Anchor hangs herself after legal issues hits the news - not Alicia Lane

My best friend's next-door neighbor hanged himself. Most people were better off. This guy was a crotchety, crazy, whacked-out, old man, who did a lot more harm than good. He was very particular about his garden and his grass, and it certainly showed. But he took it to extremes. He used to shoot and kill squirrels and chipmunks and save them in a bucket in his garage. Why, you ask? Because he would throw them at the neighborhood children as they rode by his house on their bikes. If a kid fell off their bike, he'd point and clap -- though not at the same time -- at the crying child.

My buddy Jeff and I were sitting on the curb across his street, on our seventh-grade math and English teachers' lawn, and this old man yelled at us to "quit trespassing." "They don't want you sitting on their curb. They told me," he informed us. When we disputed his claim, he rang their doorbell. They waved and smiled at us. He then walked over and said, "They're calling the cops. You better move."

One kid threw a shaving-cream can threw his garage window during Halloween. So, with his assumptions a blazing, he wrote "Jeff" on a brick and threw it through the 16-year-old's garage window. Then he nearly got into a fist fight with Jeff's grandpa. Two men in their mid-70s duking it out would have been entertaining, but surely disturbing, too.

So we, being the vengeful, little fucks that we were -- or are -- every time we'd walk back to Jeff's house at night, we'd each pee in his plants and lawn and unload a handful of salt in his flower bed. One time, we even tore a big hole in his fish-net fence. Jeff heard him yelling one afternoon, "Those damn deer. ..."

Eventually, the old man's wife left him for reasons we can only assume. Two years later, when Jeff and I were home for the summer after our first year of college, I got a phone call. It was Jeff. He said, "Dude, there's like three police cars and an ambulance outside my house. You'll never guess why," he said. "The cops found that crazy bastard hanging in his basement. He'd been there for three days."

"Oh, fuck," I said. "Really?"

"Yeah, dude," Jeff said. "They found a note, too. It was to his wife, telling her 'this wasn't because of you.'"

"Well, that's kind of sweet, I guess," I said.

"Yeah," Jeff said. "But he didn't say we weren't to blame. ... Whoops."

I hung up the phone and immediately started laughing about the situation. Not so much because of the dude killing himself; he was an awful prick, but he didn't deserve to die. I laughed because ... well, how many times in life does the television show "Hangin' with Mr. Cooper" actually get to ring true?

 

That movie was a shoddy remake of the tragic story of Jessica Savitch (was based on the book about her)

 

I thought the Savitch-inspired movie was "To Die For"

 

We need more heedless greed on TV, no question.

 

She was messed up, and God rest her soul.
That's the ex-wife of former Michigan quarterback John Wangler. When she had her kids, she tried poisoning their minds about him. When she had a DUI in Royal Oak, she blew this ungodly BAC; she talked the bailbondsman on that out of repaying the bail...
she was indeed tormented. Am told alcohol was a good reason, but there were others.
RIP.

 

No, To Die For was inspired by Pam Smart.