John Montgomery Presents This Week's  Creep Logo by Lynn Kauczka

June 16, 2001 Prince Dipendra of Nepal

A few weeks ago, did you know there was a royal family in the country of Nepal? Had you even ever heard of Nepal? If not, consider yourself lucky because ignorance is bliss. In this case, a little knowledge can only lead to soul-searching questions like: What combination of inbreeding, religious mumbo jumbo and planetary misalignment could produce such an arrogant, ignorant and worthless miscegenation as Crown Prince Dipendra?

Here's the short version of the story which sounds like it came straight from Grimm's Fairy Tales: King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya of Nepal were having a big dinner party for their large royal family. Their son and heir to the throne, 29-year-old Prince Dipendra, was getting drunk and disorderly on Johnnie Walker Black. He'd been having a running battle with his parents over his choice of a wife. Dipendra wanted to marry Devyani Rana, a rich (and hot looking) aristocrat from India. The Queen objected, saying the prospective bride's great-grandmother was a mistress, and therefore she could not meet the requirement of seven generations of "pure" lineage. Aren't you glad you don't have to pass that purity test? Besides that, the Queen's astrologers said the couple's horoscopes were not "cosmically synchronized" and warned, Nancy Reagan-style, of a great tragedy if the wedding happened.

Anyway, the King got tired of putting up with his drunken son and threw him out of the dinner, getting a few family members to drag him up to his room. Once there, Dipendra did a few lines of cocaine, dressed into battle fatigues and headed for his gun collection, where he picked up an Uzi, an M16 assault rifle and a pistol. He then went back downstairs and spent the next minute and a half methodically wasting his entire family. In addition to shooting his parents, the King and Queen, Dipendra also killed his sister Princess Shruti, his brother Prince Nirajan, and six other assorted princesses, princes, dukes, earls, ladies-in-waiting, and the barbecued yak delivery guy.

Ironically, at that point, with his father dead, Dipendra automatically became the King. If he'd have stopped right then, he might have gotten away with it. In Nepal, the King is considered to be the incarnation of Vishnu, the benevolent Hindu deity, and no one is allowed to criticize him. He could have donned the crown, married his girlfriend and spent the rest of his life drinking Johnnie Walker, snorting cocaine and diddling his guns every night.

But you know these impetuous, coked-up princes. Dipendra ended his killing spree by putting a bullet through his own brain. He spent the rest of his King's reign in a coma, finally dying two days later.

Think things in Nepal got back to normal after that? Guess again. The next guy to become King was Prince Gyanendra, the brother of the original King Birendra. Gyanendra's first move as monarch was to create a wave of credibility for himself by claiming that the whole incident had been an accident, caused by an automatic weapon firing all by itself. "Yak Crap!" cried the King's subjects as riots broke out in the streets of Nepal. Two people died and 19 were injured in the ensuing battles with police.

But wait - it gets weirder. In Nepal, when times get too tough, they perform the "katto" ceremony in order rid the palace of its bad karma. A vegetarian Brahmin priest, the holiest figure in the Hindu faith, defiles his body by eating meat and then (presumably with both ends of his digestive tract revolting violently) rides an elephant into exile in a remote part of the Himalayan mountains, never to return. They had to perform the katto twice, once for good King Birendra and once for evil Prince Dipendra, because he was, after all, King of the Kingdom for 48 hours. During those festivities, one of the elephants picked up and killed a lady who was trying to walk under it, in the belief that doing so would ensure she would conceive a son.

So the total toll from the crazy prince's spree: ten dead royals, three dead subjects, 19 injured rioters, two exiled priests, one unconceived son, and one pissed off elephant. You don't want to be anywhere near a pissed off elephant.

And you thought the Bush girls were trouble makers.