A general practitioner in Germany, identified only as Dr. Joern K., was killed in March 2019 when he picked up a package in front of his medical office in Enkenbach-Alsenborn, and it exploded.
Then, a woman and her daughter were injured when they touched a bomb hidden in the firewood they used for their stove. The device exploded inside their home in Otterberg, not far from Dr. K’s office.
Police immediately investigated, shared notes, and concluded that the woman, her daughter, and the GP all shared one thing in common. They knew Bernhard Grauman, a 59-year-old gardener who died a few days before the death of Dr. K.
Grauman was found dead in his bed in the small town of Mehlingen. At the time, it was thought he might have poisoned himself.
Could Grauman, somehow, be involved in the death of the doctor and the wounding of the woman and her little girl?
Could he have taken revenge from beyond the grave?
Very possibly.
You see, Grauman had experience working with black powder, used in both explosive devices, as part of his association with groups that staged medieval festivals and reenactments.
And the dead and injured had run-ins with Grauman in the past.
With the Kaiserslautern public prosecutor’s office, Udo Gehring said he wouldn’t be surprised to find Grauman planted more bombs before he died.
“It is all about clearing up the cases around the explosives. What is behind it? Might there be something else behind it? How did it come to it? And most of all, whether there might be more explosives out there,” Gehring said.
Because of that, police immediately set up a hotline for people who might have had personal or business relationships with Grauman that went bad.
Talk about a big club. Grauman must have had plenty of enemies, or at least people he’d felt wronged him.
More than sixty people who were concerned enough that Grauman might have targeted them called a special hotline.
The police didn’t find any other bombs, but the investigation remained open.
Grauman left behind, in addition to his exploding presents, a wife and two children.
WTF! Who Buried The Mercedes?
Yeah. Good question. Who buried a 1990s Mercedes convertible on the property of a mansion in Atherton, California? Better question: why?
This mystery broke the morning of October 20, 2022, when a landscaping crew unearthed the expensive auto buried four to five feet under the lawn of an expensive home.
Since it was such a surprise and immediately opened a Pandora’s Box of questions, the Atherton Police Department was called. Police officers responded with a crew of cadaver dogs because, well, why not?
And guess what? These dogs, in the words of the official police department press release, “made a slight notification of possible human remains.” In other words, these highly trained canines sniffed a dead body. Maybe.
Oh, good, Lord! Could there be a body buried near the car?
Maybe or maybe not. Police Commander Dan Larsen says the dogs might be responding to human blood or vomit instead of a body.
Is anything else suspicious?
Well, yes.
Police also discovered several unopened bags of concrete inside the buried Mercedes.
Wow!
Does that have “gangster” written all over it, or what?
Investigators are betting this car was buried sometime in the 1990s. And you aren’t going to believe who owned the home in the 300 block of Stockbridge Avenue at that time.
None other than Johnny Lew, that’s who!
The Mercury News reports Johnny built the 12,000 square-foot French-style estate in the 1990s, about the time of the burial. And did he have a criminal record or what?
Johnny Lew was convicted of second-degree murder in the 1960s but got out on a technicality. Then he did time behind bars in the 19700s for two cents of attempted murder. And in the late 1990s, he was arrested on insurance fraud charges.
Johnny, no rocket scientist, tried to get a couple of undercover agents to sink his $1.2 million yacht. The Mercury News wrote that Johnny said he did that on orders of “his people” in an Asian mob.
Okay.
Now, we can’t talk to Johnny about this. The guy died, damn it.
More on the Mercedes: It was stolen from Palo Alto, California, in 1992, and the auto’s owner is also dead and buried now. Legally, it seems.
Next-door neighbor Gary Dillabough, was out of town when landscapers found the car. He says this phone lit up with fifty text messages from friends, and he still can’t believe this is happening.
“It’s just such a weird, out-of-the-box thing,” Gary said. “It’s just hard to get your arms around. It’s like, maybe you bury people, but bury a car? It’s so stupid.”
Now, as of the writing of this post, police had not found a human body. Nor were investigators saying anything else about why that car might have been buried in the lawn.
Stay tuned!
It’s November 2, 1945. 3 p.m. Thomas McMonigle is racing through Campbell, California, driving faster than humanly possible, with a fourteen-year-old girl beside him.
She’s screaming bloody murder, clawing at the passenger-side window, desperately trying to escape.
Thomas would love to give her a good punch to the back of her head to get her to shut the fuck up, but he keeps both hands on the wheel and stares straight ahead.
The last thing he needs right now is to run into a cop.
Oh Damn!
This is nearly as bad.
A woman at her mailbox is staring into Thomas’s car, looking like she’s seeing worse than a ghost. The lady’s looking right at the girl who’s still screaming at the top of her lungs.
Thomas wonders, Did she see me?
The Murder of Thora Chamberlain: A Shocking True Crime Story