The 6 Most Baffling Serial Crimes

6 The Amish Hair-Cutting Spree

It's not often you hear about Amish crime rampages, but when you do, they're hilarious.

For instance, in September of 2011 a man who was driving to a horse auction with a bunch of Amish passengers unwittingly became Jamie Foxx in a Mennonite version of Collateral when the passengers requested that he stop at a number of homes along the way. Each time, the men would jump out, race inside the home and then run back out and ask him to keep driving. The driver thought it was weird, but who was he to question the quaint and bizarre customs of the Amish?

It turns out that these men were part of an outcast Amish gang who called themselves the Bergholz Clan, and they frequently terrorized other Amish folk by bursting into their homes and cutting off their victims' beards and hair. The gang leader was an exiled rogue Amish bastard out for revenge, an unpleasant man named Sam Mullet.

No, really. His crime was cutting people's hair, and his name was Mullet. Like an old-school Batman villain.

But Why?

Amish people aren't allowed to shave their hair or beards, as the girth of a man's beard is an indicator of his masculinity, and also apparently God has a problem with it. So the Bergholz Clan decided to strike the Amish community with the worst insult they could conceive.

If you don't understand, it's like a bunch of people bursting in at midnight and stealing guys' dicks.

5 The Serial Butt Slasher

To get the most obvious joke imaginable out of the way right now, holiday shopping in Fairfax County, Virginia, can be a serious pain in the ass. By which we mean someone in Fairfax County shopping malls has literally been randomly stabbing people in the ass.

This was the luck of one 18-year-old shopper as she perused her local Forever 21. While bending over to pick up some clothes that had fallen off a hanger, she felt a sharp pain in her rear, the result of a quick, shallow jab with a knife. Since then, at least nine women have been slashed in the butt, and those are just the ones who came forward. In most cases, the crime is so weird that the victims don't even know they've been assaulted until they hear about the other cases in the news.

The mastermind has refined his strategy to an art -- identifying an unsuspecting and unguarded set of buttocks, the slasher will drop some clothes items off a rack, and when the victim bends down to retrieve them, he goes to work with a razor or box cutter, then swiftly disappears into the night.

But Why?

According to former FBI profiler Gregg McCrary, the butt slasher appears to have a ridiculously specific sexual disorder known as "piquerism," which means that the attacker gets off on cutting butts. Wait, this is common enough that it has a name?

Although no arrests have been made, a police task force created to hunt down the slasher has identified a suspect from security camera footage. But the man appears to have fled town, perhaps moving on to a shopping mall near you.

4 The Elderly Vandal

Vandalism, being the most petty and pointless of crimes, is almost exclusively the work of teenagers. When you find a crude erection spray painted on your fence, you rarely look to the little old bingo enthusiast across the street for answers. That's probably how 62-year-old widow Elaine Meredith got away with it for so long.

Over the course of 10 months, residents in the town of Caldicot in South Wales had been bothered by what they could only assume was a gang of hooligans carving obscene things into the hoods of people's cars. Dozens of vehicles had been targeted, and there was seemingly no way to stop the vandalism short of setting a bunch of bear traps.

One day, 32-year-old Gary Smith heard what sounded like "chalk on a blackboard" outside his home, and upon investigating, discovered Meredith and her dog skulking around his car, which presumably had a half-finished dick carved into it. The lady claimed she had seen a bunch of youths running from the scene, but the paint-encrusted craft knife she was holding seemed to indicate otherwise.

But Why?

The old lady won't admit she was doing it to this day, despite the prosecutor actually bringing in a handwriting expert to confirm that the "FUCK YOU"s etched into the more than two dozen cars were her own work. It's not a case of the lady losing her mind to old age, either -- she showed no signs of dementia.

We just think "Put fuck words on every car in town" was on her bucket list, like she is still working from the list she made when she was 13.

3 The Used Grease Thieves

It starts out like a Hollywood heist caper. A pickup truck pulls into a secluded alley, and a group of career criminals exit the vehicle. They smash apart the lock that stands between them and their bounty and unreel a giant hose, siphoning their loot into tanks loaded in the back of their truck. As quick as they can, they drive away with ...

... a truck full of grease from a Dumpster at the back of a restaurant. Yes, just regular grease. Uh, good work, team?

Yes, proving once and for all that life imitates The Simpsons, a gag plot line that had Homer and Bart ripping off restaurants for their used cooking grease has spawned a real-life crime epidemic in which people are doing exactly that (presumably while running a scam with an auto-dialer in order to fund a plot to saw the head off the town statue and ultimately create a giant shield to block out the sun).

But Why?

Regular kitchen grease can be filtered and purified into something commonly called "yellow grease," a key ingredient in biofuel. With fuel prices shooting up and the boogeyman of peak oil looming, the demand for alternative fuels, and thus the value of grease, has skyrocketed. The street value of grease has gone up about 500 percent in the past decade, making a gallon of grease rival the cost of a gallon of gasoline, and turning black market grease into a hot commodity.

Grease theft has become so widespread and out of control that restaurants are being forced to invest in security measures to protect the disgusting crap you usually blot off your pizza with a napkin. Some are even proposing its theft become a felony crime.

2 The Newspaper Thieves

In Denton County, Texas, a crime epidemic is underway that is taxing police officers and small businessmen to the limit. There's no need to put extra locks on your doors and buy a gun, although if you live in Texas you probably already have three anyway. The criminals are just cleaning out newspaper vending machines.

Those machines have always sort of operated on the honor system -- you pay your 50 cents and the door opens up to the whole stack of newspapers, and they trust you to just take one. It makes sense, because there's no real reason anyone would want more than one, right? The news doesn't get any better if you grab three instead of the one you're entitled to.

But according to news vendor James Johnson, his boxes are being cleaned out up to 25 times a week, and it's gotten so bad that he's had to hire extra staff to do nothing but sit in their cars and stand guard with binoculars. Since then, he's caught 11 newspaper thieves.

But Why?

Apparently the thieves aren't just really excited about the news; they're looking for coupons. Johnson points the blame directly at reality shows like TLC's Extreme Couponing, which follows a bunch of people who manage to save hundreds of dollars a week by obsessively snipping thousands of coupons out of newspapers in exchange for having some kind of life. And the coupon thefts spike dramatically whenever the show is on the air.

Johnson even once nabbed a guy who made such a living off stolen coupons that he was driving a Cadillac Escalade from stand to stand, ripping off coupons like they were stacks of free cash. Another alleged coupon bandit, Sybil Hudson, faces a $4,000 fine and up to a year in jail. But it's worth it, because according to Hudson, couponing "saves millions of bucks." But can't you take some of the cash you saved and just buy the damned newspapers?

1 The Serial Pooper

In September and October of 2011, students at Ft. King Middle School were treated to a series of anonymous donations that appeared on their doorsteps like tiny Christmas miracles. Unfortunately, the gifts were fresh human turds.

After four separate incidents of human shit being dropped unsolicited outside a classroom entrance, police set up a security camera to catch the generous philanthropist in the act of sharing.

Now, clearly this is going to turn out to be a student, right? Some angry kid mad at a teacher and playing a juvenile prank? Who else would take the time to poop in a paper bag and transport it all the way to the school, day after day?

But, no, the security footage they obtained led them to the arrest of 23-year-old Kenneth Martin Sorsony:

... who looks like he was doing a big poop while they were taking his mugshot.

But Why?

We would like to believe that it was all some kind of elaborate, albeit obscure, political satire. Something so brilliant in its style and execution that we mere peons can only speculate wildly about its layers of meaning. But after seeing the mugshot, we have to conclude that this is just a guy who really, really loves to poop.

For more crimes that left our mouths agape, check out The 5 Creepiest Unsolved Crimes Nobody Can Explain and The 5 Most Baffling Attempts to Smuggle Live Animals.