Criminal incompetence (Truth can be more stupid than fiction)
I’ve said it before but there is a truly monumental mountain of evidence that separates art from life – or, more to the point: detective novels from real life crime.
Whereas your average handsome & laconic & pipe-chewing & chief-inspecting hero of the Yard only got his man after endless cups of tea, a few rooftop chases and a formal ‘What’s all this, then?’ arrest, real life criminals hardly ever deliver the suspense that can be transubstantiated into delightful penny dreadfuls or splendid Sherlock Holmes movies.
Most criminals are so bad at their chosen profession that it would probably prove to be financially much more rewarding for them to retire and subsequently sue their old school’s job counseling department for malice:
In the long and noble history of the world’s most incompetent criminals, we have an impressive new entry – a burglar who decided that the ideal shop to break into would be… a security camera store.
Police in Boise, Idaho made one of the easier arrests they’ll ever make, after 21-year-old Allen Michael Darnell’s every move was filmed by over a dozen demonstration CCTV cameras in the Computer Central store.
The footage show him smashing the glass front door, then walking around the shop trying to steal computers. Unfortunately for him, they were bolted down.
He appears to have noticed the fact that the store was filled with security cameras, because after a short time he pulls his coat up over his head. This devious criminal masterstroke was slightly undercut, however, by the fact that he also kept going up to the cameras and staring straight into them.
Having spent some time failing to steal any computers and staring into surveillance cameras, Darnell decided to make off with around $250 from the cash register. The next part of his plan – hide in some nearby bushes until the police arrived – was then executed flawlessly.
Mind you, at least the fore-mentioned criminal had some kind of game plan: break in, steal, get away, hide. Granted, his mental capacities proved to be such that he had as much chance of doing so with any measure of success as a certain other person had in illegally invading a certain other country but at least there had been some skewed logic to the whole procedure. (I am talking of the store invader, of course – not of the other one.)
Hercule Poirot would always go on about ‘order & method’ and ‘the little grey cells.’ Which is all very well in the kind of limited and structured universe that Agatha Christie built but which has painfully little to do with the world of real, and mostly quite mad crime:
A man was arrested after a bizarre series of events that included him crashing his car, getting shot by a homeowner, breaking a restaurant window and stripping to his underwear.
Police said it all started when the man crashed his car into a pole and started banging on the door of a nearby house. After he kicked in a window, homeowner Leroy Bruce shot him.
Bruce said the man ran off and left his pants and other clothing behind. The bleeding suspect fled to a McDonald’s and threw a rock through the front window.
Witness Lisa Fuqua said that the man was easy for police to identify.
Yes, another glorious triumph for the pipe-chewing (or snuff-taking) heroes of the Yard. Though it probably didn’t involve much tea drinking and in all likelihood not much in the way of rooftop chasing either.
Still, however mad the perpetrator, he still eluded capture for an equally shambolic as symbolic few handsful of seconds. In other words, at least he gave it a try.
Which is more than you can say for a certain alcoholic burglar…
So, weep, you Queens of Crime, you Mistresses of Murder – and yes, all their fans who still believe it takes at least a great detective and some three hundred pages to catch the evil masterminding villain: weep, weep, weep your bitter, book-stained tears of deep regret.
Agatha Christie once famously said, ‘Crime pays.’
Real life, alas, is hardly ever as rewarding as fiction:
Alcoholic burglar Stuart Taylor had to call 999 after cutting his arm breaking into a house and then not being able to break out.
Blackburn magistrates heard that 41-year-old Taylor bled so profusely inside the house he caused more than £7,500-worth of damage to carpets and furniture.
“He had cut himself smashing a double glazed window and then couldn’t get out,” said Mr White. “When the police got to him he pointed to an open bottle of champagne and asked if he could finish it off before he went.”
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