6
A Serial Killer Target Used Her Car Keys To Deflect A Gunshot To The Head
You don't get a name like "Night Stalker" without being darn good at murder. Indeed, Richard Ramirez killed at least 13 people in a little over a year in the mid '80s, which is pretty successful, if you're inclined to call such things successes. That's what makes the slip-up which partially led to his conviction all the more bizarre.
One night, when Ramirez was out stalking, he encountered Maria Hernandez and followed her from her car to her apartment. Hernandez turned around when she heard noises behind her, which Ramirez took as his cue to shoot her in the face. But when he fired his gun, the bullet was blocked by the car keys that Hernandez was incredibly luckily still holding. It's not known what kind of metal is used to both make keys and block bullets, but she apparently drove a Wolverine. Despite suffering only a broken finger, Hernandez dropped to the floor and played dead. After delivering a few good kicks to what he believed to be a corpse just for fun, Ramirez stepped over Hernandez and entered her apartment, where her roommate met a decidedly less fortunate fate.
Hernandez got up and managed to get to the front of the building right as Ramirez was leaving, at which point she begged him not to shoot her again. And ... he didn't, for some reason. Probably because he needed a pants change more than he needed murder after seeing what he had every reason to believe was a ghost. This turned out to be a bad move, as Hernandez's testimony later helped secure him a one-way trip to the gas chamber.
The Los Angeles Times
"Hey, I remember you! How've you are do- wait ... shit ..."
5
A Family Survived For 38 Days In The Middle Of The Ocean Using Enemas
One day in 1971, ten-year-old Neil Robertson asked his father why they couldn't just take off on an adventure and go sailing around the world. Instead of explaining the many reasons they shouldn't do that, the senior Robertson immediately sold the family's farm and prepared to take off from the coast of England in a 43-foot schooner, directly into a raging storm. It went about as well as you'd think.