By Jim Hagarty
2006
I don’t really want to gross anyone out here, but a story in this week’s news reminded me of something that happened to me a few months ago.
First, the story. A woman and her adult son in Newport News, Virginia, were convicted this week of trying to extort money from a restaurant chain by claiming they found a dead mouse in a bowl of soup while celebrating Mother’s Day in 2004. Their conviction was apparently not a slam dunk but their chances of getting the $500,000 they wanted from the restaurant were hampered by the size of their demand. Had they been a little less greedy and gone for a reasonable sum – $10,000 maybe, give or take a few hundred – the company might have rolled over, but with that kind of money on the line, they decided to fight back.
Now, Carla Patterson, 38, and her 22-year-old son Ricky probably thought they were pretty clever when they plunked a dead mouse into her bowl of soup. But they hadn’t counted on the wonders of science and the potential for them to be done in by the findings of a little procedure called a necropsy, kind of like an autopsy for mice. And who would think that anyone could possibly prove that that mouse didn’t arrive at Carla’s table in the bottom of her soup bowl, but instead made its way from her purse to the dish? I would have thought it impossible to prove. But the restaurant’s defence team did exactly that.
The necropsy showed the mouse died of a fractured skull (meaning Carla or Ricky must have beaned it with a bat or hammer). It had no soup in its lungs and had not been cooked. The jury agreed, after four hours, that these were signs that the rodent was dropped into the soup after its death.
The Pattersons fell, as it were, into their own mousetrap and for their trouble could each spend the next 10 years behind bars. But mercy has been recommended so it’s doubtful they’ll spend more than a year in the sinbin.
It was a nice try, I guess, but also a good lesson for all future rodent extortionists. Make sure you don’t conk the mouse on the head but find some way to send him off that won’t leave any trace of violence that could be picked up later. A good idea might be to cook up the little guy in a pot of soup at home before taking him out to dinner with you. Just make sure you order the same kind of soup at the restaurant as the type you boiled up at home.
What is the world coming to, you have to wonder, when it’s getting so darned complicated just to pull off a simple scam?
But now to my story. Not too exciting, I’ll admit, but at least my misadventure with food was not planned by me as a scheme to bilk anybody. If you’re squeamish, don’t read this next sentence. One day, I was drinking a can of pop, when I felt something catch between my lips. I set the pop down, investigated and pulled out a fingernail clipping. Yippee! What a wonderful world, I thought.
My one consolation was that, as I understand it, cola is kind of a powerful cleanser in its own right so at least the stray human body part I almost ingested was probably germ free.
I forget which pop company it was which has an employee who clips his or her nails on the assembly line, but it didn’t occur to me to sue. With my luck, some brainiac somewhere would do a DNA analysis and find the fingernail was my own which it most definitely was not.
I guess Carla and Ricky’s one consolation is that all the soup they eat during the coming year will be for free.
