Slime Mystery Finally Solved
Wisconsin State Journal :: LOCAL/WISCONSIN :: D1
Sunday, May 4, 2003
George Hesselberg
There were stakeouts lasting into the early morning hours. Experts were consulted. There were postcard mailings to the entire neighborhood. There were visits and inspections of area businesses and dumpsters.
Neighbors talked about it, joined the stakeouts, puzzled and pondered the evidence, but tried not to touch it. Over two months, there was no break.
Jerry Lange, a neighbor, brought it to the attention of police. Police took it to health officials. Bags of a smelly rancid green slime were being dropped off in the West Side neighborhood. Sometimes it would be four or five days between drop-offs.
It looked like, said Lange, “leftover bean soup, vegetable stew, something from the bottom of a crock-pot. If you ate the school lunches when you were growing up, or ate in a military mess hall, think about some of the mushy concoctions that used to get scooped on your food tray.”
And it smelled bad.
Police said area businesses had taken to padlocking their Dumpsters because the same gunk was showing up there.
At first, the prime suspects were restaurants because it looked like liquid food waste, health officials said. Or it was a food-related business trying to avoid the expense of cleaning up the stuff.
After the mystery was detailed in this column three weeks ago, the patrols continued, as did a neighborhood watch. The alderman sent out postcards. Police, for a time, even had a suspect under surveillance.
Last Friday morning a neighbor, George Meyer, watched as a motorist drove along the 1100 block of Woodland Way. The female driver got out, opened the car trunk and removed a plastic bag “of the usual vegetable-like substance,” placing it in the bushes on the terrace. Meyer confronted her, and “she totally broke down,” he said.
“She said `I’m sorry, I’ll never do this again,'” said Meyer, who saw that her car trunk was filled with such bags, and told her he would report her license number to the police.
When police came to her home, according to Lt. Tony Peterson, the woman “readily admitted being responsible” for the dumping. She is a bulimic, which means she has an eating disorder that is usually manifested in binge eating followed by vomiting.
She would eat, vomit into buckets in her garage, then once a week dispose of the liquid.
She was cited for depositing rubbish without permission, which carries a $162 fine.
Peterson said the woman, described as “very thin,” told “the officers involved that she was plugged in with UW Health and (Dane County Mental Health) prior to our contacting her. Officers said that she was a really nice person. It was their impression that she is cognizant of her problem and felt very bad, embarrassed.”
“It’s not something I want to do,” she told police. “I am just ill.”
Peterson also referred the police reports to Dane County Mental Health.
He said at least one area resident, worried about the possible health repercussions from the dumping, had contacted police to angrily demand the woman be fined the maximum for “each incident.”
Meyer, the neighbor who finally stopped her, said he and just about everyone else thought they would catch a different type of criminal, someone illegally dumping commercial waste.
“I’m glad we stopped her,” he said, but added he would feel differently and seek a greater penalty if the offender had been a business or someone avoiding waste costs.
An expert on eating disorders, Dr. Dean Krahn, an associate professor of psychiatry, said there is probably no punishment the city could dole out or a neighbor could demand that would equal the sort of self-punishment the person is already suffering.
He said two to three percent of college women suffer from bulimia and up to 12 percent may have “an eating disorder that we might call close to bulimia.”
Without talking about this case specifically, Krahn provided some background on bulimia, its causes and treatment:
“Vomiting is a way of undoing the binge-eating, primarily,” said Krah
n.
“Some people vomit after quite small food ingestion, but most vomit after binges, large intakes of calories in a short period of time.
“Most people vomit in the bathroom, but some people, trying to keep things secret, dispose of it elsewhere.
“Another thing that happens is that this gets very ritualized. Sometimes people are so driven to not want to do it (binge eating) that they not only undo the binge by vomiting but also undo the reality of vomiting by getting rid of the evidence.
“In chronic, severe bulimic situations, you see people trying to get rid of the vomit to keep their secrets, and almost make such a secret of it that to them, it didn’t happen,” Krahn said.
Bulimia was first described as an illness in the United States in 1980, and for many victims the illness decreases with age. Krahn attributes that partly to less dieting pressure as a person — and the victims are mostly women — ages.
“It is a terrible secret to live with, something that dominates your life. You have to know when you are going to binge, when to purge, and you have to deal with the guilt around it. It puts a clamp on your social life,” he said.
It doesn’t fit the stereotype, but it is not unusual for a person with bulimia to be overweight, he said, because of binge eating still leaves food in the system, even after vomiting.
The illness is treated with cognitive behavior therapy, psychotherapy.
“Talk therapy is very helpful. You look at the thoughts that underlie your feelings and behaviors. People want be perfect, and they think if I can’t weigh 102 pounds, then I am no good.’ Therapy tries to interrupt those thoughts, examine the validity of those thoughts.”
Krahn said such therapy “helps significantly about 60 percent of the people who do it.”
What doesn’t work, he said, is for someone to tell a bulimic to “just eat normally.”
“When you have been starving yourself a lot, for example, you may not know or can’t tell when you are hungry or when you are full.”
The ill person will often be placed on a regular eating schedule. Some medications may be used as “add-ons” to the therapy, but they are not, by themselves, effective. People with the illness “severe enough so they are vomiting” may have other problems, or “co-morbidities,” such as depression.
Krahn said a “wonderful outcome” of this case would be establishing a connection with a therapist.
“I am sure she is punishing herself already much harder than whatever the penalty is for dropping bags of vomit. It is a very self-punishing illness.”
Jerry Lange, the neighbor who stuck with the case from beginning to end, agreed:
“We were all very surprised that one person could generate that volume of waste. Our primary concern now that the individual has been identified, is that she get proper treatment. No one should have to endure this kind of health problem alone.”
Finally, the case was solved at about 4:45 a.m. April 25, but it hasn’t ended, and it left many of those involved a little sad and some angry.
It had been happening weekly, in the dead of night, along Hammersley Road, usually, near Whitney Way and Gilbert Road.
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