How many times have you heard someone say, "Gee, I want to find something creative to do with my life." Well, some people don't find this sort of self-fulfillment until the very END of their lives. Incredibly, some people put more into planning their own suicide than they ever demonstrated for any other project in their entire lives!
After the slash movies of the Seventies put all sorts of ideas into peoples heads, someone was bound to take action.
In a report from a physician from Helsinki published in the Journal of forensic Sciences in 1984, the bizarre tale is told of a fifty-four-year old man who (for reasons not reported) kept trying to commit suicide until he finally succeeded - albeit with a chainsaw.
Apparently the man had been alone with his mother-in-law in his home and was quite despondent. Just three weeks prior he had taken an overdose of tranquillizers but was saved at the hospital. His mother-in-law was horrified when she saw blood all over the front of the mans shirt, and he told her that he had tried to cut his chest open with a kitchen knife. Then, he told her that "he knew a more effective way," and he disappeared into the shed in the garden where most of his tools were stored. Within seconds she could hear the sound of an electric chainsaw starting up, followed by a muffled cutting sound and then a scream of agony from the man.
The mother-in-law panicked and ran to a neighbours house next door for help. The man emerged from the shed, bleeding from the chest, and staggered back to the kitchen where he collapsed on the floor. Responding to the neighbours telephone call, the police and an ambulance arrived about 25 minutes later, only to find that the man had died from his wounds.
In the shed, they found the chainsaw and noted in their report that "the electric chainsaw and its immediate vicinity were covered with blood, hair and bone fragments." The medical investigators estimated that he could have only "worked the saw on himself for a few seconds, definitely less than a minute." Apparently he had been thinking about committing this act for some time, because the investigators also found out that "a week before his death he had told his wife that he would kill himself with a chainsaw."
Despite what might seem to be the obvious, it apparently wasn't the deep slashes made in the man's chest that killed him (he missed all the vital organs somehow), but instead it was the intense vibrations that it made! The vibrations rippled through the man's body and caused some delicate tissues to burst in his lungs, and that was the apparent cause of death. The author of this article also reports how the various areas of the body respond differently to different vibratory levels and concludes that the case of the chainsaw suicide is just one example of "the types of damage to viceria and tissues that have been noted when violent vibrations of low frequency have been directed to the body for a very short time with fatal results after a few minutes survival time." ie "it was the bad vibes that killed him!"
Now, here's a woman who must have seen the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
In a case from Anchorage, Alaska, reported in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology in 1988, the body of a twenty-four-year old woman was found mutilated in a particularly unusual way: She was completely missing her left arm, and the frayed, bloody stump indicated a rather crude cutting job had taken place. Oddly enough, the missing arm was not found near her body, which was in a neighbours front yard.
Upon further investigation, the authorities found a kitchen knife and a 6-inch blade on the railing of the neighbours porch. Blood spatters suggested that she had attempted to ring the doorbell but had failed, and then had crawled into the front yard.
What had happened to her? The investigators traced a trail of blood that led them from the neighbours property to the bathroom of the dead womans house. A large amount of blood was found there - along with her left arm. Near the sink a Bible was opened to the pages containing the 22nd, 23rd and 24th psalms, and a Bic disposable razor was also found there with "two masses of scalp and hair" belonging to the woman. Was this a bizarre homicide? Not at all ...
The right handed woman had actually cut off her left arm (after mutilating her scalp with the razor) immediately below the shoulder joint with a small, wooden-handled kitchen knife. The author of the case history report reveals that this is probably the first time an "autoamputation-suicide" has ever been reported in the medical literature.
Perhaps she should have invested in a chainsaw - it would have made things MUCH easier, wouldn't it?
Joaquin had always wanted to be a Marine. In his room at home he had always stuck up Marine Corps posters on the wall, and he dreamed of the day when he would be old enough to join. The day his family and his best friend took him to join the other new recruits at the airport, Joaquin must have gone to the airport at least a dozen times in the course of his final hour. He suddenly realised how afraid he was about going to boot camp.
Joaquin didn't like anyone telling him what to do. And although he had always dreamed of becoming a Marine, he didn't realise how much autonomy he would have to give up - especially in boot camp. And it was only at the airport that reality hit him in the gut.
Somehow Joaquin got through the 11 weeks of basic training and was assigned to an infantry unit on a large base that was away from any major city, making it difficult to have frequent contact with the outside world. After a few weeks of this semi-isolation, Joaquin started to become somewhat depressed and began to tell his buddies that he regretted enrolling in the service. To make matters worse, he began to resent even more acutely having to take orders from superiors, and he also began expressing "extreme disdain for military regulations."
He made it, somehow, for almost a full year. Then, on the anniversary day of his enlistment, Joaquin "was found hanging by a clothes-line rope attached to a basketball net near an outdoor swimming pool." He was quite dead. Investigators did not find a suicide note, but Joaquin left a definite "fuck you" message of sorts to the military: He had deliberately hanged himself from a basketball net that had the sign "Do not hang on net" posted on it.
Furthermore, Joaquin violated military regulations by being "outdoors in uniform without a cover (hat)" and he had his right hand in a pocket while in uniform.
Joaquin would never have to follow another order again...