14 DAY TRIAL // When she was about 15 years old, Kathryn Rawlins of Atherstone, Warwickshire, happened to find a bomb dating back to World War I in the playing fields at her school.
She dug it out of the ground and, thinking that it was just an empty shell, decided to keep it. The woman, now 45 years old, says she used the bomb as a vase for about 30 years before it finally dawned on her that maybe the war relic wasn't exactly safe.
And it most definitely wasn't
In an interview, Kathryn Rawlins explained that, while watching TV one day, she came across a documentary on bombs dropped in the UK by Germans during World War I.
The daytime documentary made the woman suspicious of her favorite vase, and so she contacted local authorities. She told them what the bomb she'd been keeping flowers in for decades looked like and also mailed them a photo.
Soon enough, an officer reported at her house and took the bomb away. As it turns out, the device still had explosive in it. Yup, Kathryn Rawlins' vase was actually a deadly weapon.
“The police said the shell had the potential to have killed anybody within about 20 meters [65 feet] of it and could have taken the house down,” the woman said in a statement, as cited by Mirror.
“I have had the shell on the mantelpiece for 3 decades now. I used to stick plastic roses out of the top of it when I was dancing around to Madonna,” she further explained.
All's well that ends well
Once the explosive was removed from the bomb, the shell was returned to Kathryn Rawlins. The 45-year-old woman, married and a mother of two, says she plans to go on using it as a vase.
A careers advisor, she might even take it to work with her and show it to the kids and teens who visit her. After all, she's done it before. Yup, while, without her knowing, the bomb still packed explosive.
