America's Dumbest Criminals

by Daniel Butler

  Retired officer David Hunter of the Knox County Sheriff’s Department remarks that this criminal “had a plan, but his plan just wasn’t too deep. He had forgotten to bring along a mask.” But then he saw it—an empty cardboard beer box!

  The robber entered the convenience store with gun in hand and the beer box over his head. He could just barely see out of the corner of it when he turned the empty case at an angle.

  After smacking his knee on the door and knocking over several displays, the man finally managed to face the clerk and demand all the money. She put the money in his hand, and he stumbled and crashed his way out the door.

  The robber entered the convenience store with gun in hand and the beer box over his head. He could just barely see out of the corner of it when he turned the empty case at an angle.

  The man ran out and hurried to his getaway car, driven by his girlfriend. But she, too, seemed to have difficulty thinking clearly under pressure. When the bandit told her to turn right and head out of town, she turned left and was met by about fifteen sheriff’s deputies. She almost literally ran into them. Although it was ten o’clock at night, she had neglected to turn on her headlights.

  The clueless couple was captured, then released on bail. And about a week later the aspiring criminal hit on another brilliant plan: He would hit the very same market with the same disguise. The police would never expect it and this time, he’d do it right. Then people would remember him—that daring Beer-Box Bandit.

  As it happens, the same clerk was working the night the bandit made his second attempt. She recognized him by his box; the door was locked and the sheriff’s department was on its way before the bandit could even enter the store.

  It’s hard to get away with a box on your head . . . and this dumb criminal didn’t. His career in crime was over. And yes, we still remember him—that incredible idiot, the Beer-Box Bandit.

  82

  Skid Row

  When Bob Ferguson, now a retired police officer in Indiana, responded to a burglary call from a gun store, he learned that the thief had stolen thirty rifles, several handguns, and a number of shoulder holsters, then made a clean getaway. There were no witnesses, no surveillance cameras, and virtually no clues. It seemed this case would be chalked up as a loss.

  But Ferguson noticed a set of skid marks on the road where someone had obviously peeled out. He followed his instincts and the skid marks. They led him to a corner, where he found another set of skid marks. Farther up the road were another. The marks mysteriously ended in front of an apartment building. Ferguson entered the building, looked around, and headed upstairs.

  Outside the door to an upstairs apartment the officer discovered a leather loop that looked exactly like the leather loop on his own shoulder holster. He knocked on the door, and a man in his early twenties answered.

  Ferguson poked the leather loop in the suspect’s face. “Where did you get this?”

  The suspect responded without a blink, “From breaking into the gun store.”

  Ferguson’s quick thinking and the criminal’s quick answer led to quick justice—and a whole new meaning to the phrase, “Keep me in the loop.”

  83

  Back Door Man

  Detectives Ted McDonald and Adam Watson of the Brunswick (Georgia) Police Department had taken in a suspect for questioning about a recent homicide. But during the entire interrogation, which lasted several hours, McDonald found himself staring at the suspect’s primary identifying feature—his hat.

  “I couldn’t take my eyes off it,” the detective remembers. “It was so big and colorful—I’d never seen anything like it. I kept getting visions of Carmen Miranda in drag. Weird. I guess that hat was his trademark or something.

  The detectives felt pretty sure the man with the hat knew more than he was telling, and they suspected he was covering up for some of his buddies. But they didn’t really have anything to hold him on, so they finally told him he was free to go. They also told him they were going to talk to his girlfriend to verify his alibi for the night of the murder. He had told them she would support everything he’d said.

  “That’s cool, man,” he said. “You mind takin’ me with you when you talk to her?”

  Needless to say, the answer was no. The officers wanted to talk to her independently.

  “Well, then, can I at least get a ride home?” he asked.

  The detectives knew the suspect and his girlfriend both lived in the projects, and he didn’t have a car. “Sure,” they said, “we’ll drop you off at your place, but you can’t talk to your girlfriend before we do.”

  After taking the hat man home, the detectives drove six blocks over and began looking for the girlfriend’s apartment.

  “It took us a few minutes to find her place,” McDonald’s partner, Adam Watson, says.

  As soon as the detectives knocked, they heard a commotion coming from behind the door—bottles being knocked down, furniture being tripped over, hurried footsteps, and then the slamming of the back door. The man’s girlfriend answered the door and gave them permission to enter. But before they began to question her, something in the center of the living room caught their eye.

  It was the hat—Carmen Miranda’s hat, or, rather, the suspect’s hat, left on the table in his haste to beat it out the back door. In the course of five minutes the hat man had run six blocks to his girlfriend’s, come in through the back door, told her what to say, and then run out again. Pretty impressive . . . except for the hat part. Now they knew for sure that he’d been there.

  His girlfriend, being smarter than he was, didn’t want any part of his lies. She wouldn’t corroborate anything he said.

  “I think she had just about had it with this joker anyway,” McDonald says.

  The man was rearrested and, as it turned out, knew more about the homicide than he had let on. The case was later solved.

  McDonald sums it up: “He might have had a chance with her if he hadn’t left that one-of-a-kind hat sitting on the table. Once we saw that, she couldn’t have lied to us if she had wanted to.

  “It’s funny, though. Every time I see an old Carmen Miranda movie . . . I think of that guy.”

  84

  Step by Step

  If we were stupid enough to risk jail or prison by breaking into a business and stealing something, we’d go for something big, and we’d take every precaution to cover our tracks. But we’re not that stupid. That’s why we’re writing a book and a certain man in Wisconsin is writing his wife.

  It had snowed off and on for most of the day. There wasn’t a lot of moisture in the air, but there was enough to keep the snow from being blown away by the gusty winter wind.

  Toward evening, the police received a call on a 2-11, a burglary. When they arrived at Bernie’s Barbershop, they saw that the window had been broken out in the front of the small free-standing building. There really wasn’t that much in there to steal. It was a modest two-chair shop.

  Bernie the barber was called down to the shop to meet with the officers and take a look at the damage.

  “Can you tell us what’s missing from your shop, sir?” a young uniformed officer asked the man.

  “What’s the matter with people today?” the barber mused disgustedly. “I’m a working stiff. What’s some jerk doing stealing from a working man?

  “Sure, I can tell you what’s missing, Officer,” Bernie steamed. “My brand new portable color television set that I haven’t had long enough to even have to dust yet— that’s what’s missing! I’d just like to know where the bum that took it is right now!”

  It didn’t take the officers long to find the answer.

  While Bernie talked with the officers, one of the detectives on the scene had discovered something. Footprints. Not the footprints of the officers and Bernie; they were all mixed together in front of the store. No, these footprints led away from the others. Around the corner, past the row of dilapidated houses that lined the block, and down the snowy sidewalk.

 
Pedestrian traffic had been light that evening, so this particular set of prints was easy to follow. They continued across the street and down the opposite sidewalk. The detective followed them. The uniformed cop followed the detective. Bernie followed the officer.

  The prints led to an apartment complex, then to a door, and disappeared behind it. The detective rapped sharply on the door. After a short wait, a nervous woman appeared.

  “Yes?” her voice quavered. The detective was looking down. A set of wet footprints still covered the carpet and led right to a large sofa where an even larger man sat watching a hockey game on Bernie’s TV.

  The reception on Bernie’s stolen television was perfect. The only snow was on the man’s shoes, the only fuzziness was between his ears. And before the game was over, the larcenous hockey fan was looking at a different station . . . the police station’s penalty box.

  85

  Dressed for Arrest

  Sergeant Larry Bruce told America’s Dumbest Criminals about a routine warrant he served one morning that took an unexpected twist and became a comedy of errors.

  There had been a string of burglaries in the city of Brunswick, Georgia, and Bruce had been put on the case.

  “I had a pretty good idea who the person was,” Bruce says. “In a town of just seventeen thousand people, if you’ve been around for a while, you get to know what’s going on and who’s doing it.”

  When Bruce had collected all the evidence he needed, a warrant was issued for the suspect’s arrest. Sergeant Bruce and another officer set out early on a February morning to serve the warrant. They were hoping to save some effort by catching the suspect while he was still in bed.

  “It was exceptionally cold that morning—about twenty-eight degrees,” Bruce recalls. “My partner and I walked up the crooked sidewalk to the front door of the man’s mother’s house. ‘This shouldn’t be too hard,’ I remarked to my partner.

  “Well, his mother answers the door and tells us that her son is already up and in the bathroom. So we explained that we needed to talk to him, and would she be kind enough to go and get him for us. Which she did. She returned a moment later with her son right behind her. He wore white jockey shorts, and his face was covered with shaving cream.

  “As soon as he saw us he ‘booked.’ We couldn’t believe it at first. The guy runs to the back of the house and out the bathroom window—in his underwear at twenty-eight degrees!”

  Still shaking their heads, the officers ran to the squad car to radio for help.

  “In foot pursuit of a black male . . . six-foot-two . . . about one hundred and ninety pounds . . . wearing white Fruit of the Looms and a face full of shaving cream . . . send all available units.”

  The dispatcher was incredulous. “We didn’t copy all that. Please repeat.”

  Bruce repeated the bulletin. Midway through, he realized how it must sound and began to laugh. It took a minute or so to repeat the information. By then both officers were laughing.

  “In foot pursuit of a black male . . . six-foot-two . . . about one hundred and ninety pounds . . . wearing white Fruit of the Looms and a face full of shaving cream . . . send all available units.”

  After a few more minutes, several units had arrived in the neighborhood and an intensive search had begun. As the officers combed the neighborhood, people were coming out for their morning papers.

  “Y’all looking for a crazy man runnin’ around in his underwear?” one old man asked.

  “Yes, we are. Have you seen him?”

  “Just turned the corner to the left,” he responded with a cackle. “Don’t worry ’bout him. He was movin’ too fast to freeze!”

  The officers turned another corner. A woman in a housecoat stood pointing to a vacant house on a corner lot.

  The officers converged on the house, and Bruce knocked. The door swung open. There stood the suspect, still in his undies, and still wearing the shaving cream, which by now had dried out a little. He yawned innocently, stretched, and said, “You looking for someone, Officer?”

  “Yes, you!”

  The man protested that he had just awakened and was shaving when the officer knocked. The fact that there was no furniture, no running water, no electricity in the house didn’t really seem to bother him. Neither did the fact that everybody in town knew the house had been empty for more than a year.

  The suspect, now shivering, was escorted to the closest squad car. Bruce and his partner headed around the block to their own unit.

  “No, Larry,” laughed the other officer as he turned up the collar of his jacket against the cold. “That wasn’t hard at all.”

  86

  Four-Wheel Suspicion

  Patrolling a strip of fast-food restaurants in Memphis, two officers spotted a known car thief pulling out from a drive-through window in a car they suspected didn’t belong to him. At about the same time, the suspect spotted the patrol unit.

  He took off. The cops hit their lights and sirens and started the pursuit.

  “We are in pursuit . . . possible stolen vehicle . . . southbound on Washington . . . now heading south onto Adams Street.”

  “This kid was runnin’,” remembers Sergeant Keith Haney of the Memphis Police Department. “We’d dealt with him on numerous occasions in the past, but he was still a minor then, and the courts would let him off easy. He knew this, so whenever he’d steal a car, he would always go for broke when he was being chased by the police. He was a real cocky kid, too. But this was the first time we’d ever been after him since he turned eighteen. Now he was an adult—and could be tried as one.”

  “Suspect just took out part of a fence at Garden and Greenlawn and is now going the wrong way on Lincoln Avenue.”

  This was one car thief who was determined not to be caught. For a good twenty minutes he sped through stop signs and red lights, down side streets and back alleys. Finally, surrounded by police units, he abandoned the car and attempted to flee on foot. The officers caught him before he had run twenty yards.

  The next day, the new adult was taken to Haney’s office for questioning.

  “You’ve got the wrong man,” the kid stated boldly. Apparently, he had spent the long night in jail strategizing about how he was going to get out of this one.

  “Really?” the sergeant responded. He glanced down at the arrest record. “They identified you in a car that didn’t belong to you, chased you for seven miles, then arrested you right after you exited the vehicle. Of course it was you.”

  The thief shook his head back and forth. “There’s no way they could have identified me,” he said cockily.

  “And why is that?” Haney asked.

  “I was wearing a baseball cap,” he sneered. “And the windows of the car were tinted.”

  87

  Quick Comeback

  Officer Dan Leger, a southern undercover narcotics officer, was always quick with an ad lib. One story Leger told us really showed the importance of the quick comeback in police work. A creative impromptu answer can be an officer’s best tool for handling the situation by controlling the conversation.

  “I was working undercover, and I was making a buy. You’ve got to record everything you can for evidence when the buy goes down, and this means you almost always have to be wearing some sort of ‘wire’ for recording your conversations. Unfortunately, every dealer knows that, too. Hollywood has always shown the undercover cop putting a wire right on the chest area, so for starters you want to be creative in where you put the wire. But you’ve also got to be prepared to talk your way out if the bad guys happen to find it. You’d be surprised at what they’ll believe.”

  One criminal, for instance, went straight to Leger’s wire and confronted him, blowing the officer’s cover sky high. In less than a minute, however, Leger had managed to convince the criminal not only that he wasn’t a cop, but also that he was one of the baddest and smartest criminals that particular dumb criminal had ever run into.

  When the criminal shouted, “This is a wire! You�
��re a cop!” Leger looked at him like he didn’t have a lick of sense and then explained the facts of life.

  “Of course it’s a wire,” he said patiently. “My lawyer told me to wear this so I’d have evidence to prove entrapment if I ever made a buy from an undercover officer. You ought to be wearing one, man. If a cop busts us and we go to court, it’s our word against the cop’s . . . and who do you think a judge is going to believe? But if you’ve got them on tape you can blow their case right out of the water.”

  The dumb criminal was stunned by the logic.

  “Wow, that’s really true, man. Great idea! Where did you get yours?’’

  “I told him where he could get a wire, and I also gave him some tips on how to wear it. He thanked me warmly for the information, then he went ahead and sold me the dope. I eventually proved my point in court.”

  The judge and jury did take Leger’s word over the dumb criminal’s because Leger had the recording from his wire and that was the evidence that convicted him.

  88

  As the Crow Pries

  A burglar alarm went off at the station, and Lieutenant Dewey Betts of the Memphis Police Department quickly rolled out. The alarm was from a drug rehabilitation center Dewey was familiar with. When he arrived on the scene, it was obvious that the burglar had broken in through a second-floor window. What was not obvious was why the burglar chose the center. It’s not exactly the logical place for a dumb criminal to look for drugs or money.

  Betts called for backup and waited for the arrival of the second unit. Meanwhile, he stood with his back against the wall, hidden, in case the crook looked out and saw him standing there.

  There was a creaking noise and the lieutenant looked to the side. The crook was trying to make his escape headfirst through the first-floor window. Not wanting the suspect to get away, the officer grabbed the crook by the collar and started to pull him through the window to the ground where he could cuff him. But when Betts pulled, the burglar screamed uncontrollably.