Death and dismemberment

WLOSers were all about death and dismemberment with their infotainment report on Tuesday.

Body parts
Holly Headache brought us a follow-up at 11 on the big story of the day – the fact that somebody found some human remains in a culvert on Roberts Street in West Asheville. A woman walking her dog said the dog sniffed out the body parts.

Last week, about a mile away, somebody who works at Highwater Clays found some human bones along the river. So now, cops are thinking the various body parts – in various states of decomposition – might be all one person.

Holly said the cops have said that the bones last week belong to a white female, aged 21 to 50, who had brain surgery. But that’s about it.

There are so many questions here – how much of a body do the cops have now? Twenty percent? Fifty percent? And how come some parts are more decomposed than others. Has a killer been freezing a body, a la Dahmer? Will cops be doing a more in-depth search along the river? C’mon people.

Prison official goes to prison
Edith Pope, a former Craggy Prison administrator, was sentenced to 22 months in prison for having sex with a convicted murderer and arsonist. And if it has to do with sex, you know Michelle Boudin was on the story.

Boudin quoted Pope’s attorney, who said his client had sympathy for the killer, in part because he didn’t have any fingers or toes. (Hmmm, let’s imagine for a moment…) Ok. And the attorney also said that Pope was taking some medication that made her bi-polar.

But the judge was having none of it, and told Pope that she was putting the whole community’s safety in jeaopardy because the inmate, through his connection with Pope, had secured computer discs showing the prison layout. Can you say escape? The discs also had the electronic signature of Pope and the prison superintendent on it. So Judge Ronald Payne threw the book at her.

Scam alert
Carolyn “Little Red” Ryan told us to beware of a pregnant lady begging for money. That was the gist of the report, but she had to hype it up by telling the story through an anonymous source and stressing how offensive it was that a pregnant woman was scamming people.

Look – a scam is a scam. And you don’t give money to people who come up to you in a parking lot asking for it, even if they do look sad and pitiful. Tell your anonymous source to think next time before handing somebody 15 bucks out of your last Social Security check. Jesus, Mary and Joseph!

Bottom line – watch out for panhandlers at Biltmore Square Mall and the Kmart next door. And if you see someone begging, call the police and they’ll throw their butts in jail.

In other news…
A former UNCA student was killed in a head-on collison on Merrimon Avenue Tuesday morning. Police aren’t sure why the 20-year-old driver was driving down the wrong side of the busy road… And Ashvegas cops seized more than 600 pounds of marijuana found in a house along Brevard Road. The pot was imported from Mexico and had a street value of $1.5 million, the cops said… And the trial of Gail Gash, charged with murdering her husband, a former fire chief whose body parts were found strewn around his property and the Blue Ridge Parkway, will be held in Henderson County. Gash’s attorney had asked that the trial be moved because of all the publicity over it, but the judge said the trial stays in H’ville.