America's Dumbest Criminals (4 page)
Hackett and his partner staked out the area the next night. Before long, they saw a big station wagon rolling down a little lane near the hog pens. Three or four men got out. The officers used night lenses to watch the suspects walk down the lane toward the hog pens. Then the commotion started.
“They were running,” Hackett remembers, “and the hogs were running. Then one of the guys pulled out a .22-caliber rifle and popped one of the hogs. He shot again, and the hog went down.
“Well, we backed off at that point, knowing they would have to come back down the lane with the hog they had shot. So we're sitting there waiting for them to get onto the highway so we can stop them. Sure enough, they came zipping down. We pulled them over.”
The two officers approached the vehicle and peered inside, expecting to catch the rustlers red-handed. But all they saw were two men in the front seat, three men in the backâand no sign of a recently deceased hog.
One of the officers peered into the rear of the station wagon. “Nothing back there but an old seat,” he said. Then they looked more closely and realized it was the backseat of the station wagon. The officers asked the men in the backseat to get out.
“Now, it didn't look too bad,” Hackett says. “There was a seat cover over what appeared to be the backseat. One of our guys reached in and pulled off the cover.”
It wasn't a seat at all. It was a very large, very dead hog. “We don't know how they did it, how they got that hog into the backseatâit must have weighed around five hundred pounds.”
Those hogs had been disappearing one at a time, one a night.
But that's not the end of our little pig tale.
“Later on, we got a search warrant to go back to the house where one of these guys lived, and we found a small, live pig this guy had previously taken. We kept her for evidence, and one of our officers took her home to keep for the trial. By the time the trial came around, however, the officer had grown quite fond of the pig. He even had her paper-trained! The âevidence' remained at the officer's home as a pet until she weighed about four hundred pounds, then she moved to a local farm.”
Presumably, she never had to serve double duty as the backseat of a station wagon.
O
fficer Steve Turner of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department had little trouble apprehending this tired, dumb criminal.
As homeowner Loretta Davin placed the last suitcase in the trunk of her car, she had no idea she was being watched. Twenty-six-year-old Fred “Junior” Williams, a small-time house burglar with a keen eye for opportunity, had been observing Davin for twenty minutes or so. Junior knew she was about to leave, and from the amount of luggage she was taking, he knew she would probably be gone for at least a couple days. Junior smiled as the car pulled out of the driveway, turned the corner at the end of the street, and disappeared.
Breaking in through a side door unnoticed was easy for our burglar. That's what he did for a living. And with the homeowner safely out of the way, this promised to be a stress-free operation.
Ah, life is good,
thought Junior as he shook a pillow from its case. He then began a leisurely stroll through the house, filling his pillowcase with whatever he decided to take. There was some jewelry, some cash hidden under the mattress, the VCRâyes, life was good. This job was a piece of cake.
Hmmm . . . piece of cake.
That sounded pretty good to Junior. He hadn't had lunch, and by now he had worked up quite an appetite rifling through the house. He decided to see what the kitchen had to offer.
Well, all right! The lady of the house hadn't bothered to clean out the fridge before she left. Junior found some nice chicken salad and a loaf of bread, a few carrot sticks, some potato chips, and some chocolate milk.
Hey, may as well put it on a tray, kick back, and catch a little TV.
So that's just what Junior did. He carried the tray to the nightstand next to the bed, climbed in, clicked on the tube, and ate his lunch. But after all that hard work and that good meal, the bed was just too comfortable. The sandman came a-callin' on Junior, and soon he was out like a light.
Meanwhile, Loretta Davin had arrived at her office and learned that her business trip had been postponed. After being gone only three hours instead of three days, she returned home to find her side door broken open. Gripped with fear, she phoned the police from her car phone.
Turner was one of the first officers to arrive on the scene. Here's how he described it:
“As we entered the home, it was obvious that a burglary had occurred. Drawers were pulled out, closet doors stood wide open, and the place looked as if it had been ransacked. With weapons drawn, we cleared each room. As we got near the bedroom, I could hear voices, so we approached very cautiously. The television was still on. And there, all sprawled out, lay Junior, sleeping like he was in his own bed. The tray was there on the nightstand with some food still left on it, and the pillowcase of loot was sitting next to it.
“What a picture! We had had dealings with Junior before, so we all knew who he was. So we just kind of quietly encircled the bed and yelled, on cue, âJunior! Wake up!' He did, and the look on his face was hysterical. We arrested him and took him to jail for breaking and entering, burglary, and sleeping on the job!”
Junior's short nap turned into a long stretch.
“I
've got another story for you,” Detective Ted McDonald told us at a recent barbecue for
America's Dumb
est Criminals
personnel in Brunswick, Georgia. “Adam Watson and I had to serve a warrant for cashing a stolen check on a man that lived here in Brunswick. I remember it because of the heat that day. It must have been a hundred. In fact, it was so hot that I saw two dogs fighting over a tree.”
He smiled.
“As we arrived at the man's house and began to go up on the front porch, a dog starts barking. About this time a man comes from around the back of the house to see what the dog is barking at. It was us.”
“Robert Norton?” the officers asked the man.
“Yeah, I'm Robert Norton. What can I do for you guys?”
“Mr. Norton, we have a warrant for your arrest for receiving and cashing a stolen check.”
“Nah . . . you've got the wrong man.” he said, shaking his head. “I never cashed a stolen check in my life. What makes you guys think I did something like that?”
“Well sir,” Officer McDonald said, holding up the canceled check from the bank. “You forged the name the check was in on the front. But on the back, when you endorsed it, you signed your
real
name. And you provided the teller with your driver's license, complete with your current address.”
“You weren't thinking too clearly at that moment, were you?” Watson asked.
“Let me see that check,” the man said. He looked it over pretty good, front and back. Then he shook his head in disbelief and frustration.
“I'd never done anything like this before,” he told the two detectives. “I guess when she asked me for my I.D. I just went into check-cashing mode. I can't believe I did that . . . pretty dumb, huh?”
“Pretty dumb,” the officers echoed in unison. “Let's go.”
I
t was a late Thursday afternoon in a Florida panhandle locale when two young off-duty detectives in plain clothes were approached by a local drug dealer as they sat and talked over a cup of coffee. Not only were they off the clock; they were also out of their jurisdiction, just on the other side of the county line.
“S'up dudes?” the dealer bantered.
“Not much, man. What's up with you?”
“Ain't no thang. Y'all looking for a little somethin' for tonight?”
“Might be,” the detectives answered. “Depends on what we find.”
“Well, look no furtherâthe Candy Man's here,” he announced with pride of title on his face. “How's two hundred dollars sound for an eight ball?” (An eight ball is 3.5 grams of cocaine.)
“That sounds real good if it's the right thing.”
“Oh, it's the right thing all right. That's why they call me the Candy Man, 'cause my deals are so sweet!”
“Sounds good,” one of the officers repeated. “In fact, we'd probably want to do a couple of eight balls right now, only at the moment we don't have that much cash with us. But if we could take a little ride over to our office, I could get some money out of the safe.”
“Not a problem,” the Candy Man offered. “I need to go and see my boy to pick up some more anyway. Y'all can ride with me.” So the two officers got into the Candy Man's car and rode with him to secure the drugs. After the pickup, the officers started giving Candy Man directions to their office.
After a half-dozen lefts and rights, the three arrived in front of their “office.”
“Well, here we are, Candy Man.” The officers smiled.
“This ain't no office building, man. This is the police station.”
“That's right,” they assured him. “We're cops.”
“Aw, man . . . you guys are the law?”
“'Fraid so,” the officers answered. “And you're under arrest for sale of a controlled substance.”
“Damn.” The Candy Man just hung his head and sighed. “And I was beginning to like you guys.”
It's like your mother always told you. It doesn't pay to talk to strangers.
I
n Sweden, it's illegal to drive on the highway if you have the fluâbecause reaction time of people with the flu tested below those with alcohol in their systems.
Here, we have convictions for D.U.I.â“Driving under the Influence.”
Are sickly Swedes in danger of being charged with D.U.W.â“Driving Under the Weather”?
T
erry Jarnigan was a troublemaker. He was always having brushes with the law, and he was especially well known for starting fights and somehow managing to get away just before the police arrived.
One Friday night Terry tried to pick up another man's wife in a local tavern in a Midwest town, and a fight ensued. Soon the whole place was involved in an old-fashioned barroom brawl, with chairs and glasses being thrown and broken amidst a frenzied free-for-all.
Then someone yelled “Cops!” The crowd broke for the door, and Jarnigan was one of the first ones out. But the squad car pulled in, lights flashing, just as he was making his way across the parking lot. With no time to think and few places to run, Jarnigan opened the door of a brown Pontiac Bonneville and stretched out along the back floorboard.
In a matter of minutes, more officers and squad cars had pulled into the parking lot. Jarnigan would have to sit tight for a while. He just lay there in the back of the Pontiac, watching the shadows of the flashing lights and listening to the voices outside. He couldn't hear everything that was said as the police began arresting the people involved in the donnybrook. But he did hear his own name over and over as bar patrons explained the origins of the fight.
Then Terry Jarnigan heard voices coming closer to his hiding place.
“It's not fair to arrest me!” a man was protesting in a shrill voice. “I didn't start the fight. Some jerk was hitting on my wife, and she didn't like it. Well, I didn't like it either, so I just . . . ”
“Yes, sir,” another voice answered calmly. “We'll get all of that sorted out down at the police station. But we don't have any more room in the cruisers, so you'll have to follow me downtown in your own vehicle.”
“He's the one you ought to be arresting . . . ” The man was still muttering as he swung open the door of his brown Pontiac Bonneville. Terry Jarnigan blinked as the dome light came on, and the car's owner jumped back and yelled.
“Hey! Here he isâhere's the punk that started the whole thing! You just wait till I get my . . . ”
The officer stopped the furious husband just before he took hold of the cowering troublemaker. Jarnigan was duly booked for inciting a riot and for committing illegal trespass in entering the man's car. And then he was thrown into the same holding tank with the people he had provoked into fighting in the bar only an hour earlier, including the enraged husband of the woman he had flirted with.
They were all very glad to see him.
I
s speeding a crime of passion? Officer Rusty Martin remembers a time when the label could have applied.
“I was a rookie stationed in a little town called Duncan, Mississippi,” Martin says. “Now, nothing much ever happened in Duncan. The nights were even quieter than the days, and I was working the 6:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. shift. So I was always looking for ways to liven up those long hours.”