Missing Girl Big Fat Hoax

hat police officials are calling a "cruel hoax" perpetuated by a "big fat bitch" from "some Podunk town out in BFE" came to an end last Thursday with the arrest of Donna Lynette Walker, a 35-year-old Kansas woman. Walker had contacted the parents of missing Indiana girl Shannon Sherrill only days before, claiming to be the missing girl and renewing hope for the family after 17 years of grief.

Six-year-old Shannon disappeared in October of 1986 while playing hide-and-seek outside the family home in Indianapolis. Authorities had all but given up hope over the years, as leads failed to materialize and it became less and less likely that Shannon simply took hide-and-seek very seriously. Walker's call last week seemed to the family to be a miracle, but quickly turned out to be the shitty kind of miracle that people usually aren't referring to when they speak of miracles.

With the arrest came disturbing-yet-hilarious details about Walker's past. According to several poor bastards who identified themselves as her friends, Walker has frequently made crank phone calls in disguised cartoon voices ever since childhood, and as an adult her talent for being incredibly and flamboyantly full of shit has led to police records in California, Kansas, Virginia and Nebraska for making bizarre threatening calls, forging checks, reporting false fire alarms, placing bomb threats and using stolen credit cards to pay her telephone bill. Few involved can take even these charges seriously, however, since Walker often disguises her telephone voice in a spot-on stuttering impersonation of Porky Pig.

Friends of Donna Walker are at a loss to explain her motivation in contacting Shannon Sherrill's parents, or how they could possibly be this hard up for friends. All agree, however, that the Sherrills probably should have taken Walker's claims of "What's up Doc? I'm your kidnapped daughter!" with a grain of salt.

"I'm not surprised," said friend Kelli Wauch, who wasn't surprised. "I met Donna through a group where you go for support or if you're happy you go there and Donna is somebody who thrives off of other people's pain so it didn't surprise me that she did these things because she told me about a girl missing in Indiana and it being her parents and saying something along the lines about that and I just kind of blew it off because it didn't make any sense," rambled Wauch, prompting this reporter to slap her across the mouth in hopes of coercing a coherent quote.

That rambling narrative, coupled with the fact that Wauch has had to change her telephone number twice during the month she has known Walker to stop the tirade of threatening phone calls made in cartoon voices, begs the question of why Wauch still identifies herself as Walker's friend. Rather than sift through another verbal train wreck of a response, however, this reporter is satisfied to chalk it up as some kind of weird Kansas thing we're not meant to understand.

In Indiana, Walker faces a felony charge of identity deception and a misdemeanor charge of false reporting, as well as a life-long series of disappointed looks from the entire human race. In addition to contacting the missing girl's parents, she also repeatedly contacted the police regarding this case, posing alternately as two different women, the missing girl's husband, and a diminutive hunter with a speech impediment.

Attorney Billy Rork insisted that Donna Walker did not feel she'd done anything wrong, despite the fact that she is twelve years older than Shannon Sherrill would be today in addition to the minor details that Walker was never kidnapped and is in no way related to the Sherrills. Rork also communicated that Walker didn't feel like going to prison or being held in any way accountable for her actions. Additionally, she didn't feel like Italian or Thai food, though those details seemed less important in the big picture.

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I present to you, the King of throw-away island. Slicing a trench into the past, dogwoods spread their sprays like drifting clouds, the most wasteful member of the tree family. "King Trapper of the North" is how they'd like to be remembered. Hardly. Tubers, seeds, runners, corms, bulbs, rhizomes, roots and spores fan out like chuck wagons clattering in a figure eight. A boy sets out; a man returns, chromosomes aligning. Less secret are the lichens, and the groundhogs are without good cause, like spoiled vultures. Shaded by the cursed dogwood. Among the toughest of living things, A.L. van den Brandeler makes quick with the axe to help me single-hand her.

You will feed during summer's abundance, mate, lay eggs and die. Try again later.

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Hey commune folk. Stu here.

Thanks to a little bird who gave me the word I'm now officially up to speed on the whole situation. The Cubans, the whole acid rain deal, and the clandestine adventures of your friend and mine, Senior Swashbuckle. Some pretty wild shit if I do say so myself, and in case anyone's taking notes: I do. Now that I've got it all under control I feel comfortable sending you this. Yes! A human pancreas! Gross! No, but seriously, that was a joke, and if I really scared you then I think it's time to admit that you have absolutely no idea what a human pancreas really looks like. I think they have informational pamphlets down at the DMV that can help you with that. In actual actuality, I have sent you this column, at least in some loosey-goosey futuristic sense of the word "sent," you beamed it down or whatever from the intergalactic informational alcove where I had seen to it being stored. You know the score.

This is it, folks, the Stu Umbrage Show. What you see is what you get, and that includes more topless birds than the Tropicana and Charlie Sheen's house combined. So if you don't like it you can blame me, and also kiss my black ass while you're at it. On a side note, I was trying to get Diana Ross to be my column sidekick here, but it didn't work out because she had no idea who I was and also I use phrases like "kiss my black ass" far too often.

Sure, the idea of a sidekick for a humor column is a fairly revolutionary one, but I think it's solid. After all, I don't hear any of you laughing. Which may be some kind of technical issue we haven't resolved yet, but in the meantime I could use somebody to sit over here and laugh like I just pulled the tonsils out of the lead guy from Weezer when I type the punchlines. Carson made it work on the Tonight Show, which revealed the show's roots: him and McMahon sitting in Johnny's basement, smashed on Absolut and babbling incoherently about current events and Ed's supernaturally large goiter. But damnit, it worked. They didn't make an afterschool special about it, but it worked.

This has been a crazy year already, and I'm not even talking about those cannibals they found living in the walls at the White House. Those guys got a bad rap, you know what I'm talking about? It reminded me of the last few Public Enemy albums.

Anybody else out there realize that salsa is a food as well as a dance style? I've never been so embarrassed in my life; I always thought you had to be a bum to get kicked out of a Mexican restaurant. This country's going to hell and nobody's stopping for bathroom breaks, be advised.

I've often wondered what our medical profession would be like if cancer gave you really big breasts instead of just rotting out your organs and whatnot. Dollars to dodos says they'd be force-feeding skinny blonde broads asbestos in day spas all over L.A., and the doctors would all turn their attentions to curing whatever the hell is wrong with Pauly Shore. Mark my words, on the off chance something truly freaky happens and that situation actually comes up.

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