Man Uses Obituary to Confess Indiscretions

"Now to that really mean Park Ranger; after all, it was me that rolled those rocks into your geyser and ruined it. I did notice a few years later that you did get Old Faithful working again," man writes

A 59-year-old Utah man who wrote his own obituary before he died last week used the opportunity to come clean.

Friends and family of Val Patterson learned Sunday that the man they thought held a doctorate from the University of Utah received the degree thanks to a paperwork mistake and that he never even graduated.

Patterson died from throat cancer on July 10. KSL-TV reports he wrote his own death notice in the first person last fall.

The light-hearted obituary published in the Salt Lake Tribune also includes a confession to stealing a business' safe. He wrote: "As it turns out, I AM the guy who stole the safe from the Motor View Drive Inn back in June, 1971."

He said his only regret was that he "felt invincible when young and smoked cigarettes."

"Now, to make it worse, I have robbed my beloved Mary Jane of a decade or more of the two of us growing old together and laughing at all the thousands of simple things that we have come to enjoy and fill our lives with such happy words and moments," he wrote.

His widow, Mary Jane, told KSL-TV the confessions are true.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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