6 Totally Confusing Crime Sprees That Are Baffling Police
Not every unsolved crime is committed by a criminal mastermind. For every Zodiac Killer still on the loose, there are a dozen people who are uncaught not because they're outsmarting the law at every turn, but because they're so crazy that not even Batman could predict their actions. We've assembled a gallery of the strangest rogues you might one day find in Arkham's minimum security wing. Hopefully. Otherwise, they'll keep doing bizarre shit like ...
Someone Has Been Throwing An Inhuman Amount Of Urine Down A Building's Garbage Chute
The residents of 301 Cumberland Street in New York City have a problem, and it's not other citizens making fun of their exceedingly British name. According to the Brooklyn real estate site Brownstoner.com, a low-budget Howard Hughes has been filling trash bags with urine and dumping them down the garbage chute, where they burst open in the basement like Satan's catheter bag. This isn't like someone throwing out dirty diapers -- we're talking Naked-Gun-level urinations, like the amount of water you'd bring with you on a long camping trip, or a small Coke at a movie theater. It's disgusting.
And yes, of course we have pictures.
We're a little offended that you'd even ask.
One of those trash bags can hold 50 liters, while an adult bladder can hold up to 600 milliliters (unless you're in the window seat of a six-hour flight, at which point it inexplicably shrinks by 90 percent). So either someone is carefully bottling their urine for later distribution, or a resident is secretly keeping a herd of goats as pets. Worst of all, the communal laundry room is located in the same basement where the golden tsunamis periodically take place, so the whole building now stinks for a variety of reasons.
The building's management was long aware of the problem, but never felt a pressing need to address it, possibly thinking that if they could hold their concerns in a little longer and get through the day, they'd avoid any embarrassing incidents. When residents forced the issue, presumably with an email that read "Look, we live in New York, we already deal with more than enough human waste," management heroically put up the following memo:
"If you keep doing this, we'll be forced to move you to one of our Long Island or Jersey properties."
We're sure a polite, rational request will really connect with someone who's bagging and tossing their own waste. "Oh, so that's what the toilet is for? I thought it was for getting rid of my dead goldfish and leftover soup! Sorry everyone, my bad!" On the off chance this doesn't work, we'd love to see the ensuing door-to-door inspection, which you just know will feature a tense argument during which a resident will insist they have a bottle of apple juice, but no one will believe them unless they take a big gulp. If that fails too, they might have to consider truly drastic measures, like a single cheap security camera.
Someone Keeps Flipping Over Smart Cars In San Francisco
If you live in San Francisco and you own a Smart car, there's a good chance you might leave your home to go to work at a tech startup one morning, only to find your precious vehicle in this position:
They even tore off the "coexist" bumper sticker.
Or this one:
Ah, the beautiful Smart car mating pose.
Or even this one:
Wait, is that the first car again? Time to get a garage, man.
Seriously, this keeps happening. Smart car flipping has been coming and going in waves, possibly because the vehicles travel in packs. In April 2014, four cars were found flipped over like sad, wounded animals. What makes it even more tragic was that one victim was "babysitting her friend's Smart car," and yet even with that added layer of security it was ... wait, what? How do you babysit a car? Do you read it Good Night, Hub Cap?
Anyway, two more were flipped over in June, and all jokes aside, it's a dickish thing to do, considering the body damage and shattered windows that result. But that hasn't stopped the crime wave from spreading -- copycat hooligans flipped a smart car at Ohio State University, either as a wacky college prank or an expression of the existential angst that comes from getting your higher education in Ohio. There's even a forum for affected Smart car owners to share their annoyance and exchange vegan cauliflower brownie recipes.
They wanted to organize a meetup, but they were afraid the street would look like it was hit by a tornado.
No arrests have been made, although a witness saw a group of six to eight people in hooded sweatshirts flip a car at around one in the morning, so the evidence would point to drunken frat boys venting their anger over Krystal not wanting to go home from the strip club with them. Other suspects include SUV manufacturers, the Hulk, and stiff breezes.
The Case Of The Topiary Dick Vandal
In what might be the aftermath of an Edward-Scissorhands-like experiment gone even wronger, some anonymous, phallus-obsessed plant-pruner in Windsor, Ontario has been turning public plants into ... uh, pubic plants. What do we mean? We mean exactly what you imagined:
"It's a grower, not a shower."
One reporter who wrote about this hard journalism story referred to the mystery gardener as a "bushwhacker" in her headline, and then presumably high-fived herself for ten minutes. According to locals, the dick shrub stood majestically for a while until photos of it went viral, forcing the city to enact some painful surgery.
The blind mohel they hired did a great job.
However, that wasn't the end of the penile crime spree. After striking twice in October 2013, he (we're assuming it's a he, because come on) took a break before getting even more creative in November, because we all know that performing three times in a row would be exhausting and, frankly, not very enjoyable. His most recent effort involved carefully spelling out a word with garlands, and you get two guesses as to what that word was.
What the hell is a "PENTS?"
City officials weren't amused -- at least, not after the initial giggling they had to disguise as a fit of coughing when their boss glared at them. But, reasoning that they'd have more success with carrots that look like dicks than sticks that look like dicks, the executive director of parks publicly offered the vandal -- nay, the artisan -- a job interview, saying that the mystery gardener "put a lot of effort" into his dicksculptures and is clearly "very, very good ... at being able to, uh, shape things." Unfortunately for Windsor, it appears nothing ever came of that outreached hand offering a job. Fortunately for us, that means he's still out there and available to work on our new stately country manor. So drop us a line, man.
Someone Has Pooped On 19 Cars Since 2012
Look, we've all been stuck in traffic and wanted to take a monster shit on the hood of the guy in front of us who doesn't understand that his horn doesn't cast a magic anti-red-light spell. But while most of us are able to resist the urge, either because we know it's wrong or because we don't want to shame our families with the court case, one Akron, Ohio man has been giving in to his base desires for over three years.
Yup, that's pretty much exactly what we'd expect a Mad Pooper to look like.
The news describes him as having "wandered" through an Akron community, like a shit Ronin looking to offer his services when and where the people need him. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to his actions. Some cars are victimized multiple times. Sometimes the hood is targeted, and sometimes the mirror gets it. And sometimes he leaves an extra-special passenger in the copilot seat like he's starring in the world's worst PSA about always leaving your doors locked. It's gotten so bad that the cops have even created a map of his attacks, presumably in the hopes that the pattern ends up forming a shape that will crack the case, like in a Batman comic.
It's probably just a poop emoji, though.
Despite that, and the fact that someone actually managed to photograph him in the act, there are still no leads about his identity. You can read a timeline of his crimes, if you want to see a journalist's dream of becoming the next Edward R. Murrow die a little bit more with each instance of "pooped." Don't despair, brave reporter: There are questions we want you to investigate. What do police believe motivates this man? Anti-authority statements? Art? What are residents doing to protect their cars? And why has this guy been on the runs for three years when all it would take to catch him is a seemingly empty police car with an officer hiding under a tarp in the backseat?
The city of Ohio has yet to offer the car pooper a job.
Almost 2,000 Dollars In Chewing Gum Has Been Stolen In Southern Sweden
You've all seen the movie scene. A motley collection of career criminals sit around a card table covered with blueprints in an isolated warehouse. There's the smooth-talker, the sultry seductress, the tech geek ... and their charismatic leader, who strolls out of the shadows, leans on the table, stares down his gang, and announces, "Ladies and gentleman, tonight we steal enough gum to keep our ears from popping on airplanes for life."
OK, so that's probably not what happened. But we challenge you to offer up a better explanation for how and why Sweden is experiencing a gum thieving spree so large that every school desk in the country could have an unpleasant surprise left under it. Wait, shit, is that the plan? You monsters.
Can a nation declare martial detention?
It began in November 2014, when 184 packets were stolen from what we assume was an Ikea. A suspect was caught and said he planned to exchange the gum for a jacket, which raises serious questions about Sweden's economy. The same presumed Ikea was struck for an even greater loss on New Year's Eve, and this arrested suspect (apparently the thieves we dreamt up need to spring for a getaway driver) claimed he was planning to give the gum to his friends. Either this guy throws terrible New Year's parties, or Sweden's collapse into a barter society has hit them harder than we realized.
A different probable Ikea was hit for over 800 packs, if our Swedish math is correct. A police press officer offered up an official bemused shrug, stating "I have no idea why chewing gum has become such a popular thing to steal. It has no value unless you steal so many packages." Uh, dude, you kind of addressed your own confusion there. But here's a possible explanation the investigators seem to have bypassed: It's Romania's fault. In 2012, England went through a similar gum-related crime spree, which was the work of Romanian thieves. It turns out that in Romania, packs of gum are often used instead of pocket change. Oddly enough, as we worked on this article, "large-scale store thefts of chewing gum" were reported in the dick shrub capital of the world (Windsor, Ontario), and an international crime gang hasn't been discarded as an explanation. A possible member was caught on tape while relieving a store of some packets:
Dude, you've got Snickers right there.
By the time you read this, the gum bandits might have even reached your city. In the meantime, Sweden continues its investigation, with police planning to stake out baseball diamonds, convenience store parking lots frequented by rebellious pre-teens, and additional Ikeas.
An Elderly Man's House Has Been Egged Over 100 Times In A Year
Egging houses is one of those pranks that's hilarious when you're 13 or Justin Bieber, but once you get older or less of a shithead, you realize that it's a particularly annoying act of property damage. We consider it a titanic struggle to clean up after we fuck up an attempt at a fancy omelet flip, so we can only imagine the annoyance an 85-year-old Ohio man feels at his house getting egged on a consistent basis since March 2014. These are no normal eggings, though -- whoever is doing this throws the eggs from at least a couple of blocks away, apparently using some sort of launcher or catapult.
Or chickens fed a literal buttload of ex-lax.
"Somebody is deeply, deeply angry at somebody in that household for some reason," reads the official police statement, which offers little useful information beyond additional proof that making statements is kind of skimmed over at police academy. Is this one of those old men who gives out pennies and toothbrushes on Halloween? Is Ohio's mad pooper branching out to chicken-butt-related crimes? Did someone once comment that the house's exterior would look nicer in eggshell white and there's been a horrible misunderstanding ever since?
The homeowner seems oddly admiring of his attacker's accuracy, but being woken up at two in the morning by avian artillery can't be fun. To their credit, the police aren't screwing around -- they've held undercover stakeouts, installed surveillance cameras, canvassed the neighborhood, and sent the eggshells to the lab for testing, because apparently Euclid, Ohio isn't exactly a hotspot of criminal activity. Then again, when they aren't doing that, they're giving the egged home's owner citations for violating the city's housing codes with his ugly-ass facade.
"It's not the egg stains -- it's that atrocious green."
The cops even had a suspect, but he was ruled out when they saw him on the street "as an attack occurred in the presence of police." Unless that was all part of his plan. At this point, their biggest clue is that the culprits have access to a large number of eggs, so that narrows the pool of suspects down to anyone who knows what a grocery store is. There's even a $1,000 bounty on information. So if you've ever thought of entering the private investigation business and wouldn't object to a lifetime label of "The Eggcellent Detective" if you crack the case, this could be your big break.
You can read more from Mark, including the story of the mysterious culprit who won't stop blasting "Rico Suave" outside his bedroom window at three in the morning, at his website.
Also check out The 7 Most Incredible Crime Sprees Carried Out by Animals and 5 Criminals Who Were Hilariously Good at Escaping Jail.
