Loose items

A little housekeeping on a Tuesday afternoon …

- The first in a series of outdoors columns is over at the Fresno Bee sports blog, complete with photos and distracting rants about hot sauce and pregnant women. Read that here. The first in what will hopefully be a long and non-lethal blog series, was a day trip to a trail in Kings Canyon National Park.

- I’m beyond irritated that I didn’t tell you about this sooner, but a television channel called Investigation Discovery had a recent show that I should have been on, and I’m not even kidding. Investigation Discovery is a relatively new network, a subsidiary of the Discovery Channel, and it has a show on Friday evenings called “Call 911.” Last Friday’s episode featured the story of Philip Schuth. I think I can say with relative certainty, that I am the media’s leading expert on Philip Schuth. Heck, I might be humanity’s leading expert on Philip Schuth, because the guy doesn’t have many friends.

To turn a long story into a long paragraph, a few years ago, Schuth lived in a blue-collar part of La Crosse, Wis., called French Island, a few blocks from the Mississippi River. I was the metro columnist in La Crosse at the time. One weekend, Schuth shot his neighbor with a pistol, which led to a long police standoff, which led to the discovery of some pretty weird stuff about Schuth. Like he had some illegal guns, some homemade bombs, and oh, he pretty much hadn’t left his rotting house in five years. Also, there was one more thing. His dead mother was in a block of ice in a downstairs freezer. Without giving too much away, some aspects of the case were not nearly as creepy as they first appeared, and others were significantly more creepy than anyone would have guessed.

Schuth eventually started calling me from county jail. (I’m still not sure whether he intended to call me specifically, or I was just the one who picked up the phone.) And then he kept calling, and kept calling, and kept calling until I had hours of taped interviews with him, 15 police-approved minutes at a time. I wrote a series of stories about Schuth and his life, this one being the main profile piece. You can find it in the handy-dandy “RANDOM WRITING” section of this very web site. Eventually, they let Schuth out of jail to attend his mother’s funeral and I got to ride from the jail to the cemetary in an old minivan with Schuth and Schuth’s friend, and that friend’s common-law wife, the police following us in unmarked cars. It was easily one of the weirdest moments of my life, and there’s this super awkward Polaroid photo of Schuth and I standing next to each other at the cemetary. It’s in storage, but when I dig it out one of these days, I’ll be sure to post it here.

So Friday this “Call 911″ show featured the Schuth story — “Wisconsin Standoff, Part 1,” followed by “Wisconsin Standoff, Part 2” — and I missed it. Actually, I was at state track at the time, and I don’t even think I get that channel*, but still. I forgot to give you the head’s up. So far, there are no repeats of the show scheduled, but if there are, you’ll be the first to know. I’m on a mission to find it online somewhere, but as of yet have had no luck. But how good can it be if they didn’t contact the world’s foremost expert on Philip Schuth? I’m kidding. I’m sure it was great.

*Some fun programming notes: On Comcast, Investigation Discovery is channel 271, available for $76.90 per month on the preferred package that includes National Geographic, the Military Channel, Biography, Encore and the Science Channel. At least that’s what the helpful guy at Comcast said over the phone. On DIRECTV, it’s channel 285, although I don’t know all the package details.

Here’s a little YouTube preview of the Investigation Discovery channel itself, not that it has anything to do with Schuth …

My apologies again for not getting the word out on the show earlier. I’ll see if I can get ahold of someone at the Discovery Channel and beg for a re-run. Maybe my expertise on the subject will have some pull. Yeah, right. By the way, as far as I know, Schuth is still serving an 8-year prison term he got in a plea bargain deal. I’m still claiming that if Schuth had had any money for a decent defense attorney, he’d have never even gone to prison.