufacturer in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Waite decided to remove the only two obstacles in his path to riches: his parents-in-law. The doctor’s efforts are neatly chronicled in Carl Sifakis’s book A Catalogue of Crime. Setting to work on his mother-in-law, Waite took her for a drive in a heavy rain with the windshield open. He put ground glass in her marmalade. He introduced into her food all sorts of bacteria and viruses – those that cause pneumonia, influenza, anthrax and diphtheria. The lady did catch a cold, but that was all. In disgust, Waite shifted his attention to his father-in-law, trying the same disease producers – with absolutely no effect. He filled the old man’s rubber boots with water, dampened his sheets, opened a container of chlorine gas in his bedroom while he slept. Nothing. Then he tried giving the old man calomel,