Posted on 04/29/2004 5:45:08 AM PDT by chance33_98
Police: Okla. Woman Drove To Fla. With Dead Mom In Car
Woman Wanders In Wal-Mart For 13 Hours
POSTED: 11:25 pm EDT April 28, 2004 UPDATED: 7:26 am EDT April 29, 2004
PALM COAST, Fla. -- A woman apparently drove from Oklahoma to Florida -- by way of North Carolina and Texas -- with her mother's decaying body as her passenger, then went shopping at Wal-Mart, authorities said.
Flagler County sheriff's deputies found Melba Doshier's body Tuesday in the car parked at a Wal-Mart in Palm Coast after shoppers reported a bad smell coming from the vehicle.
The St. Johns County medical examiner on Wednesday said she died of natural causes at least five days before she was found.
Doshier's daughter Alicia, who officials said is in her mid-30s, has been questioned and hospitalized for psychiatric observation. She was found in the store Tuesday, 13 hours after security cameras spotted her parking the car and entering the store (pictured, left).
Sheriff James Manfre said he wasn't planning to file charges.
"This is as strange and as bizarre a case as I've seen," Manfre told The Daytona Beach News-Journal.
Capt. David O'Brien said it isn't clear if the woman meant to come to Florida. Manfre said the woman's state of mind is such that detectives can't take her words for the truth.
Detectives say the mother and daughter lived in Covington, Okla., about 75 miles north of Oklahoma City. They were evicted from their home and left Oklahoma a couple of weeks ago in a car registered in the name of Alicia and Melba Doshier, the sheriff's office said.
Receipts in the car indicated the daughter drove through Texas and North Carolina before reaching Florida, O'Brien said. The woman said she talked to the body during the trip, he said.
While the medical examiner reported the body had been decaying for at least five days, O'Brien said it was probably 10 days.
Detectives found the daughter after the body was found in the parking lot.
"She was in the store shopping," O'Brien said.
Her cart was filled with groceries, children's clothes and other merchandise, he said. The sedan was filled with newspapers, a suitcase and trash, partially covering the body.
The daughter can be held up to 72 hours under state law to make sure she's not a danger to herself or others, and longer if doctors think it necessary.
Manfre said the woman would be free whenever she's released because no crime has been committed.
One answer: Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, agitated in the 60's that mental hospitals were set up to house people driven "crazy" by society and they were actually political prisoners.
With smiling faces on them and music boxes inside that play "rolling, rolling, rolling, keep those prices rolling..." which can last up to 10 years on special batteries to keep you rolling in your grave.
At Walmart the clerks aren't that helpful. She was probably doing just that for 18 hours.
Very interesting cover story about Walmart in the April 19 issue of National Review.
Two reasons, I think. The first reason was that sometimes people in mental hospitals in the 1930s-1960 *were* badly abused.
There were many exposes. Frank Wiseman in 1967 made a documentary called Titicut Follies about a notorious hospital in Massachusetts. US News says:
Tucked away in this pastoral region the Indians called Titicut, behind rolled razor wire and thick steel doors, Bridgewater State Hospital is well situated to protect its "criminally insane" inmates from prying eyes. Indeed, when Frederick Wiseman made a documentary about the facility in 1967, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court banned all public screenings (except in limited professional settings) to protect the inmates' right of privacy.
It mattered little that Wiseman had permission from state Attorney General Elliot Richardson and releases from inmates or that 10,000 visitors a year toured the institution. For 24 years, until the court reversed its decision in 1991, Wiseman's work, "Titicut Follies" (named after the patients' talent show), was the only film ever censored in America for reasons other than obscenity or national security.
Other reasons: doctors performed psychosurgery (lobotomy, leucotomy) on people against their will; people were committed indefinitely when there was little wrong with them. "Insanity" was grounds for divorce and it did happen that a husband would have a "nervous" wife committed so that he could divorce and remarry. Reporters occasionally got themselves "committed" (with an escape hatch) so that they could expose the conditions inside mental hospitals.
I also think (my personal opinion) that the huge grounds and historic old buildings of the old mental hospitals were simply too attractive to developers. These hospitals were often set up as "sanitariums" in the 19th century, because it was believed that the mentally ill needed a quiet place away from crowds and the cities. Many were sold by cash-strapped states during the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s. Again, people thought that drugs and outpatient clinics were going to take care of everything.
One word: Lumberjacks.
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