The first time I had a high school football beat for a daily newspaper, the dateline for my home games was NEW CARLISLE, Ind. That was the first stadium I found by driving to the middle of nowhere and looking for the lights. The New Prairie football coach was the first coach to call me on a Saturday night to complain about me accurately quoting him in the paper.
New Carlisle is about an hour from Chicago, where on Monday the FBI arrested a New Carlisle woman and her boyfriend as they tried to complete a murder for hire scheme that involved a used swimming pool plus gas money payoff.
This is the lede of the Tribune story I read in print today. So awesome.
An Indiana woman offered an undercover FBI agent posing as a professional hit man her above ground swimming pool and $200 in gas money to kill an ex-boyfriend who wanted custody of one of her children, federal authorities in Chicago charged Tuesday.
The belly laughs don’t stop in this story. First, there’s a guy out there whose life was valued in terms of of a used swimming pool and gas money; conjoined with the concept that the pool was ”…a few years old but its about all I really got worth anything,” to quote accused murder-for-hire honcho Heidi Friedburg in her post on Craigslist.
Second, that Heidi Friedburg had the balls to question the talents of a hit man who was willing to snuff a guy for $200 and a used swimming pool. “…So he’s good?” was one of the quotes according to Trib story. Seriously, that takes stones.
Third, Friedburg and her boyfriend William C. Alexander were pinched as they were unloading the swimming pool. That was the clincher on that parlay. OK, so I got the gas money, but where’s my pool, SUCKA! That’s when the squad busts in with guns blazing and badges high.
To get the local perspective on the big bust, I turned to my old friends at the LaPorte County Herald-Argus. Before I tell you what two of the top five headlines posted on heraldargus.com are — the Heidi Friedburg arrest isn’t one of them – let me just say the H-A doesn’t have FBI sources in Chicago and shouldn’t be expected to break this story.
With that said, the top story is:
“Man injured after falling out of truck”
One of the other five stories from the Tuesday afternoon edition, and my personal fav, was this bombshell:
“Man finds racoon corpse inside bag”
I didn’t have the heart to read the links to the stories, so I can’t confirm whether or not this was the same man both finding a dead racoon and busting his ass falling out his vehicle. It could be a multi-part series on shit to do in LaPorte County. I don’t know.
What I do know is that those headlines are funny. They’re not swimming pool/gas money murder funny, but funny nonetheless.
