The Snake Story

I noted this morning in the news.....cops in Austin are saying they have a problem of an unusual nature.  Some kid died, and from the evidence at hand.....they say he had a pet cobra snake.  The snake bit him and he died within minutes.  The snake? Well.....he wandered off.  So far.....no one has found him.  There's an intensive search to be mounted by local authorities on Friday.

From time to time.....you will note news items like this where people build up some collection of dangerous snakes because of a fascination.  Occasionally, they get bit, and some live....some die.  It's a fairly dangerous hobby.

Back around 1984, I was briefly in Colorado and we had this episode to occur with a couple.

Authorities found them dead on some hilltop....mutual suicide deal.  They both had various issues and it didn't take much work to establish facts over the case.  The one odd thing were all these empty canvas bags in the back of the car.  So they went back to the house of the couple and noted these empty glass cages.

Cops asked questions of the neighbors.  The neighbors noted around twenty-odd poisonous snakes in the private collection that the couple held.  All were gone.

What the head cop ended up summarizing for the reporter....was this theory that the couple had released all of these poisonous snakes there on the hilltop....in the midst of the Rockies....into the wild.  This included a couple of cobras.  The snake expert included a comment or two into the story that winters are severe and he didn't have a lot of faith that these particular snakes would survive.  Course, he suggested this......he couldn't be sure.

It's been thirty years since that summer and one has to wonder.....if he was right, or if there's a whole hilltop infested with cobras in Colorado.  One of those things that you'd rather not ask about.