From The NY Times:
In November 2011, Paul Frampton, a theoretical particle physicist, met Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online dating site Mate1.com. She was gorgeous — dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a supposedly natural DDD breast size. In some photos, she looked tauntingly steamy; in others, she offered a warm smile. Soon, Frampton and Milani were chatting online nearly every day. Frampton would return home from campus — he’d been a professor in the physics and astronomy department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 30 years — and his computer would buzz. “Are you there, honey?” They’d chat on Yahoo Messenger for a while, and then he’d go into the other room to take care of something. A half-hour later, there was the familiar buzz. It was always Milani. “What are you doing now?”
Frampton had been very lonely since his divorce three years earlier; now it seemed those days were over. Milani told him she was longing to change her life. She was tired, she said, of being a “glamour model,” of posing in her bikini on the beach while men ogled her. She wanted to settle down, have children. But she worried what he thought of her. “Do you think you could ever be proud of someone like me?” Of course he could, he assured her.
Frampton tried to get Milani to talk on the phone, but she always demurred. When she finally agreed to meet him in person, she asked him to come to La Paz, Bolivia, where she was doing a photo shoot. On Jan. 7, 2012, Frampton set out for Bolivia via Toronto and Santiago, Chile. At 68, he dreamed of finding a wife to bear him children — and what a wife. He pictured introducing her to his colleagues. One thing worried him, though. She had told him that men hit on her all the time. How did that acclaim affect her? Did it go to her head? But he remembered how comforting it felt to be chatting with her, like having a companion in the next room. And he knew she loved him. She’d said so many times.
Frampton didn’t plan on a long trip. He needed to be back to teach. So he left his car at the airport. Soon, he hoped, he’d be returning with Milani on his arm. The first thing that went wrong was that the e-ticket Milani sent Frampton for the Toronto-Santiago leg of his journey turned out to be invalid, leaving him stranded in the Toronto airport for a full day. Frampton finally arrived in La Paz four days after he set out. He hoped to meet Milani the next morning, but by then she had been called away to another photo shoot in Brussels. She promised to send him a ticket to join her there, so Frampton, who had checked into the Eva Palace Hotel, worked on a physics paper while he waited for it to arrive. He and Milani kept in regular contact. A ticket to Buenos Aires eventually came, with the promise that another ticket to Brussels was on the way. All Milani asked was that Frampton do her a favor: bring her a bag that she had left in La Paz.
(via metafilter)
Comments
7 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.That’s a sad story. Too bad he wrote all those joke messages about the stash. that might have been what sunk him.
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Do you think those were innocent jokes, though? I possible, but with that kind of ego, I’m inclined to think not. This is a person who believes the rules only apply to ordinary people, not extra special geniuses like him. He is this top 1 percent elite person that supermodels throw themselves at, after all, so of course he could never be caught smuggling. I feel sorry for him for being duped by the romance, but less so for the drugs.
I’ve known a lot of scientists, and while they’re mostly regular, nice people, there are a few out there that remind me of this guy. The attitude must be helpful in a certain way for doing science, as long as you can keep yourself out of South American prison.
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I did think those “jokes” were a little too spot-on, but the note he wrote with the calculation of the value of 2 kilos of Coke really strains the limits of coincidence. And you have a point about his perception of himself vs. ordinary folk. I guess we’ll never know for sure… unless he writes a book about it when he gets out.
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guilty!
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I used to work in a university library and I noticed some of the professors were space-cases and/or entitled. I mean most professors were “normal” but some of them really made me wonder how they functioned out in the real world. And now, thanks to this article, I know the answer: they don’t.
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Wow, I didn’t know that people like Sheldon Cooper existed in real life!
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I think he is a high functioning autistic, likely with aspergers. FYI, I am the parent of a high functioning autistic child who is on the mild side. It’s hard to describe how their mind works, but often they just don’t “get it” like everyone else does. I think he fundamentally didn’t understand what was happening. He knew he was carrying drugs but his brain wasn’t registering what the implications of what that meant.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying he’s not guilty, he is. But hopefully they took into account his mental status when sentencing him.
Here’s the classic test for autism. It’s given typically to children at around 3 years of age. (The child is shown through a series of pictures the following) A puppet Sally, plays with a ball and puts the ball in her basket, and then leaves. Her puppet friend, Anne, removes Sally’s ball from Sally’s box and puts it in her own box. The child being tested observes all of this. Sally returns. The child is then asked to theorize where Sally will look for the ball. If the child guesses Anne’s box it shows an inability to see the world from anothers point of view and it’s likely the child has autism.
Think about that for a moment. How difficult it would be to get through life being driven by a mind that is completely self centered and incapable of seeing things from they view of others you come in contact with. Parent’s of these children are under loads of stress trying to help navigate their way through life.
So the next time you hear a parent of an autistic child questioning vaccines and other environmental factors, be kind to them. They have it really rough. I luckily have a high functioning kid who has made great strides. I have met many others who are much, much worse and tell myself on those rough days that I am some way lucky. It’s tragic sometimes as I’ve seen other autistic kids who have not grown out of it as much as he has and still have very debilitating issues.
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