Thread: Criminals can be highly entertaining...

I can think of two examples. Years ago Yahoo News used to have a regular posting of stupid criminals. The first story that comes to mind is of the bank robber in a small village in Ireland. Even though the bank robber wore a mask, local police were able to capture the bank robber, a local resident, based upon the description of the robber by the tellers. The first part of each teller's description began the same way--"he was about 7'6" tall..."

Okay, the second story is from what has been my home town for the past 18 years. At Christmas-time a local resident in Iowa City reported to the police that an approximately 18' tall evergreen tree was cut down and removed from their yard. Now the Iowa City police are not renowned for their skills beyond accidentally shooting residents, but even they were able to follow the drag marks IN THE SNOW from the tree owners' home to a local fraternity, where the police found about 12' of the tree sitting outside of the fraternity. These nitwits had cut down the tree and dragged it through the snow only to take the top 6' of the tree inside. The funny thing about this criminal act was that the value of the tree put the theft at the level of a felony.

Oops, I thought of another one. When I was a freshman at Harvard, some guys in my dorm decided that the best way to decorate their room was to simply steal stuff from the Freshman dining hall across the street. The first thing they stole was one of those ventilation fans on a 5' tall stand. The diameter of the fan was about 3' in diameter and it only had one speed--wicked fast. They brought it into their room, turned it on, and got to experience their very own tornado in their room. Let me put it this way, they had a lot of cleaning up to do after that fan ran for just a few seconds. Needless to say, the fan went back that same night. Given that these bright boys still considered the dining hall to be a viable source for decorations, and because they did not have a step ladder tall enough to reach the chandeliers made out of antlers all donated by, and shot by, Teddy Roosevelt, they decided to steal one of the paintings hanging on the wall. Fortunately for these nitwits, they did manage to get caught by a security guard before they left the building. If they had managed to leave the building, they would have been responsible for the largest art theft of 1980, given that the value of the painting they wanted for their dorm room was valued at 1.8 million dollars!