Mad love

Though it's early, this story may well be one of the strangest of the year.

To summarize it a little bit: A young woman named Linda Hodge meets an older, extremely wealthy man named Bruce McMahan, with whom she starts a relationship. Several years later, though both are married to other people, they fly to London where the following happens:

"We traveled to London for some business, and during that trip Bruce took me to the Westminster Abbey and we exchanged vows," Linda testified in her deposition.

Besides her testimony, there are the cheek-to-cheek photographs documenting this unusual ceremony.

There is little description in court records of how the couple made their ceremony happen in the very public church on June 23, 2004. Photographs inside the sanctuary are prohibited, so only the two of them would know if there was anything more to it than two well-dressed tourists walking up and performing a little ritual during visiting hours.

They took their photos with the garden of the Little Cloister as a backdrop. In one, they share a chaste kiss.

According to several people close to the litigation, a ceremony at Westminster Abbey made sense because McMahan, they say, is an Anglophile who counts among his heroes Adm. Lord Nelson, the British naval hero who died in the Battle of Trafalgar. Also, McMahan is said to believe that his genes are exemplary and saw in Linda the best match for his own superiority.

Four days after the ceremony, Linda wrote in an e-mail: "You asked me afterwards if I felt different. Near, I don't but at a distance, I do. I am glad about this and feel the insecurities slipping away."

In other e-mails, they began to sign off as "H" and "W," references to husband and wife. In one e-mail, dated June 29, 2004, McMahan wrote: "Miss you W. Think nasty things about you all the time." Linda answered a couple of hours later: "Mmm yeah, nasty is so good. You must have read my mind. What else can we say, we're H & W — that's the beauty."

Okay, so they've become polygamists at this point. That's weird. But the weirder thing is that McMahan turns out to be Hodge's long-lost father.

Weirder still? That would be the fact that Hodge and McMahan started their relationship—their very intimate relationship, if you know what I mean—after a paternity test had confirmed that he was her father, a fact which both of them knew. Beforehand. Yeah.

Read the whole thing. If you feel like getting a serious case of the heebie jeebies, that is.

(Via Fark)