Old-timers remember when the airport, then entirely at Radio Road and Airport, was not just a terminal but a cluster of one story, barracks-type buildings. They'd been left there from WWII and afterwards used for most anything they could accommodate. Some folks even lived there. Gradually, they were torn down. During this process, one of my old associates and retired cop Chester Keene was sent there. It went like this, in his own words:
Someone had called in a Signal-7 (dead body) at the airport. I arrived at the location and found an old aircraft being stripped down to be part of the off-shore artificial reef. Sitting about midway back was what appeared to be a corpse. It was sitting up, wearing a trench coat and ball cap. The cap rested atop a rotting head, the meat falling off and flies feasting. The detectives had already been there and the plane was fenced off with yellow crime scene tape to protect the evidence and keep people away. That was fine with me. The smell was horrendous.
We waited for the Medical Examiner, Dr Smith, to arrive so the next steps in the investigation could proceed. On scene, he hastened to the corpse, began picking at the head, then backed off and roared laugher.
"You have something dead here, alright? he said, " a dead chicken."
"What?"
"A dead chicken. Someone has a strange sense of humor."
And he was right. On closer inspection, we found a rotting carcass sitting on top of the propped-up coat, and hidden by the ball cap. We wondered what was going on until we started filling out our report.
First line, Date: April 1st. We'd been had. April Fool's Day.
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