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NARRATOR: Tonight on America's
Dumbest Criminals, what's the use of having a disguise
if you don't wear it properly?
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What's the most
essential item if you're planning a shootout with police? These guys didn't
know the answer.
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And which was less sharp-- the
blade of this antique knife or the thief who
tried to pocket it?
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For these and other
cutting revelations, don't move a muscle. It's time for America's
Dumbest Criminals.
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[theme music] NARRATOR: Now welcome
your hosts for ADC-- Daniel Butler and Debbie Alan.
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-Thanks for joining us. We've got a cornucopia
of crooked calamities to bring your way tonight.
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Cornucopia-- is that
more than a quart? -Yeah. But less than a gallon. -OK. Good.
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Alright, look what
I've got right here. Can you identify this? -Oh, that's easy.
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That's fake money. That's counterfeit. You know I know that? -How? -Because Jesse "The
Body" Ventura's picture
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isn't on the three dollar bill. -You are absolutely right. -That's it. Elton John's is.
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-I guess it wouldn't be
smart to try to outsmart you. -Can't be done, Little Debbie.
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-Can't be avoided most days. Well you can count
on counterfeit money being passed off
later in the show.
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But now we're going to
tend to other matters. -First up let's explore the
system of checks and balances.
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In this case, it's a bank robber
who left behind a check that tossed him into the balances
of the justice system.
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-He's not just caught. He's caught on camera. [police siren] -It was kind of strange for us.
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Especially in a rural
county like this. I was working day shift. And I got a call to respond to a
local bank for a robbery alarm.
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Well of course when
we got to the bank, the robber was no longer there. And I was told by the cashier
that when the robber left,
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he had dropped a lot of
the money that he took. In the money on the
floor, it was also
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an envelope that he
brought with him. Well we looked in this
envelope and there was a check.
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On the back of the
check was a robbery note that said, "Stay of the alarm. Give me the money."
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So he'd written the robber note
on the back of a check which turned out to be
made out to him.
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Bank records revealed
this person actually had an account with the
bank he was trying to rob.
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So he was pretty easy to
track down after that. As a matter of fact, about
four or five hours later,
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he called the sheriff's
office and told us where he was, and
turned himself in. -That's an endorsement.
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How dumb can they get? Alright, well this
lout was dumb enough to identify his loot
as part of his take.
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-Here's the story of a
hairball with an heirloom in a classic case of
something to remember me by.
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-We had a break-in call from
one of our ocean cottages. They entered the house
by an upstairs window.
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And at the time I was
processing the crime scene, patrol officers went
out and located someone
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unloading the property
from the house, and were brought to the station. And upon questioning
them, they said
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they had bought
these items not 15, 20 minutes ago from
another area in town. So I went back to
the crime scene,
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looked again, and was able to
retrieve a silver pocket knife in between the runs
of a homemade stairs.
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And so I brought it
back to the station. I had to get him to say
that it was his belonging.
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So what we did was we placed
all the items on the table. Everybody had cleaned
out their pockets.
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One by one, each person came
and got their personal items so we could inventory
them, and process
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them before going to the jail. And the suspect picked
up the silver knife and placed it in his bag
with his other belongings.
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So I went back to his
bag, emptied it out, and I went through each item and
made him speak about each item.
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And when I got to
the silver knife, he said, "That's an antique. My grandfather gave it to me."
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I said, "What does it say?" And he said, "Silver Pheasant." He read that from a distance.
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And claimed it to be his. This is the knife that I
found in between the runs of the stairs at
the crime scene.
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He picked the right knife,
so we took him to jail. -You know, it must
be really hard to be
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a good robber these days. I mean, there are just so many
details that must be addressed,
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you know. -You've got to
plan your disguise. -Yeah well, your entry. -Your weapon.
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-Your tough guy dialogue. -And your escape. -You know, with so
much on your mind,
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it's easy to overlook something. -And in this next story, the
something that got overlooked
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was pretty important. Take a look. -Very recently we
had an armed robbery at one of the
convenience stores.
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A fella said he had a gun, had
his arm in the right pocket of his coat, and demanded money.
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He got the money. He left. But he was quickly arrested. The clerks come to
find out, thought
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it was a joke at first because
he'd been in there all day long, in and out. He comes every day.
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When he robbed the place,
he had a ski mask on, but it seems as though he forgot
to pull the ski mask down.
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The clerk thought it
was a joke at first. But I guess when he
said he had a gun,
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she figured it might
have been for real. But it didn't really
seen it was his day.
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Not only had he forgotten
to pull his ski mask down, but when he left the
building, as he was dropping
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the ski mask, as he was ditching
his coat so he wouldn't be recognized, he
didn't really realize
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that we had had a
stake out in the area. He was quickly apprehended. And he's facing a lot of time.
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NARRATOR: In Arizona,
it's illegal for donkeys to sleep in bathtubs. -It's not uncommon to have
a bit of an identity crisis
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at some stressful
time in your life. But for a woman in
Chickasaw, Alabama that stressful time came when
an officer pulled her over
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and she had trouble
remembering just who she was. See what I mean. -A woman got stopped
on the side of the road
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for a traffic violation. And the officer walked
up to her and he said, "What is your name?"
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And she says, "My name's Jane
Smith and my date of birth is so and so." He says, "Ma'am, I know
you're not telling the truth.
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You still got your name tag
on from work right here, and it says your
name is Mary Hudson."
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Now we've given her a new name. Prisoner CH1033. -OK. First, they got away from a
Nevada bank with $350,000.
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But in their desperation
to get away from police, they got away from
everything that they
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should have kept to themselves. See how haste makes waste in
tonight's Blue Light Special.
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NARRATOR: When officers
closed in on the apartment where the two bank
robbers had fled,
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they had only a few facts. -They were masked and armed
with a firearm and a pipe.
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NARRATOR: But when they took a
peek inside their getaway car, they found the robbers got away
with less than they thought.
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In their haste they'd
left behind both their weapons and the money. All $350,000.
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Armed with this information,
police convinced the holdup men they could never
hold out for long.
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The unarmed men soon
realized that their hands were tied and surrendered. -OK. Maybe it's a mean stereotype.
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You see somebody with a
shirt pocket full of pens, and you think they're
kind of nerdy.
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But what will you
think when you see what this guy's got hanging
out of his pocket?
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Judge for yourself. -I was on patrol, and I
was actually running radar in an area called County
Eighth and Pacific Avenue, here
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in Yuma. I heard the vehicle coming on
the audio portion of the radar. And I could tell by
the sound of the radar
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that he was moving right along. There's a stop sign
at the intersection of his direction of travel.
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He didn't see it apparently
until the last minute, and he skidded through
the intersection.
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Finally he puts it in first
gear apparently, and takes off. I activated my lights on my car,
and He yielded pretty quickly.
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I made my approach. I walked up to him. I introduced myself
and asked him for his driver's license,
registration, and insurance.
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And I could tell just by his
physical appearance he might have had a little bit
too much to drink.
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But the other thing
that I noticed about him was in this left shirt pocket--
he had on a button-down shirt--
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and in his left
pocket of his shirt, he had about two ounces
of marijuana sticking
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up in a plastic see-through bag. But I didn't tell
him that I saw it. So he just sat there
combing for his wallet,
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his registration,
and his insurance. Apparently he didn't realize
he had the marijuana showing
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in his pocket, or of
course it wouldn't have been there anymore. The second time I
walked up to the car
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and I just asked him, just
out of the clear blue sky, "Do you have anymore weed
besides what's in your pocket?"
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And then he just
lowered his eyes, and he looked at his pocket,
and he just rolled his head back
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in his eyes, and he
just goes, "Ohhh." -And now for a man whose
credibility his earned him
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the nickname of the
Lying Lion King, here's Daniel with
ADC Headlines. -Alright.
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Was it a coincidence
or an act of sod? Perhaps both. An intoxicated man
made the bad decision
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to go joy riding across
the newly landscaped front lawn of a police
station in New York.
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His hapless shenanigans were
picked up by the precinct's video cameras and viewed by
astonished police officers, who
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quickly stepped outside
to halt his dirty dig. Two men in North Carolina
stole two walkie talkies,
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and were a little too
anxious to try them out. A policeman monitoring
their broadcast frequency
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intercepted their
conversation as they tested the range of the radios. You know, "Where are you now?"
"I'm at Fourth and Main."
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One remained stationary
while the other drove in a car providing frequent
updates of his exact location.
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"Where are you now?"
"Fifth and Main." They were over and out and
out of commission in no time.
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Multi-layered stupidity
descended like a fog over a man who attempted to
rob a Seattle area gun shop.
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First he had to step around
a marked patrol car parked next to the front door
to enter the building.
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Once inside, he stood next
to a uniformed patrolman. When he announced his
intention to rob the place,
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virtually everyone in the
crowded store pulled a weapon. Foo goo boom boom! He won neither
the battle of wits
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nor the shootout that followed. And that closes the file on
ADC Headlines-- news ripped
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from somewhere near the back
of your local newspaper. Debbie. -OK. What would you do if you knew
that a robbery suspect was
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speeding towards your
neighborhood with police cars right on his tail? Well you probably wouldn't
do what this officer did.
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But that's what makes
it this week smashing installment of Special Delivery. -Officer Salerno and
myself were on duty.
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We had to do traffic
control for a library on the corner of
Keystone and Main. Officer Purdy's house is just
two doors up from the library.
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So we decided to go there and
stop and have a cup of coffee. -So they had the portables on.
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I put the big scanner
on in the kitchen. They stayed to finish
a quick coffee, went out back and
rode on patrol.
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-About an hour after that-- -We hear Scott Township get a
call for a guy robbed a bank.
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-And I hear this go on. And they put out the alert
that the bank, they just had an armed robbery
occur at the bank.
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-And he fled down route 247
coming down towards our area. -I went up onto Route 6.
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Officer Salerno went to Sturges
Road to watch for the car. He ended up seeing the car.
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-So I decided to
try to pull it over. When I did, the
guy took off on me. -And next thing I hear
is one of our guys
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saying that he thinks
he saw the car. And he spins around and
he's going after it.
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Once he put the lights on, he
says, "The guys not stopping. He's going." -At that point the car
decided to go up and around
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different blocks
through the town. You're sitting there
listening to this. And he's going to all the sites.
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-Pursuit ended up
onto Main Street, coming towards the
library we had just left.
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OFFICER PURDY:: When he
pulled onto Main Street, he had a left or right decision.
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A 50-50 chance. Left, he was gone to
the other end of town. Right, he was coming
more closer to me.
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He makes the right. -At that point, we knew
we were headed back onto Keystone where
Officer Purdy lives.
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-He went a block and a half,
there's a traffic light. Now you got three choices.
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Straight left or right. The only bad one
was the left one. That's the one he made.
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-To our surprise,
Officer Purdy was listening to the
pursuit on his radio. OFFICER PURDY:: When he got to
the intersection, that's it,
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I just grabbed my
radio--the portable radio. Ran our, pulled the truck right
to the edge of the driveway.
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-He pulled his car right
out from his driveway, straight across the road. -And I expected to get crushed.
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I was going to get T-boned. I just sat there braced,
and nothing happened. OFFICER COTILLA: The suspect,
thinking that it was a dirt
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road, an alleyway, decides to
turn left into the alleyway. -Comes to a stop. Because at the end of
his driveway is a fence.
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So Officer Cotilla pulls up. I jump out of the car. He backs up into CJ's truck,
and right there we got him.
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Right in the driveway. OFFICER COTILLA:
I couldn't believe that I saw this guy
turning into his driveway.
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Because it's a
dead end driveway. It doesn't go anywhere. It was amazing. -You know, how many
wrong decisions
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can one guy make in a day? If he knew what was
going to happen, he would have stayed in bed
that morning, that's for sure.
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-It's like valet parking. You know, but man, that's got to
mess with your property values.
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Sometimes we hear about a
fellow who can't win for losing. And this crook was truly a
triple threat to himself,
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building up more charges
than a power plant. He's the kind of guy who
gives criminals a bad name.
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Prepare to be dumbfounded. -One Sunday morning, I was in
the office doing some reports.
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Decided I would go
get me something out the vending machine. When I walked into the lobby,
I observed a white female
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with a black dress,
standing, looking around, looking nervous. And I noticed another
gentleman on his knees,
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doing this type of
motion, and the vending machine was rocking
back and forth. On closer,
inspection, I observed
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the subject had
a crowbar and was attempting to break
into the machine. I tapped the female on the
shoulder, had her stand aside.
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Tapped the gentleman
on the shoulder. He dropped the
crowbar of course, They both were arrested.
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While he did that, he mistakenly
parked in the handicapped zone, left his vehicle running, left
it unlocked with the windows
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down. I also gave him a ticket for
parking in the handicapped zone, and leaving the
vehicle unattended.
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To show how some
people are so stupid, he was in the courthouse here
in Covington a few months later,
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and walked past a
gumball machine. Guess he was very tempted,
got a screwdriver,
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and then attempted
to break into it. One of the bailiffs walked by,
and saw the machine missing,
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got to poking around,
opened the door, and caught him red handed. He was then arrested and of
course placed back in jail.
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NARRATOR: In San Francisco,
it's illegal to wipe one's car with used underwear. -I got a call about a bank
robbery that had just occurred.
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And it was within a block and
a half of the police station. So obviously all the units
went right to the scene.
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We had a pretty good
description of him. Didn't wear a mask, didn't wear
gloves, didn't do anything.
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Basically went into the bank. Did show a gun. Took the money and ran. Well, as the
officers in the area
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were looking for witnesses, and
interviewing people, and asking if anybody saw anything, they
went into a coffee shop which
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is right next to
our police station. When they went into
the coffee shop, they asked the people there
if they had seen anything.
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And a woman there said,
"As a matter of fact, a guy came in here. And he was like panicked."
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-Excuse me. I locked my cars in my car. And I was wondering if I could
just get a ride out of here.
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Just get some help. -He came in and said, "I
locked my keys in the car. Can somebody please give
me a ride to my house.
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I'll give them $20." So she said, we'll be happy
to call the police for you. He goes, "No, no, no.
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I don't have my
insurance card with me. I just need somebody
to run me home. I only live two towns away."
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He figured, $20, he offered
this guy a ride home. Meanwhile, our investigators
went out and ran the license
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plate on the car
with the keys in it. And that was our
offender's vehicle. -Get out!
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Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Out of the car! -Once we knew where the
car was, we ran the plate,
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and the police department
from the town where he lived was waiting for him
when he got there.
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We could not believe that
this guy would go out and rob a bank, and lock
his keys in the car.
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-I think they wanted
that guy to get out. -Get out. Get out. -You know, in the
game of Monopoly,
00:17:40
you can buy your way
out of jail for $50. -Yeah. But real life is
not child's play,
00:17:45
as tonight's final
criminal sadly learned. -Do not pass go. Instead, we're going
to the wacky world
00:17:51
of We're Not Making This Up. -We had an individual housed at
the Oklahoma County Detention
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Center being held
for two charges-- both failure to pay
fines and costs. Two individuals came
to bond him out.
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They posted bond for
the first charge, which was in the amount of about $450. They paid by cash.
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As is procedure, our
detention officer checked the bills for
validity, and found
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them all to be good bills. The second bond,
they posted $625. The detention
officer checked it,
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and found that three
of the $100 bills they gave him were
counterfeit bills. D.O. SHAWN CANTRELL: I used
a counterfeit detection pen
00:18:33
that you see used at the banks. And on counterfeit
currency, it turns black. So they sat there and watched
me do it-- check the currency
00:18:41
and watched it turn black. I was kind of surprised. When I checked the bill, I
looked up and kind of expected
00:18:46
to see them running,
but they didn't. And they stood there. -Can you hang on
for just a minute?
00:18:52
Thank you. -So we called the
Secret Service. SHERIFF JOHN WHETSEL: They
were subsequently arrested.
00:18:58
On their person, as
they were being booked, they found three additional
counterfeit bills-- one
00:19:04
being a $100 bill, and
two more $50 bills. -Do you have any money? Do you have any of this?
00:19:09
-Yes sir. -You guys gotta remember
to do both sides. What's up? -Sad part was-- it made
pretty much sense to me--
00:19:19
they had enough money to
pay for it in real money. But they actually tried
to use counterfeit money
00:19:24
to bond out their friend. -This half, is half a dollar. That's all for now, but if
you've got a lead on a story,
00:19:34
or you just can't wait till next
week for more state of the art stupidity, visit our website.
00:19:39
-Our address is
www.dumbcrimes.com. -We want to thank
you for joining us, and extend our gratitude
to the law enforcement
00:19:46
officers who make
this show possible. Every day, they lay
their lives on the line
00:19:50
to keep us safe
from the stupidity of would-be criminals. -As always, we hope we've all
learned from others' mistakes.
00:19:56
-But if you haven't, we
just might see you next week on America's Dumbest Criminals.
00:20:01
[applause] -Hey, you want to see how many
candy bars a $3 bill buys? [music playing]