The Kazmer Report

Well, Dennis Dixon confirmed my previous blog Sunday night.

-Rick Kazmer

rickk@dailyamerican.com

Should the NFL go to 18 regular season games?

(This column is part of a debate series available in Tuesday’s Daily American.)

Yes
By RICK KAZMER

Watching third-string scrubs blunder through late minutes of pre-season football is a waste of potential meaningful NFL time.
The league should expand the regular season to 18 games and eliminate two of the exhibition debacles that fans now endure four times a year. One, maybe two of the games are necessary to gauge who will be starters and backups. But expecting anyone to demonstrate their true potential on a field of young nobodies is ridiculous.
The errors of the inexperienced in some cases do more harm than good. Pittsburgh quarterback Byron Leftwich was lucky to leave the field standing Sunday in Denver (after Head Coach Mike Tomlin strangely played him with backups) because the scrub line in front of him was obviously unorganized and outplayed. It is sad when a team loses its season because the star player is injured in an exhibition game. And there is no need for the loss.
Coaches can get an adequate idea of a player’s individual talent in training camp. If team staffs want more time to evaluate players, then give them longer training camps.
The NFL season is short. Regular season games are better than pre-season games. It makes sense to enact the proposed scheduling adjustment.
(City Editor Rick Kazmer can be reached at rickk@dailyamerican.com.)

This Steelers fan is not jumping on the Dennis Dixon bandwagon — at least after one preseason performance.

If Coach Mike Tomlin starts Dixon during one of the preseason games and he is successful, then Byron Leftwich may have some competition.

For now Dixon is a run-first, pass if it’s available quarterback. That kind of play won’t hold against good defenses — as it did against the Lions scrubs nearly a week ago. The team knows what it has in Leftwich. He should be able to get the Steelers to a 2-2 record before Big Ben comes back. That is if the defense, offensive line and running game are decent. If they fail, then even Roethlisberger cannot save the season.

Give Dixon the starting nod against one of the preseason opponents. If the coaches can open up the passing playbook with him at the helm, then maybe he can lead the Steelers to a perfect record after four games.

-Rick Kazmer

rickk@dailyamerican.com

Here is a good example of how even small town government can be corrupted.

Bell, Calif., which has a population of around 40,000 is paying its elected officials salaries totaling about $1.6 million a year. The city manager makes $800,000 a year. It is ridiculous. Somerset County’s population is around 80,000 (approx.) and officials here don’t earn anywhere near that.

Voting practices and other factors have led to this taxpayer’s nightmare in the west. But there are likely lots of other examples of bloated government in the country. Hopefully the citizens of Bell can right their ship.

-Rick Kazmer

rickk@dailyamerican.com

DA probes voter fraud allegations in Calif. city

BELL, Calif. (AP) — Investigations involving the high pay of leaders in this blue-collar city intensified Tuesday as prosecutors said they were looking into allegations of voter fraud and the state’s chief fiscal officer announced he would conduct an audit of spending.
District attorney spokeswoman Jane Robison said her office was looking into claims that off-duty Bell police officers were recruited to distribute absentee ballots in last year’s election and tell people which candidates to vote for.
It was only one of several allegations the district attorney is looking into in the city where three top officials resigned last week after it was disclosed they were being paid salaries totaling about $1.6 million a year.
“We do have a full investigation on several fronts,” Robison said. She declined to elaborate.
Also Tuesday, state Controller John Chiang arrived in the city of some 40,000 residents, about 17 percent of whom live in poverty, to announce his office is launching an audit of city spending.
If he finds any appearance of wrongdoing, Chiang said, it will be reported to the district attorney and the state attorney general’s office.
On Monday, state Attorney General Jerry Brown announced his own investigation, saying he had subpoenaed hundreds of city records.
Chiang said his audit would include a top-to-bottom review of all state and federal funds received by the city. His staff will also conduct a “quality control review” to ensure that private firms hired by the city to audit its books did a proper job and to determine if the city has adequate internal controls to make sure city spending policies are not abused.
“The residents of Bell and the residents of the state of California who are watching what happens here need our help to restore their confidence,” Chiang told a news conference. “That starts with transparent accounting.”
Interim City Manager Pedro Carillo said the audit would be made public.
Carillo took over last week for ousted City Manager Robert Rizzo, who was forced to resign after it was learned that he was being paid nearly $800,000 a year. Two other paid high-paid officials, the police chief and the assistant city manager, also resigned. Four City Council members who were each making about $100,000 a year voted Monday to cut their pay by 90 percent.
Mayor Oscar Hernandez and Councilman George Mirabal added they would not seek re-election, and Hernandez said he would work for nothing until his term expires.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that a retired Bell police sergeant had filed a lawsuit claiming off-duty city police officers were recruited to distribute absentee ballots in last year’s election and tell people which candidates to vote for.
One Bell resident, Hugo Herrera, told The Associated Press his mother was among those approached by an officer who asked if she would sign a paper showing her support for Hernandez.
When she got to her polling place and attempted to vote, Herrera said, she was told the paper she had signed was actually an absentee ballot. She asked that the ballot be disallowed and that she be allowed to vote for another candidate, adding she never really supported Hernandez but just wanted the officer to go away.
“So they let her vote again,” Herrera said. “Who knows if they really counted it.”
He said he and his mother reported the incident to the district attorney’s office.
Carillo declined to discuss the matter.
“I haven’t had the opportunity to review that,” he said.
He also declined to say how much he’s being paid to replace Rizzo, adding his contract is still being negotiated. He did say it would be substantially less than the $787,636 a year his predecessor was making.
Police Chief Randy Adams, who also resigned, was making $457,000 a year. Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia was receiving $376,288 a year.
The salaries have begun to have a fallout effect on other cities around the state.
On Monday, the Pasadena City Council voted to suspend members’ annual cost-of-living pay raises, with one councilman saying the news from Bell reflected badly on city officials all over the United States.
The City Council in Indio cut the salaries of its city manager, police chief and other top officials by 10 percent, saying in these hard economic times it could no longer afford to pay them as much.

Maybe officials will get Tommy Lee Jones to track these bovines down federal marshal style. I am hoping at least one of the cows makes it free, or else all of the fuss would largely have been for nothing. As it stands, it appears the cows will be put down immediately after being captured.

— Rick Kazmer

rickk@dailyamerican.com

Cows escape after slaughterhouse truck overturns

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — Police say 12 cows being driven to the slaughterhouse made a break for freedom when the truck that was transporting them overturned in west Michigan.
Police say the bovine escapees hoofed it over highway guardrails, forced traffic detours and caused at least one accident.
The 42-year-old truck driver suffered minor injuries in the accident in Kent County about 4 a.m. Wednesday.
All but five of the fugitive cattle had been rounded up by Thursday morning.
The animals from a farm in Farwell, Mich., had been destined to end their days at a slaughterhouse in Milwaukee, Wis.
Michigan State Police Trooper Joe Young said when all the animals are captured they will be euthanized.

This mistake cost someone a significant amount of cash. Police should have watched the box to see if anyone came to grab the pot.

-Rick Kazmer

rickk@dailyamerican.com

Mich. woman surprised to find marijuana in mail
Eds: APNewsNow.
BLACKMAN TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — Bills, catalogs, junk mail — marijuana?
Indeed, police say a surprise 2-pound package of marijuana arrived in the mail last week at one elderly woman’s home in southern Michigan’s Blackman Township, which is about 75 miles west of Detroit.
The woman called police. Detectives don’t know who sent the weed. They learned that the Arizona return address on the package was bogus.
Police say the pot is worth about $2,400.
Deputy Director Jon Johnston told The Jackson Citizen Patriot that the marijuana either was sent to the woman’s home by mistake or someone planned to snatch it from the mailbox before she checked.
The pot will be destroyed.

The below stories were minor wire moves Friday night but caught my eye.

The first — concerning Pitt tuition rate hikes — drew my interest because I am a Pitt grad. The tuition rate increase is ridiculous. The Associated Press reports Pitt is one of four quasi-state universities in Pennsylvania. College officials should have enough money to run academic affairs privately — no taxpayer money. I, as a student, would rather have paid less tuition and have slightly older buildings than sky-high rates and continuous construction of new structures. Especially when buildings at UPJ include a John Murtha center that costs around $10 million (taxpayer money). Spend more wisely.

The second story below is just very odd and creepy.

-Rick Kazmer

rickk@dailyamerican.com

Trustees OK 5.5 percent hike in U of Pitt tuition
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PITTSBURGH (AP) — Tuition is going up more than 5 percent at the University of Pittsburgh.
School trustees on Friday approved a 5.5 percent hike for in-state undergraduates, an increase of about $734 per year.
That means in-state students on the main campus will pay about $14,078 annually, though some majors cost more. The price does not include room, board and fees.
Out-of-state students will see their tuition bills rise 3 percent, to about $23,733 a year. That’s about $692 more than last year.
Officials approved a 2.5 percent increase for the Bradford, Greensburg, Johnstown and Titusville campuses.
Pitt is one of four quasi-state universities. The new price schedule covers approximately 34,000 students.

Human skull stolen from crypt at Pa. cemetery
Eds: APNewsNow.
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. (AP) — Police in northeastern Pennsylvania want to know who broke into a mausoleum, smashed open a crypt and stole a human skull from a decades-old casket.
Workers at Hollenback Cemetery in Wilkes-Barre discovered the vandalism and theft on Friday morning.
Cemetery employees say someone cut the lock to the mausoleum, which was built in 1904. The skull was taken from a casket interred in the 1920s.
Police Lt. Paul Middleton says there are no leads and the investigation is ongoing.

I wonder how many times the owner has forgotten to feed poor Max?

The crazy part is the dog’s persistence. The owner looked out at the car several times before realizing he was in there broiling. Let’s leave the dogs at home.

-Rick Kazmer

rickk@dailyamerican.com

Pa. dog trapped in hot car honks to alert owner

MACUNGIE, Pa. (AP) — A veterinarian says a dog trapped in a car on a 90-degree day in eastern Pennsylvania honked the horn until he was rescued.
Nancy Soares says the chocolate Labrador was brought to her Macungie (muh-KUHN’-gee) Animal Hospital last month after he had been in the car for about an hour.
She says Max’s owner had gone shopping and was unloading packages when she returned but forgot that Max was still in the car. She later heard the horn honking and looked outside several times but saw nothing amiss. Finally, she went outside and saw Max sitting in the driver’s seat, honking the horn.
Soares says the owner immediately gave Max cold water to drink and wet him down with towels before rushing him to the clinic.
Soares says Max was very warm and panting heavily but had suffered no serious injuries, only heat exhaustion.

If I owned the Cleveland Cavaliers I would have told LeBron to hit the road a long time ago. One athlete should never take an entire franchise hostage like “King” James has done to Cleveland.

Sure, LeBron has helped turn around the team, but he doesn’t deserve NBA god-like status. Now Miami has the superstar, but for how long? James has proven he has no loyalty. He will follow money. Florida is a nice state for the multimillionaire because it has less taxes than other states. LeBron says he wants to win a championship but money and image are his true ambitions. It’s the kind of attention that usually produces negative results. It will be interesting to see what happens to King Jame’s dynasty in Miami.

-Rick Kazmer

rickk@dailyamerican.com

LeBron James picks Miami Heat

By TOM WITHERS
AP Sports Writer
LeBron James walked away from the comforts of home to chase an NBA championship.
Perhaps the most hysterically-hyped free agent in sports history, James announced Thursday night on national TV that he plans to leave Cleveland to join the Miami Heat for a chance to play with Olympic teammates Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.
It’s a power trio that could rock the league for years to come.
“I can’t say it was always in my plans, because I never thought it was possible,” said James, who wrestled with his decision for weeks. “But the things that the Miami Heat franchise have done, to free up cap space and be able to put themselves in a position this summer to have all three of us, it was hard to turn down.
“Those are two great players, two of the greatest players that we have in this game today.”
Add in James, and Miami has a three-headed monster.
Ending weeks of round-the-clock speculation, the two-time MVP said he was uncertain until the eleventh hour before deciding that the only way he could fulfill his dreams of winning multiple championships was to leave his home state and a city that hasn’t sprayed championship champagne in 46 years.
See ya, Cleveland.
Sorry, New York, Chicago, New Jersey, Los Angeles and all you other NBA cities who came calling.
Hello, South Beach.
“It’s going to give me the best opportunity to win,” James said. “We’re going to be a real good team.”
That’s not what Cleveland wanted to hear.
Fans poured out of the same downtown bars and restaurants that have thrived with James around in frustration moments after the announcement. A few set fire to his No. 23 jersey while others threw rocks at the 10-story-tall billboard featuring James with his head tossed back and arms pointing skyward.
“We Are All Witnesses,” the mural says.
This was something Cleveland never thought it would see.
Cavs owner Dan Gilbert sent a blistering email decrying James’ actions.
“As you now know, our former hero, who grew up in the very region that he deserted this evening, is no longer a Cleveland Cavalier,” Gilbert wrote. “This was announced with a several day, narcissistic, self-promotional build-up culminating with a national TV special of his ’decision’ unlike anything ever ’witnessed’ in the history of sports and probably the history of entertainment. Clearly, this is bitterly disappointing to all of us.
“The self-declared former ’King’ will be taking the ’curse’ with him down south. And until he does ’right’ by Cleveland and Ohio, James (and the town where he plays) will unfortunately own this dreaded spell and bad karma.
“Just watch.”
Olympic teammates four years ago in Beijing, James, Bosh and Wade all helped deliver gold medals while playing for the U.S.
This time, the superstars will pursue another gold prize — an NBA trophy — the one Wade got in 2006, the one that James and Bosh have yet to touch.
“Winning is a huge thing for me,” said James, who left more than $30 million on the table by not signing with Cleveland.
It’s a huge victory for the Heat, which got Wade and Bosh, a five-time All-Star with the Toronto Raptors, to agree to take less money on Wednesday so James could join them. Heat president Pat Riley was able to corral the top three stars in an unprecedented free-agent class.
So while Miami is building a dynasty, Cleveland is devastated.
In a city scorned for generations by some of sports’ biggest letdowns, James’ long-awaited words that he is leaving represented a defeat perhaps unlike any other.
“The Decision,” the name of the prime-time, hour-long special James and his team of advisers brokered with ESPN, now joins “The Drive,” “The Shot,” “The Fumble,” and “The Move” in Cleveland’s sports hall of shame.
Cleveland fans, so accustomed to disappointment, have been let down again — this time, by one of their owns sons.
Not long after James’ decision was announced, one of his jerseys was shown being burned in the city’s streets.
“I can’t get involved in that,” James said. “I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James … At the end of the day, I feel awful. I feel even worse that I wasn’t able to bring an NBA championship to that city. I never wanted to leave Cleveland. My heart will always be around that area. But I also felt like this is the greatest challenge for me, is to move on.”
James’ decision ends nearly two years of posturing and positioning by teams hoping to add the 6-foot-8, 260-pound physical force of nature to their roster. He famously announced at New York’s Madison Square Garden in November of 2008 that “July 1, 2010, is going to be a big day.”
He wasn’t kidding. When the clock struck 12:01 a.m. last Thursday, a free-agent frenzy unlike any before it — in any professional sport — got under way with the enough speculation, rumor and second-by-second intrigue to last a lifetime.
March may be madness, but this was a year’s drama crammed into eight days.
James, Wade and Bosh were wined and dined by suitors who spared no expense to make them feel special. It was billionaires chasing millionaires, and depending on your view, it was either a shining moment for the NBA or a travesty.
Commissioner David Stern probably didn’t mind any of it. The league stayed front and center in newspapers, on the Internet and in the blogosphere, leaving the World Cup, Wimbledon, Major League Baseball and other goings on fighting for scraps.
Last week, the Heat, Cavaliers, New Jersey Nets, New York Knicks, Los Angeles Clippers and Chicago Bulls converged on Cleveland to make their sales pitch to the league’s most wanted man. The Cavs only had to drive across town to meet with in the business offices of the local superstar, who grew up in a single-parent home in the Akron projects and has known no other pro basketball home.
The Cavs appealed to James’ loyalty, his Buckeye roots and the fact that this is where he is raising his two young sons, to keep him. They hired Byron Scott as their new coach last week.
None of it worked.
“We believe in this team, this organization, this community, and what we will do to compete at the highest level,” Cavs general manager Chris Grant said in a statement that did not mention James. “We believe in the new coach and leader we have in Byron Scott, and the world class basketball organization and positive and strong culture we’ve established.”
New York devoted two years to trying to snare James.
“We are disappointed that LeBron James did not pick the New York Knicks, but we respect his decision,” Knicks president Donnie Walsh said.
New Jersey couldn’t land him despite having rapper Jay-Z, a good friend of James, as a part owner.
“We have a vision of a championship team and need to invest wisely and for the long term,” Nets billionaire owner Mikhail Prokhorov said. “Fortunately, we have more than one plan to reach success, and, as I have found in all areas of my business, that is key to achieving it.”
And Bulls general manager Gar Forman said he was convinced his organization “made the strongest of bids to acquire LeBron James during this free agency period.”
Wade has shared the spotlight in the Heat locker room before, doing so when O’Neal was there for the 2006 title run. James said that if not for Wade being willing to make this megadeal happen, the trio wouldn’t be together.
“D-Wade, he’s the unselfish guy here,” James said. “To be able to have Chris Bosh and LeBron James, to welcome us to his team, it’s not about an individual here.
“It’s about a team.”

Nothing is more annoying than the banter on radio, TV and in the public about the hot weather. It’s summer—it’s what everyone was waiting for in the winter—when those same opinion avenues complained about the cold temperatures. Bring on the 90s, or 100s as below article indicates. Enjoy the heat.

-R. Kazmer

rickk@dailyamerican.com

East Coast seeks respite as temps soar above 100

By DAVID B. CARUSO and JIM FITZGERALD
Associated Press Writers
NEW YORK (AP) — The East Coast roasted under an unrelenting sun Tuesday as record-setting temperatures soared past 100 from Virginia to Massachusetts, utility companies cranked up power to the limit to cool the sweating masses and railroad tracks were so hot commuter trains had to slow down.
“It’s brutal,” said construction worker Pat McHugh, 49, his face shiny with sweat, as he took a break in New York City. “Worst heat on the job in 10 years.
The temperature broke records for the day in New York, where it hit 103, and in Philadelphia, where it reached 102.
It was also over 100 in cities from Richmond, Va., to Boston, and Providence, R.I., and Hartford, Conn., also set records.
“It’s safe to say this is one of the hottest days in about a decade for many locations in the Northeast and even inland,” said Sean Potter of the National Weather Service. “You’d go back to 2001 or maybe 1999 to find a similar heat wave.”
With people cranking up the air conditioning, energy officials said there was tremendous demand for electricity, but the grid didn’t buckle.
Few power problems were reported and the operators of the regional electrical systems that serve the Mid-Atlantic, New England and New York said they had ample capacity. Usage appeared to be falling just short of records set throughout the Northeast during a major heat wave in 2006.
Still, it was oppressive.
On the baking streets of the Bronx, 14-year-old Miguel Pena and 13-year-old Vincent Quiles walked their bicycles up a steep hill, white handkerchiefs around their heads to keep the sweat from their eyes.
“Man, this stinks,” Miguel said. “We just got out of school and this is supposed to be when we have fun, but this is too much. We thought it would be cooler on the bike, but now we’re going home. It’s just too hot.”
“You can’t breathe out here,” Vincent added.
In downtown Philadelphia, pedestrians and drivers appeared to move a little more slowly in the heat, which combined high humidity with clear sunny skies that made sidewalks hot and asphalt sticky.
“Hydrate,” President Barack Obama reminded a group of reporters as they left the Oval Office at the White House.
Meteorologists in some places began calling the hot stretch a heat wave, a phenomenon defined in the Northeast as three consecutive days of temperatures of 90 or above. New Jersey’s largest city, Newark, handily beat that threshold, hitting 100 for the third day in a row. Temperatures in the Mid-Atlantic region are expected to be in the high 90s to 100 again on Wednesday.
It was so hot that even machines had to slow down. Transportation officials cut the speed of commuter trains in suburban Washington when the tracks got too hot. Extreme heat can cause welded rails to bend under pressure.
Workers at the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine, N.J., used tubs of ice cubes to help four sick or weakened seals keep cool.
It wasn’t much easier on animal lovers. In Massachusetts, Katie Wright was determined to follow through on her promise to take her children to a zoo.
“It’s pretty ridiculous,” Wright said as her 3-year-old son Jackson and 2-year-old daughter Emery watched owls and hawks at the Massachusetts Audubon’s Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary in Lincoln. “But we wanted to get out, so we brought hats, sunscreen, extra water and then promised the kids lunch at an air-conditioned restaurant.”
At his Manhattan newsstand, a steel kiosk that soaks up sun like a sponge, vendor Sam Doctor said the only way to keep cool was to splash his head with water, but he acknowledged that his system wouldn’t last. Both of his soda-cooling refrigerators had already conked out by midmorning.
“When it’s 100 degrees out there, it’s 110 in here,” he said, still smiling as he served customers.
In Philadelphia, where the temperature was in the 80s before 7 a.m., 45-year-old Davey Adams waited in a subway station that was stagnant even before the morning commute began in earnest. He had spent the weekend in air-conditioned bliss at his son’s house in New Jersey but had to return to his job Tuesday as a forklift driver in a warehouse.
He said he planned to use “cold water and a washcloth” draped over his head to keep cool.
In New York, 13 firefighters were treated at a hospital after suffering dehydration and exhaustion while battling a blaze in Queens. The 42-year-old lieutenant governor of Massachusetts spent Monday night in a hospital after marching in five parades in 90-degree heat.
Deaths blamed on the heat included a 92-year-old Philadelphia woman whose body was found Monday and a homeless woman found lying next to a car Sunday in suburban Detroit.
Even Queen Elizabeth II, a familiar visitor to exotic and steamy places, was subject to the grueling heat on her first visit to New York City in more than three decades.
Dressed in a summery floral dress and hat, the 84-year-old monarch paid tribute to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, placing a wreath of flowers and chatting with victims’ relatives.
“She’s beautiful. She looks like she could be anybody’s grandmother,” said Debby Palmer, who lost her husband, Battalion 7 Chief Orio Palmer. “And she looks like royalty, because we’re all sweating and she was quite the lady — no sweat whatsoever! Her lipstick was just so.”
There was no end in sight.
The hot air is “sitting over the top of us, and it’s not really going to budge much for the next day or two,” said Brian Korty, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Camp Springs, Md. After that, he said, a system coming in off the Atlantic Ocean would bring in cooler weather.
A certain segment of the public might look at the thermometer and blame global warming, but the two things aren’t necessarily related, said Gavin Schmidt, at the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University.
“One winter, one heat wave, one snowstorm is not significant. You need statistics over a decade,” he said, noting that day-to-day weather and global temperature are two different things.
That said, he added, “the planet is getting warmer. 2000-2009 was the warmest since the 1850s. And the last 12 months seem to be the warmest.”
So get used to it.
———
Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Eva Dou, Verena Dobnik and Colleen Long in New York; Jeff McMillan and JoAnn Loviglio in Philadelphia; Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, N.J.; Mark Pratt in Lincoln, Mass.; and Lauren Sausser in Washington.

We are not able to fit all of the stories of the day into the Daily American. This was one I found to be odd, sad and strange — all at the same time.

Widow lives with corpses of husband, twin

By MICHAEL RUBINKAM
Associated Press Writer
WYALUSING, Pa. (AP) — The 91-year-old widow lived by herself in a tumbledown house on a desolate country road. But she wasn’t alone, not really, not as long as she could visit her husband and twin sister.
No matter they were already dead. Jean Stevens simply had their embalmed corpses dug up and stored them at her house — in the case of her late husband, for more than a decade — tending to the remains as best she could until police were finally tipped off last month.
Much to her dismay.
“Death is very hard for me to take,” Stevens told an interviewer.
As state police finish their investigation into a singularly macabre case — no charges have been filed — Stevens wishes she could be reunited with James Stevens, her husband of nearly 60 years who died in 1999, and June Stevens, the twin who died last October. But their bodies are with the Bradford County coroner now, off-limits to the woman who loved them best.
From time to time, stories of exhumed bodies are reported, but rarely do those involved offer an explanation. Jean Stevens, seeming more grandmother than ghoul, holds little back as she describes what happened outside this small town in northern Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains.
She knows what people must think of her. But she had her reasons, and they are complicated, a bit sad, and in their own peculiar way, sweet.
Dressed smartly in a light blue shirt and khaki skirt, silver hoops in her ears, her white hair swept back and her brown eyes clear and sharp, she offers a visitor a slice of pie, then casts a knowing look when it’s declined. “You’re afraid I’ll poison you,” she says.
On a highboy in the corner of the dining room rests a handsome, black-and-white portrait of Jean, then a stunner in her early 20s, and James, clad in his Army uniform. It was taken after their 1942 marriage but before his service in World War II, in which he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, James worked at a General Electric Corp. plant in Liverpool, N.Y., then as an auto mechanic. He succumbed to Parkinson’s disease on May 21, 1999.
Next to that photo there is a smaller color snapshot of Jean and June, taken when they were in their late 80s.
In many ways, Jean shared a closer bond with her twin than her husband.
Though June lived more than 200 miles away in West Hartford, Conn., they talked by phone several times a week, and June wrote often. The twins — who, as it happened, married brothers — were honored guests at the 70th reunion of the Camptown High School Class of 1937.
Then, last year, June was diagnosed with cancer. She was in a lot of pain when Jean came to visit. The sisters shared a bed, and Jean rubbed her back. “I’m real glad you’re here,” June said.
On Oct. 3, June died. She was buried in her sister’s backyard — but not for long.
“I think when you put them in the (ground), that’s goodbye, goodbye,” Stevens said. “In this way I could touch her and look at her and talk to her.”
She kept her sister, who was dressed in her “best housecoat,” on an old couch in a spare room off the bedroom. Jean sprayed her with expensive perfume that was June’s favorite.
“I’d go in, and I’d talk, and I’d forget,” Stevens said. “I put glasses on her. When I put the glasses on, it made all the difference in the world. I would fix her up. I’d fix her face up all the time.”
She offered a similar rationale for keeping her husband on a couch in the detached garage. James, who had been laid to rest in a nearby cemetery, wore a dark suit, white shirt and blue knitted tie.
“I could see him, I could look at him, I could touch him. Now, some people have a terrible feeling, they say, ’Why do you want to look at a dead person? Oh my gracious,”’ she said.
“Well, I felt differently about death.”
Part of her worries that after death, there’s … nothing. “Is that the grand finale?” But then she gets up at night and gazes at the stars in the sky and the deer in the fields, and she thinks, “There must be somebody who created this. It didn’t come up like mushrooms.”
So she is ambivalent about God and the afterlife. “I don’t always go to church, but I want to believe,” Stevens said.
Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a psychiatry professor at UCLA who researches how the elderly view death and dying, said people who aren’t particularly spiritual or religious often have a difficult time with death because they fear that death is truly the end.
For them, “death doesn’t exist,” she said. “They deny death.”
Stevens, she said, “came up with a very extreme expression of it. She got her bodies back, and she felt fulfilled by having them at home. She’s beating death by bringing them back.”
There was another reason that Stevens wanted them above ground.
She is severely claustrophobic and so was her sister; she was horrified that the bodies of her loved ones would spend eternity in a casket in the ground. “That’s suffocation to me, even though you aren’t breathing,” she said.
So she said she had them dug up, both within days of burial.
She managed to escape detection for a long time. The neighbors who mowed her lawn and took her grocery shopping either didn’t know or didn’t tell. Otherwise forthcoming, Stevens is vague when asked about who exhumed the bodies and who knew of her odd living arrangement. She blames a relative of her late husband’s for calling the authorities about the corpses.
“I think that is dirty, rotten,” she said.
State police — who haven’t yet released the identities of those who retrieved the bodies — will soon present their findings to the Bradford County district attorney. A decision on charges is expected in a few weeks.
Stevens has talked extensively with both the police and Bradford County Coroner Tom Carman, who calls it a “very, very bizarre case.”
But the coroner has nothing but kind things to say about the woman at the center of it.
“I got quite an education, to say the least. She’s 100 percent cooperative — and a pleasure to talk to,” Carman said. “But as far as her psyche, I’ll leave that to the experts.”