David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

Beatrice Daigle, 73, of Woonsocket, R.I., filed a $250,000 suit when she learned that she had been praying at the wrong grave for 17 years. After her husband died on January 28, 1961, The Church of the Precious Blood in Woonsocket sold Mrs Daigle a plot at St John the Baptist Cemetery in Bellingham, Massachusetts. Mrs Daigle visited the grave frequently to pray for the repose of her dead husband’s soul. On April 26, 1978, workers opened the grave in order to move Mr Daigle’s body to another plot and discovered instead the body of a woman, Jeanne Champagne. Three more graves had to be dug up before Mr Daigle’s body was located. Mrs Daigle, who was present at the exhumation, suffered ‘severe emotional trauma and distress’ because of the mistake. In November 1979 the case was dismissed.

On February 5, 1979, Woodrow W. Bussey filed a $2 million suit in Oklahoma County District Court claiming that the Adolph Coors Co. and a local tavern had caused him to become an alcoholic by failing to warn him that the 3.2-proof beer served in Oklahoma is actually an intoxicating beverage. Bussey said that Coors beer had done irreparable damage to his brain, ‘pickling his mind’ and preventing him from thinking clearly. In 1988 Bussey, reacting to the reparations paid to Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II, sued the United States government for uprooting his Cherokee ancestors during the 1838 forced march known as the Trail of Tears.

Martha Burke’s twin sister, Margaret Fox, was one of the 580 people killed in the plane disaster at Tenerife in the Canary Islands on March 27, 1977. Consequently, Mrs Burke sued Pan American — not for the wrongful death of her sister, but for her own injuries, which she sustained because of the ‘extrasensory empathy’ which is common among identical twins. At the moment of the collision, Mrs Burke, sitting at her home in Fremont, California, suffered burning sensations in her chest and stomach and a feeling of being split.

On February 21, 1980, Federal Court Judge Robert Ward ruled against Burke, explaining that legally she had to be physically present at the accident to collect damages.

Maria del Carmen y Ruiz was married to one of Fidel Castro’s intelligence chiefs when, in 1964, she was approached by the CIA in Cuba and asked to be a spy. She worked diligently at her new job, but in January 1969 she was caught by Cuban counterintelligence agents and sentenced to 20 years in prison. After serving 8½ years, she became the first convicted American spy to be released from Cuban custody. In May 1980 Ruiz, now remarried and known as Carmen Mackowski, sued the CIA for inadequate training. She also charged that the CIA had misled her into believing that if she was detected, they would arrange for her immediate release. US District Court Judge Dickinson Debevoise of Trenton, New Jersey, ruled in favor of the CIA because, as one newspaper put it, federal judges ‘do not have authority to intervene in CIA employment matters that might result in the release of intelligence information’.

In September 1980, in La Jolla, California, the ‘Grand Old Man of Divorce Law’, John T. Holt and his wife, Phyllis, filed suit against their neighbours, William and Helen Hawkins. The Holts claimed that the Hawkins had trimmed their hedges into obscene shapes. The Holts named 20 other neighbours as co-conspirators. They asked $250,000 in punitive damages and demanded removal of trees and hedges that had been shaped ‘to resemble phallic symbols’. The case was finally dismissed in January 1982.

Virginia O’Hare, 42, of Poughkeepsie, New York, filed a malpractice suit against plastic surgeon Howard Bellin after her navel ended up two inches off-centre following surgery in November 1974, to give her ‘a flat sexy belly’. Dr Bellin had previously performed successful operations on O’Hare’s nose and eyelids. Bellin argued that O’Hare’s navel (which was later returned to its proper position by another plastic surgeon) had only been misplaced by a half inch, which he called ‘not cosmetically unacceptable’. In May 1979, a State Supreme Court jury awarded O’Hare $854,219, including $100,000 for pain and suffering, $4,219 for the corrective surgery, and $750,000 for loss of earnings. Not surprisingly, Dr Bellin appealed the verdict but later agreed to pay Mrs O’Hare $200,000.

Police officer George E. La Brash, 56, suffered a stroke on September 23, 1979, while guarding the 3,300-year-old golden mask of King Tutankhamun when it was on display in San Francisco. La Brash claimed that he was a victim of the famous Curse of King Tut, which had caused the sudden death of numerous people involved in the 1923 discovery of Tut’s tomb. For this reason he contended that the stroke was job-related and that he was entitled to $18,400 in disability pay for the eight months of his recuperation. On February 9, 1982, Superior Court Judge Richard P. Figone denied La Brash’s claim.

Penny Pellito of Miramar, Florida, filed a personal-injury lawsuit against the Hollywood Home Depot hardware store after she was struck in the head by three eight-foot planks while shopping in April 1987. Pellito claimed that the accident caused her to lose the unusual ability to block out pain. Although witnesses testified to having witnessed a doctor saw Pellito’s toe bone without benefit of anaesthesia before the accident, a jury rejected her claim. They also decided that she was 80% responsible for the accident, but they did award her $1,200 for normal physical damages.

On August 28, 1988, the world-championship cycling road race, held in Robse, Belgium, came down to a sprint between Steve Bauer of Canada and 1984 world champion Claude Criquielion of Belgium. But a mere 75 m. from the finish line the two crashed, allowing Maurizio Fondriest of Italy to snatch an unexpected victory. In a case without precedent in professional cycling, Criquielion sued Bauer for assault and asked for more than $1.5 million in damages. Criquielion alleged that Bauer had swerved in front of him and elbowed him, thus denying him the glory and financial rewards that come with a world championship. The case dragged though the courts, but finally, three and a half years later, a Belgian judge ruled in favour of Bauer.

Former sex symbol Brigitte Bardot has devoted her post-film career years to promoting the rights of animals. Among the members of her personal menagerie in St Tropez, France, were a 32-year-old mare named Duchesse and a young donkey named Mimosa. In the summer of 1989, Bardot invited her neighbour’s donkey, a three-year-old male named Charley, to graze alongside Duchesse and Mimosa. When Charley began to display a sexual interest in Duchesse, Bardot feared that if Charley were allowed to have his way with the elderly mare, it might prove fatal to her. So she called in her vet and had Charley castrated. Charley’s owner, Jean-Pierre Manivet, was out of town at the time. When he returned to St Tropez, he was outraged by what had happened. Manivet sued Bardot, claiming that Charley had really been interested in Mimosa, not Duchesse. Bardot countersued, alleging that the bad publicity had harmed her reputation. Both suits were eventually rejected by the courts.

In 1982, Charles Wayne Brown of Newton, Iowa, was struck in the right eye by a golf ball stroked by car salesman Bill Samuelson. The accident caused permanent damage to Brown’s eye. Brown sued Samuelson for failing to yell ‘fore’ before he hit the ball. The case was dismissed in 1984.