Thirty-seven years after Carroll Shelby's extraordinary little race car made big news everywhere . . . it does it again.
The two cops who came upon the middle-aged woman in the last hours of her life, lying on the bridle path of a park in Fullerton, California, an hour after sunrise, must surely have dreadful memories of her they'd like to forget.
She lay on the path, naked, her clothes burned away, her body charred from her singed platinum hair down to her toes. She was tucked into one last fetal position. Nearby were two gallon jugs, one empty and the other half-filled with gas. It was Sunday, October 22, 2000.
The cops thought she was dead. Then one of them noticed movement of her torso. She was breathing. He leaned down. Who did this terrible thing to you?
He could barely hear what she said: "Just . . . let me . . . die." Lying there, before the ambulance arrived, she made it known in whispers that she had done this to herself. She was angry at still being alive; to a cop's persistent questions, she twice spit out: "Shut up." She would not give her name.
She must have been in unimaginable pain, with burns over 98 percent of her body. Police would later theorize that sometime in the night, this woman, who was five feet four and weighed 168 pounds, had made her way to the park a mile or so from her home in La Habra, poured gasoline over herself, and set it ablaze in a concrete culvert under a bridge along the horse trail, but the terror of the flames had set her in motion and she was found 30 feet away. More bizarrely, she'd done the same thing to two rabbits, presumably pets, both dead nearby. The police never determined if she'd had help from someone.
At the hospital, a nurse shook her head. The burned woman repeated her desire to die. Before night fell, she got her wish.
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/death-deception-and-the-4-million-cobra-feature
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