"The diaphragm in the fuel pump developed a leak and was flooding the crankcase with raw gasoline."
When I was a teen a mechanically challenged friend bought the book 'How to Keep Your Volkswagon Alive, Written for the Complete Idiot'. It was a very good book, but still required that you could read and follow directions, with no second guessing if you didn't any better. He adjusted the valves, but evidently set them 180 degrees out and bent them all against the pistons. After getting that fixed he replaced a fuel pump, and evidently didn't adjust for stroke, the diaphragm punctured, the crankacse filled with gasoline and destroyed the engine. He quit working on the car, and I assume burned the book in some hideous midnight ceremony.
A former manager said that not long after his son started a job at a gas station, he recieved a call saying that something didn't seem right when he filled a VW bus up with gas, as it only held a few gallons while the owner said that it had always held a lot more. He yelled 'DO NOT START THE ENGINE', as old VW buses had an oil filler cap on the outside, which he had filed. They changed the oil, and didn't even charge for the crankcse flush :^)