Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Friday, September 03, 2010

Gruesome, Truly

The headline of the news item stuck in the middle of the daily newspaper, bottom half, read "Woman dies trying to sneak down lover's chimney". Now that's intriguing, is it not? How many people would just skim on to the next item and pass that one by? A woman 'sneaking' down a chimney? Lowering herself trustingly into the interior of a chimney? Hoping to surprise her lover? "Why darling, good of you to drop in. I was just thinking about you, and here you are!"

Possibly that might be what, in her feverish lover's imagination, might conceivably occur. Well, some imagination, that. It must surely reside inside the brain of someone not too well endowed as far as rational determination goes. Someone, surely with a few eggs short of a dozen? Think so? Well human beings are truly peculiar, and the female of the species, exceedingly so at times. Becoming so utterly besotted with a male companion that intelligent thought processes become an anomaly.

This woman was a well-regarded family physician in a small town in California. Voted one of the area's favourite doctors, no less. But Jacquelyn Kotarac, for such was her name, had a problem with her personal life. Her personal relationship with her very special intimate friend was not proceeding as well as she would have liked it to. These weren't kids; he 58, and she 49. Both presumably intelligent as professionals; he is an engineering consultant.

But people fall out with one another and relations turn sour, sometimes unaccountably, often with good reason. One of the pair perceiving the other to be somewhat short of reason might be an acceptable enough compulsion to untie the knot that binds. Dr. Kotarac had been drinking of an evening, when she decided to hie herself off to Jim Moodie's home to have a confabulation. He, seeking to avoid a confrontation, stealthily removed himself from the premises.

She had the place to herself, but she wasn't aware of that. What she was aware of was that no one was responding to her calls to open the door. She availed herself of a shovel and attempted to pry open a back door, but it resisted her appeals, too. So she clambered up and along a ladder which was a permanent fixture on the bungalow and found herself on its roof. And then, then she impulsively decided to slide down the chimney.

The article does not describe this woman's physical characteristics, her girth, that kind of thing. It does mention that the chimney flue was 38 centimetres by 18 centimetres at its most generous point; the entry. After which it began to narrow to 10 centimetres as it descended. And when Dr. Kotarac slid in, feet first, arms stretched over her head, gravity did what gravity does. And she found herself in a very uncomfortable and unprisable position.

Where, no one but herself being within or without the house, she suffered the agonies of suffocation, presumably calling out for help, with no one to come to her aid. When, the following day, she was absent from her workplace, her personal assistant telephoned Mr. Moodie and together they went to his house, finding Dr. Kotarac's car and her purse, but no Dr. Kotarac.
Puzzling, but then such things do happen, one supposes.

Three days after Dr. Kotarac's misfortune, a cleaning woman detected a foul odour, alerted Mr. Moodie, who contacted police. Firemen then took five hours of painstaking work to disassemble the chimney for the purpose of extracting Dr. Kotarac's body. Cause of death: mechanical asphyxia. Of course, cause of death in this instance was alcohol and gross stupidity.

Sad, exceedingly sad.

Labels: ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

 
()() Follow @rheytah Tweet