By Staff
We may never know how the Bermuda Triangle myth began almost 60 years ago, but an indelible reason has finally been found for getting a tattoo.
No fan of tattoos, I don't understand why anyone would want one, but I'm all for them if they keep making crime suspects easy marks for police.
No one deserves a self-fulfilling prophecy more than at-large bank robbery suspect Andrew Jeffrey Webster, 21, who inked “DUMB” on the inside of his right forearm.
Police believe that on Nov. 15 it was Webster who visited a National City Bank in Waterford and fled with cash while wearing a green jacket, black hat and black scarf.
Webster, who has a “record of arrests for burglary and drugs from Hazel Park to Southfield,” the Detroit Free Press reported Nov. 19, can ditch the clothes, but body art is forever.
Then there's Terrence Moore's distinctive tattoo, an indigo “13” on his shaved head.
It came in handy for an Oakland County jury which convicted the 37-year-old Detroiter Nov. 7 of fatally shooting a recording studio owner in Ferndale in January.
Or, take the case of Joseph Duncil, whose tattoos helped cops identify him after a three-day manhunt.
On Nov. 15, police arrested Duncil, 21, of Warren, for allegedly fatally shooting his 17-year-old girlfriend. The manhunt ranged all the way to West Virginia, but the key to locating Duncil in Detroit proved to be the large “Joe” tattooed on his throat. “Duncil” is stenciled atop his upper back.
Bad guys have never been known for their intellectual candlepower.
Some, thankfully, are downright DUMB.
As for the Bermuda Triangle's enduring mystery, I became fascinated after hearing an author in college. It was the still-unexplained Dec. 5, 1945, disappearance of Flight 19, a Navy mission with 27 airmen, somewhere off the coast of Florida, that launched this befuddling legend.
The Bermuda Triangle is the name given to a patch of ocean between Puerto Rico, Bermuda and Miami that some believe has a supernatural aura.
Five U.S. Navy Avenger airplanes left the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station on a routine training mission over the Bahamas.
Five pilots and nine crewmen, led by instructor Lt. Charles Taylor, were to practice bombing and low-level strafing on coral shoals.
After traveling 60 miles east, they were to turn north to practice mapping, then head southwest to home. The entire flight, which Air Station pilots made three or four times a day, should have lasted three hours.
Ninety minutes into the mission, compasses apparently malfunctioned. Believing he was over the Florida Keys, Taylor directed planes to fly due north to land, but from the end of the Bahama chain, his squadron instead ventured over the wide ocean.
Some students wanted to fly east, but military discipline prevailed.
Taylor's last radio message indicated they would keep flying “until we hit the beach or run out of gas.”
Even more amazing, a few hours later a Navy rescue airplane, a Martin Mariner with 13 crewmen, also vanished. No evidence of it was ever found, either, although a passing ship reported seeing bright lights in the sky that could indicate an in-air explosion.
No wreckage has ever been found, despite one of the largest rescue missions in American naval history scouring 250,000 square miles.
One author, however, theorizes that intermittent “electronic fog” in the atmosphere can cause instrument needles to spin and disorient pilots.
Michigan in a spin of its own: This state will endure a sixth straight year of job losses in 2006 - a string unprecedented since World War II.
Ford Motor Co. will cut about 10 percent of its white-collar jobs in North America next year.