America's Dumbest Criminals (9 page)
I
t seems that some people go out of their way to get into trouble. That's more or less what happened the night that Nashville Police Officer Floyd A. Hyde unexpectedly became involved in a high-speed chase.
“I was en route to a personal-injury accident in West Nashville, and to get there I had to enter Interstate 40 from I-440. As I merged, blue lights and sirens going, I fell in behind a gold Pontiac Firebird that suddenly seemed to sprout wings and take off down the interstate. The driver apparently panicked at the sight of me. He accelerated to more than a hundred miles per hour and began passing cars on the shoulder. It was obvious that he thought I was after him and was making a run for it.”
But Hyde couldn't give chase, despite the driver's reckless behavior. Injured people always take priority over traffic offenders, so the officer had to stay en route to the accident. But he did try to keep the Firebird in sight as he drove, hoping another nearby unit would be able to step in and stop the speeding vehicle. As it turned out, keeping the Pontiac in sight was not that difficult. Every turn the Pontiac made was the very turn the officer needed to get to the accident scene.
“I saw fire billowing out from underneath that car, with blue smoke and oil going everywhere. He'd blown his engine. Now he had to stop.”
Hyde followed the Pontiac all the way to his destination. At that point he found another unit had already arrived at the accident scene. His help wasn't needed. Now he was free to try to stop the nut in the Firebird, who by this time had developed something new to panic about.
“Just about the time my priorities changed,” Hyde says, “I saw fire billowing out from underneath that car, with blue smoke and oil going everywhere. He'd blown his engine. Now he had to stop.
“After I arrested him, I asked him why he was running. He told me he had a suspended driver's license. When I told him that I hadn't been after him in the first place, that I would have simply gone around him if he hadn't taken off like that,
and
that I wouldn't have caught him if he hadn't made every turn I needed to makeâwell, he got pretty upset.”
That incident cost the driver of the Firebird plentyâa thousand dollars for the new engine plus the expense of having his car towedânot to mention the charges for driving with a suspended license, attempting to elude, and reckless driving.
O
fficer Lynn Flanders of the Escambia County Sheriff's Department in Pensacola, Florida, was dispatched to a convenience store where a man was exposing himself. Another female officer quickly joined her as backup. They arrived to find the flasher still on the sceneâbut sound asleep!
“The flasher was seated in his car in front of the store, totally naked, and snoring up a storm. So we knocked on the window and woke him up.”
Flanders then explained to the snoozing streaker that he was under arrest for indecent exposure.
The sleepy-eyed criminal didn't seem all that perturbed, but he did have one request of his arresting officers: “Can I put my clothes on?”
The officers glanced around the car. The only clothes visible in the car were a pair of scuffed shoes and a wad of dirty socks lying on the passenger-side floorboard.
“Well, sir,” Flanders told him, “you can put your shoes on if you want to, but I honestly don't think it'll make much difference!”
“Oh, no, Officer,” the naked man explained earnestly. “My clothes are here. They're just stuck between the seats here.”
Of course. Isn't that where we all keep our clothes when we sleep naked at the roadside convenience store?
Always willing to serve the public, the two officers helped the suspect retrieve his clothes and waited for him to dress before escorting the fully clothed and wide-awake flasher to his new temporary home in a holding cell.
O
nce when Officer Donna McCown was working narcotics in a large southwestern city, her department head assigned her to secure two hundred dollars' worth of crack cocaine from a known drug dealer who had been arrested several times.
McCown had some concerns about the assignment because, as she remembers it, “I'd been around him before and he should have known who I was.” Not only had she been present in the station when he was being booked; she'd also driven around his neighborhood in a marked car and full uniform. She was afraid he might recognize her. But she didn't realize just how dumb this guy was.
“We met in a motel room that had already been wired for the meeting,” McCown says. “About ten officers were waiting for me outside. The gentleman showed up as expected, but he seemed a little leery at first. He questioned me as to whether I was a police officer, and I responded that I was not, so we proceeded to do the deal.”
But the dealer's jumpiness continued, increasing McCown's concerns. Had he recognized her? Was he laying some sort of trap, waiting for her to give herself away?
“This looks like good crack,” she said as loudly as she dared. This was the signal to her backup that the dealer had sold her the dope. But had she said it too loud? Something was clearly wrong, because the dealer grew more fidgety than ever. “Yeah, sure,” he muttered, his eyes darting around the room as he stowed away his two hundred dollars. “Listen, I gotta go now. Got an appointment on the other side of town.”
It turned out she needn't have worried about the dealer recognizing her. He had other things on his mind.
Tests revealed there was hardly any crack in the concoction he sold her. It had been cut with all sorts of weird stuff, but mostly a sugar substitute. It wasn't real cocaine. It wasn't even real sugar. The man had been so embarrassed about the quality of his product and so worried that she would realize how bad it was that he had barely glanced at her.
“I can't believe you did that to me,” the dealer blurted when McCown and her colleagues arrested him and confiscated his carârather, his girlfriend's car.
“I can't believe you didn't know me!” she retorted. “And I can't believe you're selling Equal for $850 an ounce. It's a lot cheaper at the grocery store!”
O
fficer Lynn Flanders, our Florida friend, had a strange experience with a drunk driver one evening.
“I was pulling over a speeder one night when he put the car in park and jumped into the backseat,” she said. “I didn't know if he was going for a weapon or not, so I called for backup.
“In the minute or two that I waited for backup, the couple in the car seemed to be having a fight. They were arguing so loudly I could hear them from my squad car.”
When Flanders's backup arrived after a few minutes, she cautiously approached the car she had stopped and peered in the window. A woman sat in the passenger seat with her arms crossed and a furious look on her face.
Flanders asked the woman what she was doing.
“I don't know, Officer,” she responded. “Why don't you ask the rocket scientist in the back?”
She gestured toward the disheveled-looking man in the backseat, who looked back with bloodshot eyes.
“Hey, I don't know what's going on,” he said with slightly slurred speech and an air of aggrieved innocence. “I've been asleep back here the whole time. Just woke up a minute ago.”
“He didn't say that the woman had been driving,” Flanders recalls. “If he had, I believe she would have been much harder on him than the courts. So he just went with the ghost-driver theory.
“We ran a check and found out he had several warrants on him. He was arrested for D.U.I.”
And poof! Suddenly, he disappeared into the criminal justice system.
T
o police officers accustomed to hearing outrageous lies and absurd alibis, a truly honest answer can feel like a breath of fresh airâeven if that breath has a distinct smell of alcohol. Captain Don Parker of Pensacola, Florida, received such an answer late one night when he stopped a woman he suspected of driving under the influence.
“By the time I got out of my patrol car,” Parker says, “she was already out of her car, staggering back and forth, and obviously very upset with me.”
“Why are you stopping me, Officer?” the obviously intoxicated woman drawled before Parker could say a word.
“Well, ma'am, you were weaving all over the road,” Parker explained. “And you didn't have your headlights on.”
“Oh, I can explain,” she replied smartly. “You see, I've been drinking all night, and I'm very drunk.”
Parker merely nodded.
“Considering my condition,” she finished with unerring and incriminating logic, “I think I'm doing very well.”
He had to agree, even as he took her in.
“Oh, I can explain. You see, I've been drinking all night, and I'm very drunk. . . . Considering my condition, I think I'm doing very well.”
H
er second day on the job, a rookie undercover officer in Florida was assigned to purchase some prescription drugs from a known pill dealer. She was given a list of pills to buy and the quantity needed for a good “bust.”
“I wasn't familiar with any of them at the time,” she remembers. “I had to write down the names of all the drugs and take the list with me.”
When the officer arrived at the “Pill Palace” with her shopping list, she began placing her order. “You'd think the dealer might have been a little suspicious since I couldn't tell her what I wanted without consulting my list. I was awful . . . I kept mispronouncing the drugs' names, and she would even correct me.”
The suspect sold the officer $250 worth of stolen pills and was arrested moments later.
“I saw her later at the station and heard her asking if anyone had an aspirin. Ironic, isn't it? She had every pill you could imagine, but didn't have an aspirin!”
S
everal years ago in Arkansas, a man robbed a pharmacy clerk at knife point. A few days later, the clerk picked the man out of a photo lineup and pressed charges against him. When the case went to trial, however, the man was nowhere to be found. He had fled the state, and officials had no clue where. They knew he came from New York City, but couldn't be sure that was where he had gone, and they didn't know where in New York to look. They really didn't have much hope of catching him.
Then they got the break they needed to find their criminal. Sure enough, the suspect had returned to New York and had applied for a job. Federal authorities were alerted when the man's prints were sent to Washington, D.C., as part of a standard check required for that particular job application. The man was soon arrested, charged, and convicted.