David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

Eighteen-year-old Charles A. Meriweather broke into a home in Northwest Baltimore on the night of November 22–23, 1978, raped the woman who lived there, and then ransacked the house. When he discovered she had only $11.50 in cash, he asked her ‘How do you pay your bills?’

She replied, ‘By cheque’ and he ordered her to write out a cheque for $30. Then he changed his mind and upped it to $50.

‘Who shall I make it out to?’ asked the woman, a 34-year-old government employee.

‘Charles A. Meriweather,’ said Charles A. Meriweather, adding, ‘It better not bounce or I’ll be back.’

Meriweather was arrested several hours later.

Every night, Mrs Hollis Sharpe of Los Angeles took her miniature poodle, Jonathan, out for a walk so that he could do his duty. A responsible and considerate citizen, Mrs Sharpe always brought along with her a newspaper and a plastic bag to clean up after him ‘You have to think of your neighbours,’ she explained. On the night of November 13, 1974, Jonathan had finished his business and Mrs Sharpe was walking home with the bag in her right hand when a mugger attacked her from behind, shoved her to the ground, grabbed her plastic bag, jumped into a car, and drove off with the spoils of his crime. Mrs Sharpe suffered a broken arm, but remained good-humoured about the incident. ‘I only wish there had been a little more in the bag,’ she said.

Edward McAlea put on a stocking mask, burst into a jewellery store in Liverpool, and pointed a revolver at the three men inside. ‘This is a stick up,’ he said. ‘Get down.’ None of them did, since all of them noticed the red plastic stopper in the muzzle of McAlea’s toy gun. After a brief scuffle, McAlea escaped, but not before he had pulled off his mask. The jeweller recognised him as a customer from the day before, and McAlea was apprehended.

In 1977, a thief in Southampton, England, came up with a clever method of robbing the cash register at a local supermarket. After collecting a basket full of groceries, he approached the checkout area and placed a £10 note on the counter. The grocery clerk took the bill and opened the cash register, at which point the thief snatched the contents and ran off. It turned out to be a bad deal for the thief, since the till contained only £4.37 and the thief ended up losing £5.63.

On the night of August 23–24, 1980, a well-organised gang of thieves began their raid on the safe of the leisure-centre office in Chichester, Sussex, by stealing a speedboat. Using water skis to paddle across the lake, they picked up their equipment and paddled on to the office. However, what they thought were cutting tools turned out to be welding gear, and they soon managed to seal the safe completely shut. The next morning it took the office staff an hour to hammer and chisel the safe open again.

There is a whole sub-genre of stupid thieves who get stuck while trying to sneak into buildings through chimneys and air vents that turn out to be narrower at the bottom than at the top.

However, none has quite met the fate that befell Calvin Wilson of Natchez, Mississippi. A burglar with a criminal record, Wilson disappeared in 1985. The following year, a body found on the banks of the Mississippi River was identified — incorrectly, as it turned out — as that of Wilson. Fifteen years later, in January 2001, masons renovating a historic building in Natchez discovered a fully-clothed skeleton in the chimney. Lying next to the skeleton was a wallet belonging to Calvin Wilson. Adams County sheriffs theorised that Wilson had tried to enter the building, which was then a gift shop, through the chimney, fallen in head first and become stuck in the chimney, unable to call for help.

Clive Bunyan ran into a store in Cayton, near Scarborough, England, and forced the shop assistant to give him £157 from the till. Then he made his getaway on his motorbike. To hide his identity, Bunyan had worn his full-face helmet as a mask. It was a smooth successful heist, except for one detail. He had forgotten that across his helmet, in inch-high letters, were the words, ‘Clive Bunyan — Driver’. Bunyan was arrested and ordered to pay for his crime by doing 200 hours of community service.

Terry Johnson had no trouble identifying the two men who burgled her Chicago apartment at 2.30 am on August 17, 1981. All she had to do was write down the number on the police badge that one of them was wearing and the identity number on the fender of their squad car. The two officers — Stephen Webster, 33, and Tyrone Pickens, 32 — had actually committed the crime in full uniform, while on duty, using police department tools.

Twenty-five-year-old Marshall George Cummings, Jr., of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was charged with attempted robbery in connection with a purse-snatching at a shopping centre on October 14, 1976. During the trial the following January, Cummings chose to act as his own attorney. While cross-examining the victim, Cummings asked, ‘Did you get a good look at my face when I took your purse?’ Cummings later decided to turn over his defence to a public defender, but it was too late. He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

On the night of June 12, 1991, John Meacham, Joseph Plante and Joe Laattsch were burgling a soon-to-be demolished bank building in West Covina, California, when Meacham came upon an empty vault. He called over his accomplices and invited them inside to check out the acoustics. Then he closed the vault door so they could appreciate the full effect. Unfortunately, the door locked. Meacham spent 40 minutes trying to open it, without success. Finally he called the fire department, who called the police. After seven hours, a concrete-sawing firm was able to free the locked-up robbers, after which they were transported to another building they could not get out of.

Dennis Newton was on trial in 1985 for armed robbery in Oklahoma City. Assistant District Attorney Larry Jones asked one of the witnesses, the supervisor of the store that had been robbed, to identify the robber. When she pointed to the defendant, Newton jumped to his feet, accused the witness of lying, and said, ‘I should have blown your –ing head off!’ After a moment of stunned silence, he added, ‘If I’d been the one that was there.’ The jury sentenced Jones to 30 years in prison.

In December 1989, three 15-year-old boys stole a car in Prairie Village, Kansas, and stopped off at the nearest convenience store to ask directions back to Missouri. Except that it wasn’t a convenience store — it was a police station. At the same moment, a description of the stolen vehicle was broadcast over the police station public address system. The car thieves tried to escape, but were quickly apprehended.

Stephen Le and two juvenile companions tried to break into a parked pickup truck in Larkspur, California, on the night of September 27, 1989. But the owner caught them in the act, chased them, and hailed a police car. Le and one of his friends climbed a fence and ran. It soon became apparent that they had chosen the wrong fence — this one surrounded the property of San Quentin prison. The suspects were booked for investigation of auto burglary and trespassing on state property, although charges were never filed. ‘Nothing like this has ever happened here before,’ said Lieutenant Cal White. ‘People just don’t break into prison every day.’