America's Dumbest Criminals (8 page)
“There was a guy in town we'd had some problems with,” Hackett recalls. “He was only about eighteen or nineteen years old, but he'd been arrested several times as a juvenile and was generally a troublemaker. And now he was wanted on a warrant for a burglary. So I was surprised when he called me on the phone at the station.”
At the time, Hackett was a lieutenant working the detective division. His desk was in a large, busy room, and the room was so noisy he could hardly hear anything.
Hackett answered the phone and barely heard someone whispering, “Hello? Hello? Is this Lieutenant Hackett?”
The lieutenant put a hand over his other ear and shouted into the phone. “Could you speak up a little bit?”
“This is Joe Miller,” whispered the voice on the other end.
“Joe, why are you being so quiet?” Lieutenant Hackett asked. Then he added, “We have a warrant for your arrest, you know.”
“I know,” Joe answered. “That's why I'm calling you . . . to turn myself in.”
Over the phone, in the background, Hackett could hear a strange boom, boom, boomâlike someone pounding on a door.
“C'mon Joe,” he repeated, “speak up. I can't hear you.”
“I can't talk very loud. I just wanted to turn myself inâ come get me right away.”
It turned out that an angry father and his son had caught Joe messing around with the man's daughter. Now they had Joe cornered in a room. One was at the front door, and one was at the back door. Turning himself in was just Joe's way of asking for police protection.
He figuredâno doubt correctlyâthat almost any amount of jail time would be less painful than five minutes alone with that woman's father.
W
hen police pull over a driver, they're always ready to hear the “big story.” Sergeant Doug Baldwin of the Pensacola (Florida) Police Department remembers a time when a van was swerving and weaving across the center line. When the officer approached the van, now stopped, he noticed that the driver had moved over to the passenger's seat.
The officer shined his flashlight across the front seat to the man who had suddenly become the passenger in a driverless van. The officer asked for the man's driver's license and registration.
“I wasn't driving,” the man claimed and pointed to the backseat. “The guy in the back was.”
The officer shined his flashlight in back and got a good look at the perpetratorâa huge teddy bear.
It didn't take the officer long to assess the situation. One of the van's occupants was stuffed. The other was obviously loaded.
A
n officer in Savannah developed a bold but simple approach to drug busts. This uniformed patrolman would walk up to a known drug house or party and knock on the door. The occupant would answer the door with almost the same greeting every time. In fact, the similarity of the incidents was astounding. Each person reacted in almost the same manner every time the officer tried this very direct approach to crime busting. It went something like this:
Dumb Criminal opens door. “Uh . . . hello, officer. Is the music too loud? Did someone complain?”
“Nah, I just wanted to buy a bag of dope.”
“Huh?”
“Do you have a bag of dope I can buy?”
“Well . . . but you're a cop.”
“So? Can't I buy a bag of dope?”
“But . . . ”
“Hey, I'm cool, okay?”
“Cool. Wait right here.”
A minute later, the dumb (and about-to-be arrested) criminal would be selling the uniformed officer a bag of dope.
The bold officer made so many arrests this way that he was promoted to detective in record time. Almost all of his arrests were pleaded out without a trial because the criminals didn't want to admit in court they had sold drugs to a uniformed cop at their own apartment.
I
t was another routine day on patrol at a shopping mall. Officer Dusty Cutler had just grabbed a quick lunch and returned to her squad car when she saw a blond woman sprint out the mall entrance and into the parking lot.
“She was an attractive woman,” Cutler remembers. “She wore a nice print dress, high heels . . . and she was very tall.”
But why was she running? Seconds later Cutler got an answer when two men ran out the door and pursued the woman across the parking lot.
At first, Cutler thought the two men were harassing the woman. Then they got closer, and she heard them shouting, “Stop her! She robbed us!”
Cutler later learned that the woman had shoplifted women's clothing from a store in the mall and then assaulted one of the managers. The two men chasing her through the busy parking lot were the store's other manager and a salesclerk.
As the suspect ran in front of Cutler's car, she hiked up her dress in order to run faster, exposing a large pair of women's underwear. They were bulkier than normal, and Cutler could see a sleeve from a woman's blouse sticking out through the leg opening.
As the shoplifter sprinted away, the large baggy underwear stuffed with stolen merchandise slipped down over the suspect's thighs. At that point the officer noticed something extra that obviously didn't come from a store. The woman shoplifter, evidently, was not a woman.
By now the officer was having a difficult time calling in the report because she was laughing so hard. And the fleeing shoplifter was rapidly losing ground. With every step, the loaded underwear slipped farther down the suspect's legs. Finally, they fell to the ground and sent their wearer sprawling.
Still trying to make a graceful getaway, the fugitive scrambled back up, kicked off both the offending underwear and the high heels, and ran faster. But by this time Cutler had pulled the patrol car into the suspect's path, and the fleeing criminal slammed across the hood of the car. She/he was arrested and charged with shoplifting.
Cutler still speaks of that shoplifter-in-drag as the strangest criminal she everâliterallyâran into.
The woman had shoplifted women's clothing from a store in the mall and then assaulted one of the managers.
A
New York cop was working traffic one night when a muscular chap in a small car zipped right through a red light. When the officer pulled the vehicle over and made his approach, the driver immediately identified his occupation. The officer was interested, but not particularly impressed, to learn that the guilty motorist was a masseur. The officer was writing out the ticket when the masseur attempted to bribe the officer by offering him a massage.
He got the ticket anywayâperhaps because the whole experience just rubbed the officer the wrong way.
W
hen Charlie Beavers broke into a plasma center one Saturday night in Pensacola, Florida, he didn't get much âprimarily because he didn't get too far.
Now, to a normal, rational mind, breaking into a plasma center might not make much sense. But to Charlie, it seemed like a good idea at the time. So after checking out the building, Charlie removed the top from an air vent on the roof and entered feet first.
Great
, he thought.
I'll just slide down this air vent, steal everything in sight, and make a clean getaway.
His master plan was going flawlessly until the shaft did a nine-foot vertical drop, causing him to lose his grip. Charlie shot down the duct at a high rate of speed. The experience must have seemed like a ride at the fairâ but the ride came to a sudden and painful stop.
Charlie's air shaft ended approximately three feet above a cross beam that separated two offices. And Charlie reached terminal velocity at about the same time he reached the cross beam. With a force hard enough to break through two ceilings (one leg on each side of the beam), he came to a crushing halt.
Charlie's legs were now in separate rooms. His arms were wedged tightly inside the shaft, straight up over his head. He was snugly straddling a cross beam.
Charlie spent a long weekend waiting for help. It arrived two days later, in the form of the police responding to a “breaking and entering” call. But then the police had to wait for the fire department to come and extricate Charlie from his predicament. As the luckless burglar was led hobbling away, Officer Pete Bell noticed that “part of his anatomy had swollen up to grapefruit size. And being from Florida, we know our grapefruits.”
Beavers was arrested and charged with breaking and entering. Most officers on the scene agreed that Charlie had served his sentence long before the police ever arrived.
Oh, did we mention that it rained all weekend, right down the shaft and onto Charlie's face?
M
etropolitan Nashville Police Officer Jeb Johnson gave
America's Dumbest Criminals
this scoop about an alarming crime:
While browsing at a chic clothier, nineteen-year-old Jonathan Parker decided that he needed three leather jackets in the worst way. The price was a little too steep, though, so Jonathan decided that he would take a “five-finger discount.” That is, he was going to steal them.
Jonathan surveyed the premises and spotted every shoplifter's nightmare, a sensor alarm in front of the shop's exit. He knew the merchandise was tagged with magnetic strips, and if he tried to slip out with any tagged merchandise, the sensor would set off a deafening siren.
Undaunted, Jonathan grabbed some jackets that suited his taste and ducked into the nearest dressing room. Thoroughly searching the jackets, our shoplifter found all the magnetic strips and peeled them off. He found them inside sleeves and pockets, under collars and along the waistband. Jonathan was very proud of himself as he flicked the last of the strips onto the floor. He stuffed the jackets under his coat and boldly walked toward the front door.
A second later the loud, piercing scream of the alarm alerted the security guard, who quickly apprehended our thorough young thief. Jonathan was stunned. Hadn't he searched every inch of those jackets?
The security guard searched the stolen jackets, and he couldn't find any magnetic strips either. So why had the alarm gone off?
Then the guard looked a little deeper. He looked right into the soleâthe sole of Jonathan's shoe, that is. And there he discovered four or five of the little magnetic strips, which Jonathan had thrown to the floor and then stepped on. The young man was arrested and charged with shoplifting.
Sticky fingers and sticky shoesâthey'll get you every time.
O
fficer Pete Peterson, now an instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, was working patrol in a much burglarized Illinois neighborhood several years ago. There had been a robbery in the neighborhood and the perpetrator had been arrested, but the police were looking for a possible pickup car. Officer Peterson stopped a vehicle that fit the profile that had been circulated. He asked the driver for his license, and the man quickly complied.
Peterson glanced at the license, did a quiet double-take, then asked the driver to repeat the information on the license. The driver again cooperated. After several minutes of questioning, however, Peterson said, “I don't think you're Mark Peterson.”
“What?” the driver protested. “No, that's me!”
“I don't think so,” Peterson repeated.
“I don't know what you're getting at,” the driver retorted indignantly. “But I can't stand here all day. I've got an appointment.”
For several more minutes he kept insisting the driver's license was his and that Pete was wasting his time.
Finally, Officer Peterson showed him his name badge. “You see, my name's Peterson. I've got a little brother named Mark, and this is his driver's license. My folks live at the address listed here. So I'm pretty sure that you stole this license!”
The driver just sank. “This has been the worst day for me,” he sighed.
The day got even worse when he heard the jail door slam shut. He had three outstanding felony warrants for his arrest.
DUMB CRIMINAL QUIZ NO. 111
How well do you know the dumb criminal mind?
You're in Raritan, New Jersey, and you've just received a ticket. Now, let's play the matching game. Match the offense with the penalty.
| OFFENSE | FINE |
| a) Littering | $500.00 |
| b) D.U.I. | $250.00 |
| c) Cursing in Public | $25.00 |
| d) Public Display of Affection | Not an Offense |
Answers: (a) $25.00 (b) $250.00 (c) $500.00 (d) usually not an offenseâdepending, we suppose, on how affectionate you get!