Disqualified Submission

Named in honor of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, the Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.

Darwin Beach Death 1998 DISQUALIFIED Submission THIS STORY WAS ORIGINALLY THOUGHT TO BE AN URBAN LEGEND. SUBMISSIONS WITHOUT CONFIRMING URLS FLOODED MY MAILBOX FOR WEEKS. THE TALE IS RATHER IMPROBABLE, AND THE STORY CONTAINS WHAT SEEM TO BE CRUDE REFERENCES TO "PEE WEE CAMP" AND "MS. COX." HOWEVER, I AM NOW CONVINCED THAT THE TALE IS TRUE. SEVERAL REPUTABLE REPORTERS HAVE CONFIRMED THE STORY, AND OVER TIME, NEW SUBMISSIONS SHOWING COURT PROCEEDINGS HAVE APPEARED. WHILE THE STORY IS AMUSING AS AN URBAN LEGEND, IT'S NOT AMUSING ONCE REAL PEOPLE ARE INVOLVED. THEREFORE THIS CONFIRMED "URBAN LEGEND" IS DISQUALIFIED. Woman Drowned while Performing Fellatio. (11 October 1998, Australia) A sexual romp at a popular Darwin beach ended in the death of a 25-year-old woman, who drowned while performing oral sex on a man, the Northern Territory's Supreme Court heard. The woman had sexual intercourse with Christopher Sean Payne, 34, in "a number of positions" in the water off Pee Wee Camp beach, before she voluntarily submerged to perform fellatio on him. Prosecutor Michael Carey told the court that while the woman was performing oral sex, Christopher "became excited and put his hands on her head and kept her down there." The prosecutor said Payne told police that he noticed something was amiss when the woman stopped performing fellatio. He wondered what was going on, so he let her up. "He says that she did not try to get up, she wasn't kicking or splashing, and that he really didn't do anything except let her up as soon as she stopped sucking on his penis," Prosecutor Carey told the court. He said that when Christopher realized the woman was dead, he "freaked out," dressed, and drove away. Christopher, who has been in prison since two days after the drowning on October 11 last year, pleaded guilty to committing a dangerous act on October 11, 1999. His counsel, Suzan Cox, told Justice Sir William Kearney that her client still had "recurring nightmares" about the drowning. "He keeps seeing it while he tries to sleep at night," Ms. Cox reported. She said a psychiatrist found that Christopher had a deep sense of shame about the incident. He had required treatment for nervous outbreaks of boils twelve times in the past year. Ms Cox said that before Payne and the woman went into the sea, they had drunk 11 750-ml bottles of beer, and an autopsy found that the woman had a blood alcohol reading of .287 - almost six times the legal Australian driving limit. "She might have just passed out under the water. That might explain why she didn't struggle," Ms Cox told the court. She said that although Payne had an alcohol problem, he was considered a quiet, shy, good-natured and considerate person by his employers and friends. Ms Cox said the unusual nature of the case meant there was no need for Justice Kearney to consider imposing a harsh penalty on him to deter others. Justice Kearney sentenced Christopher to 4.5 years on Monday. "It's an unusual case that needed careful deliberation," Justice Kearney said. DarwinAwards.com © 1994-2002 Reference: AAP, Darwin, Australia, Weekly World News Could this be true? Chuck Shepherd of News of the Weird tells me he has clippings in his archives. Researcher Nathan Scholz concluded it was true. "I'm a journalist with The Courier-Mail, a daily metropolitan newspaper in Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd group. Our sister paper "Northern Territory News" covers the Northern Territory, the capital of which is Darwin. Newstext archives News Ltd stories, but they do not go back to 1998. So I searched for people mentioned in the story. The prosecutor exists, as does Payne's defence counsel. The Supreme Court justice also exists. A colleague who worked on the story (senior journalist and later Chief of Staff for the NT News) confirmed the report. She is constantly asked whether the case was true, usually with the variation that it happened in a pool. She says the guy who did it was a scum bag, and remembers he had appealed his jail sentence. The victim was an indigenous Australian which is why her name was not mentioned -- in Aboriginal culture the names of the dead are not spoken, usually not even in court proceedings." And a reporter who says he was at court every day and took pride in his accurate reports, also confirmed that this story is not an Urban Legend. Kaz Eaton says, "This story is true. I was living in Darwin at the time the woman died, although I left before Payne's trial in 1998. I was studying law at the University there. There is a place in Darwin known as Pee Wee Camp, just as there is an upmarket suburb called "Fanny Bay" and an outer suburb called "Humpty Doo". It is that kind of place. The case caused controversy as Payne is the son of a then-high-ranking government official (white) and the dead woman was an Aboriginal fringe dweller (black). Contrary to what you have written in your book, Darwin beaches are swimmable in the dry, or cool, season, but not in the wet season when deadly box jellyfish come in close to the shore in the warmer waters. Locals, or natives as you called them, do swim at the beach in the dry season. As for the claim that she drowned without struggling, that is the submission put forward by Payne's lawyer (and yes there was a lawyer in Darwin at the time named Cox) in his defence. That does not mean that she didn't struggle. Jacques Chester says, "I live in Darwin. As far as I know, the beach is not called Pee Wee's, but there is a restaurant on East Point called 'Pee Wee's on the Point'."

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