More about dead people

soooo...Bremen has two more dead people! In the last couple of days two bodies were found. On April 1st a body was found near a train station, apparently run over by a train. Police doesn't know yet but probably it was a homeless guy...definitely no murder though. The second case is more interesting/gruesome: a farmer found a pretty decomposed body near a lake...the police thinks the person has been there for about half a year already but only came out in the open recently after all the snow we had this winter melted away. And yes, I'm writing person, because it is so decomposed that they can't even tell the sex yet (Bones would have known in a second, isn't there a good forensic anthropologist in this town?).
Maybe we should tell Gunther van Hagens about it - coincidentally his exhibition "Body Worlds" is in town right now...maybe a decomposed body is just what he needs to spice things up a little! He wouldn't even have to work on it, just put it in a glas case and see what happens - that would actually be a great incentive for people to come back every couple of days :) but to be honest, I don't even like this exhibition, it smells horrendously and watching little dead babys with hydrocephaly or other deformities is NOT funny and nobody seriously needs to see that! Not even me...and as you've probably noticed I'm really into this whole dead people business.
And that's why I've got one more for you: Two weeks ago a dead kid was found buried under a marketplace ´right next to the town hall. Only the skeleton was left therefore it is unknown so far if it's a boy or girl, but it's definitely between 7 and 12 years old. It had a necklace with a little pendant with it and...is about 500 years old. Otherwise I would have come up with this case as my cover story of course :) It was found accidentaly during construction work and is now being examined closer to find out more about peoples lives and especially bodies during the Middle Ages. The marketplace used to be a cementary for the poor back then and therefore it is no surprise that it turned up. I just hope this won't encourage people to go dig the whole place up at night...as they will only find poor people there it doesn't sound like a promising thing to do though, unless they are not looking for jewelry but the bodies itself - don't tell van Hagens about it ;)

I'll be back as soon as a new body turns up ;)

Some thoughts on murder

So...six murders in Bremen since December, five of them women, that sounds like a lot right? After all, I like to see Bremen as a big city but I guess I have to admit that with only about 500.000 inhabitants - it's not. It actually made me think about criminal statistics: is Bremen really that dangerous or does it just sound so? If we keep on murdering like this through the rest of the year we'll land at about 20 murders. That means a total of 4 murders per 100.000 people (apparently that's the figure they like to break it down to to compare crime rates of cities with a different population). So I checked out wikipedia to see what that actually means. Well, New York has 6.3 murders per 100.000 people which makes it only slightly more dangerous than Bremen (is that something to be proud of? I don't know...). Other big American cities murder rates: Los Angeles 10.0, Chicago 18.0, Philadelphia 23.0...are you starting to get scared?
But these are really big cities that possibly attract more scum than tiny Bremen so we should probably compare it to cities with a similar populations, like...Seattle. It has a murder rate of 4.8 which is one of the lowest in America. Just another reason to love this city! But then there's Washington D.C. with 31.4 - what does that tell us? That a political environment can be a dangerous one...?
Another thing I found interesting about the Bremen murders was which murder weapon was used. In the first case a 21 one year old stabbed a former teacher (cause apparently he loved her and she wasn't interested), then a lunatic stabbed two women (he didn't even know) in broad daylight. Next a guy shot his ex-girlfriend. And finally Tuesday night a woman was found dead in her apartment and (not connected) a young guy was found dead at his work place, a car dealer. For both cases there is no information about the weapon to be found but it is said they both had serious injuries...doesn't sound like a gun to me, more likely like they were stabbed...again! Bremer murderers like their knives...well, I guess it's just the fact that not that many people own guns here. Which, in the end, might be the reason why we have a relatively low murder rate. With more guns we might be closer to the 63.6 murders per 100.000 people in New Orleans (by far the highest in America in 2008, the aftermath of hurricane Katrina might add on to the numbers though). But that a city full of guns can still be a nice place to live is shown by the example of Lincoln, Nebraska with only 1.6 murders...but who whants to live there??? Let's just all move to the second place in this list - Honululu (imagine someone asking you "Why did you movehere? - oh you know, mainly because of the low murder rate...and the weather wasn't too bad either."
hm, after writing all this murderous stuff I am really looking forward to the new Bones episode tonight, maybe potential murderers from Bremen should watch it too, to get some ideas about more interesting murder weapons than knives...