Quotes of The Week: 'They Hoped a Serial Killer Would Jump Out at Them'

July 7, 2012 — -- intro: Check out this week's craziest and most buzzworthy quotes from ABCNews.com

quicklist: 1title: "They put 50 people in front of computers and hoped that a serial killer would jump out at them."text: Highway 16 in Canada has become known as the "Highway of Tears" because dozens of women have disappeared along its route. Many of them have been killed, most of them First Nation indigenous peoples. The police have shown little interest in solving the crimes.

Official police statistics list 18 women in all, 17 of whom are First Nation, as much of the indigenous population in Canada is called. Amnesty International assumes, however, that there are considerably more. Not a single case has been solved.

Six years ago, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police formed a special commission to look into the Highway 16 cases. They invested $11 million (Canadian) to investigate the murders, but without success.

"They put 50 people in front of computers and hoped that a serial killer would jump out at them," said private detective Ray Michalko, who was once a member of the Mounties. Data was collected and profiles were created. The only thing that is not being done, Michalko says, is real detective work.

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quicklist: 2title: "If I was Obama, I would be embarrassed to come here."text: The last time Samuel Wurzelbacher, a plumber from Ohio, attended an Obama campaign rally four years ago, he earned the nickname "Joe the Plumber" and became an icon of Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign when he questioned then-candidate Obama about his tax plan.

But as President Obama's bus tour rolled through Wurzelbacher's northern Ohio district this week, Wurzelbacher said he'd steer clear of any Obama events and let his fellow Ohioans answer his questions in the 2012 race.

"As of right now, I don't have any desire to go there," Wurzelbacher, who is now running for Congress on the Republican ticket, told ABC News. "His ideology and mine are completely different, and I have no real reason to listen to him speak."

Wurzelbacher has staked much of his campaign on opposing Obama's policies, which he claims have made life harder for middle-class residents in his district by placing more regulations on the private sector, raising taxes and kicking the can down the road on America's big problems, such as the debt and deficit.

"If I was Obama, I would be embarrassed to come here," Wurzelbacher said.

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quicklist: 3title: "There are no [public school] programs to support [children who are more advanced]."text: After scoring in the 99.9th percentile of standardized tests, discovering a supernova and helping in the discovery of an exoplanet, a 9-year-old boy is working toward his college degree.

At 4 years old, Tanishq Abraham was inducted into the Mensa genius society. He has published articles in the Peninsula Astronomical Society and contributes to Zooniverse, an online program for discovering and categorizing astronomy research. In kindergarten, Tanishq began the Stanford EPGY program for gifted students. He skipped first grade and began fourth- and fifth-grade math classes in the second grade.

Now, Tanishq is homeschooled, but a teacher from the school keeps track of his progress. He also takes courses online and attends science and history classes in addition to giving guest lectures at American River College in Sacramento.

"From my experience, we just think that the public school system is really not capable of handling children like Tanishq," his mother said. "They have programs for all kinds of learning disabilities, but when it comes to children who are more advanced, there are no programs to support them."Click here to read full story.

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quicklist: 4title: "It creeps people out."text: California residents have filed two class action lawsuits against Google and Yahoo claiming that the web giants illegally intercept emails sent from individual non-Gmail and non-Yahoo subscribers to individual Gmail and Yahoo subscribers, without their knowledge, consent or permission. What's more, they say the interception takes place before the email reaches its intended target.

"We began the investigation quite some time ago when a client came to us," said F. Jerome Tapley, a lawyer in Birmingham, Ala., who represents the plaintiffs. "They noticed that the ads within their email browser were strangely correlating to the incoming email they were getting from their friends. It creeps people out."

Yahoo did not respond to requests for comment, but in an email statement a Google spokesperson said, "We're not going to comment on the ongoing litigation. But to be clear, ad targeting in Gmail is fully automated, and no humans read users' emails or Google account information in order to show advertisements."

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quicklist: 5title: "After a few years of rolling pennies, I said this is a doable thing to pay my mortgage off in pennies."text: A Milford, Mass., man saved his pennies to pay off his mortgage -- literally. He carted more than 62,000 pennies to the bank to make his last payment.

"Thirty-five years ago when my wife and I took out our mortgage for our first home I happened to pick up a penny in a parking lot," Thomas Daigle told ABC News. "I said, I'm going to pay our last mortgage in pennies.'"

That's exactly what he did. In all, that's about 427 pounds of pennies at 145 pennies to the pound, though pennies minted after 1982 weigh in at 181 to the pound. Daigle says he didn't weigh them.

The 60-year-old, who would place his change and keys in a bowl each night, would sift through the change and save his pennies. On rainy or snowy nights in central Massachusetts, Daigle would roll three to five packs of pennies and place them in a box in the basement. Along with the pennies in a box downstairs, Daigle would keep a scrap of paper with a running tab of the amount of rolls stored in the boxes downstairs.

"After a few years of rolling pennies, I said this is a doable thing to pay my mortgage off in pennies," Daigle said.

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