“Romanian villagers decry police investigation into vampire slaying.” No, I don’t think it’s a joke.

Toma Petre’s relatives pulled his body from the grave, ripped out his heart, burned it to ashes, mixed it with water and drank it . . . .

Villagers here aren’t up in arms about the undead — they’re pretty common — but they are outraged that the police are involved in a simple vampire slaying. . . .

“What did we do?” pleaded Flora Marinescu, Petre’s sister and the wife of the man accused of re-killing him. “If they’re right, he was already dead. If we’re right, we killed a vampire and saved three lives. . . . . Is that so wrong?”

UPDATE: Marty Lederman (SCOTUSBlog) links this story to a passage in today’s Supreme Court decision in National Archives and Records Administration v. Favish:

Burial rites or their counterparts have been respected in almost all civilizations from time immemorial. See generally 26 Encyclopaedia Britannica 851 (15th ed. 1985) (noting that “[t]he ritual burial of the dead” has been practiced “from the very dawn of human culture and . . . in most parts of the world”); 5 Encyclopedia of Religion 450 (1987) (“[F]uneral rites . . . are the conscious cultural forms of one of our most ancient, universal, and unconscious impulses”). They are a sign of the respect a society shows for the deceased and for the surviving family members. The power of Sophocles’ story in Antigone maintains its hold to this day because of the universal acceptance of the heroine’s right to insist on respect for the body of her brother. See Antigone of Sophocles, 8 Harvard Classics: Nine Greek Dramas 255 (C. Eliot ed. 1909). The outrage at seeing the bodies of American soldiers mutilated and dragged through the streets is but a modern instance of the same understanding of the interests decent people have for those whom they have lost. Family members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own grief, tends to degrade the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person who was once their own.

But which way does that cut — against those who would disturb the dead man’s grave? Or in favor of treating it as “the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person” (well, respect of a sort)?

FURTHER UPDATE: Reader Eric Stone writes:

I think the Supreme Court is saying that it’s acceptable for family members to slay vampires, if they use a personal stake.