The 6 Most Hilariously Stupid Criminal Excuses of All Time

6 I'm Not Drunk, But the Horse Is

Let's say you live in a rural area. It goes without saying you've drank an entire six pack, because it is mandated by the county and there's absolutely nothing else to do anyway. Presently, you get the urge to visit your sweetheart, but you don't have a car, and he or she isn't a member of your immediate family. However, there is a horse nearby. So what do you do? If you said "drunkenly steal that goddamn horse," then you are thinking like Tracy Nadine Ellenburg.

A concerned citizen of Six Mile, South Carolina, contacted police after spotting Ellenberg erratically drunk-riding the contraband stallion down the middle of Main Street (the citizen's ability to distinguish between drunken and sober horseback riding should have been immediately commended).

Ellenburg had parked her horse before police arrived, but the officer on scene was able to locate it anyway, because it was the only horse tied to a bench outside a convenience store.

The officer confronted Ellenburg, who stank of alcohol, swayed and slurred her defiant insistence that she was sober, which you may recognize as a level of drunkenness so spectacular that people mimic it when they are pretending to be drunk. Regardless, not only did Ellenburg deny any wrongdoing, she actually blamed the horse, which, if you remember from before, was stolen. She declared that the horse was drunk, not her, and therefore the horse was at fault for the erratic riding.

The police, not appreciating having witnessed one of the seven wonders of the drunken excuse world, cited Ellenburg for disorderly conduct.

5 We're Not Stealing, We Thought Everything Was Free

A woman in St. Paul, Minnesota, was tucking her children into bed when she heard a noise somewhere in her house. Going downstairs to investigate, she spotted a man and a woman running full-tilt out the back door, like that one kid at sleepovers who refused to poop anywhere but at his own house. The woman chased after the intruders and found them loading bags of her stuff onto their bicycles, presumably because they had learned everything they knew about criminality from the evil baseball team in The Sandlot.

They were thwarted hilariously when a neighbor blocked them in with his car and called the police. The thieves, Charles and Pernella Bull, had attempted to make off with a laptop, a desktop computer, a toolbox, the woman's purse and a few other odds and ends. On their bicycles. We cannot stress this enough.

When questioned, Mrs. Bull said that a friend had told her that the address was listed as a "free house" on Craigslist, which meant that the owners were moving out in a hurry, so anyone was free to just show up and take whatever they wanted. You may recognize this as the daffiest pile of bullshit in the history of lies told by anyone above the age of 4.

Mrs. Bull said she had called out to ask if anyone was there when she walked into the house (you know, the house with all the lights on and a purse sitting on the counter), but when no one answered, she figured it was vacant and starting loading up the bicycles. The police weren't able to find the alleged "free house" listing on Craigslist, most likely because at no point in the course of human history had it ever existed, so the Bulls were arrested.

4 I'm Not a Bad Driver, It Was a Tarantula Attack

As Lee Solarski was tooling along one day, he crashed his car into both a mailbox and a pickup truck, as one does. Being a responsible citizen, he immediately drove the ballshits away, not realizing that a witness had written down his license plate number.

When the police tracked him down, Solarski explained that he'd crashed because his passenger had a tarantula in the car with them. The tarantula had gotten loose and was biting Solarski, causing him to lose control of the car during the attack. To his credit, we admit a rampaging tarantula would be enough of a reason to crash anything.

The police searched the car but didn't find the offending spider, which we figure came as a relief to whichever officer drew search-the-car-for-a-secret-tarantula duty. After a similarly thorough search of Solarski failed to produce any spider bites, he was arrested. So ... did he make up the spider story on the spot? Is that his go-to excuse? Does he really have a friend with a tarantula who he blames everything on? "Hey, honey, I see you've stumbled across the folder full of porn Steve's tarantula put on my computer."

Though that's actually not the worst vehicular-related crime excuse we've ever heard. A Cincinnati man walked out to his car one morning and was surprised to find a guy asleep inside without any pants on. The half-naked sleeper turned out to be Kim LeBlanc, who told police that he'd done drugs and was pretty sure a leprechaun had opened the car door and let him in. He offered no explanation as to why a leprechaun would have told him to wait inside a stranger's automobile, or where the aforementioned leprechaun had gone with his pants.

3 I'm Not Drunk, I'm a Werewolf

It had been a quiet night at the Timber Ridge Campground in northern Ohio until Thomas Stroup hit the vodka a little too hard. Someone called the police, complaining that Stroup was in a drunken frenzy and was starting fights with people. He had even kicked a dog cage in his fury.

Deputies found Stroup passed out in his trailer, surrounded by swords and knives, which, along with throwing stars and a magnetic dartboard, are required to be placed in every odd-numbered unit in a trailer park. When they woke him up, Stroup only growled at them. Once he finally started talking, he spoke in a Russian accent and threatened to kill the deputy's cousin Keith, only the deputy didn't have a cousin named Keith, so instead of being flushed with terror, the threat just left everyone feeling confused.

After being unsuccessful in his attempt to intimidate the deputy, Stroup explained that a wolf had scratched him during a recent trip to Germany, so now whenever the moon was out, he felt compelled to prowl through the night and attack (and evidently kill guys named Keith).

Stroup also mentioned that he'd been arrested by German police during his trip for drinking too much and blacking out in public. His passport indicated that he had, in fact, been arrested in Germany, but the police wisely connected the dots and determined that, rather than getting scratched by a wolf and turning into a feral demon, Stroup had just drank too much and turned into an asshole.

2 103? Thought I Was Going 031

A worried driver called police when he saw another motorist yelling and waving a cigarette around while erratically changing lanes at high speed (if he had been waving a gun instead of a cigarette, everyone would've just kept driving). Responding officers clocked Matthew Cook doing 103 in a 60 mph zone, but Cook had an explanation: his dyslexia kept him from understanding the speedometer.

We should note here that dyslexia does not in fact keep a person from feeling the forces of acceleration or from looking out their goddamn windows and seeing that cars are blurring past them like the stars in hyperspace. Also, even if Cook had a numeric speedometer and was dyslexic with numbers, he would still know he was looking at three digits. Unless you are on a racetrack, on the Autobahn or in freaking space, you are driving too fast.

Regardless, Cook didn't have the chance to argue his claim, because his speedometer read like a dial, and the court didn't buy that dyslexia would make him unable to understand that he was burying the needle. Cook's license was revoked.

1 It's Not a Crime, It's Method Acting

Detective Robert DiGiacomo was on the lookout for a suspect who started a fairly lame crime spree by stealing a bottle of water and face-punching a convenience store clerk. As DiGiacomo sat idling in his Chevy Impala, the passenger door opened and a man climbed in. Micah Calamosca, who would actually turn out to be the clerk-punching water bottle thief, then told DiGiacomo to get out of the car because he was totally stealing it.

When DiGiacomo finally stopped laughing and had a chance to wipe the tears of hilarity from his eyes, he pulled out his gun and arrested Calamosca. But Calamosca had a ready-made excuse: The movie The Dark Knight Rises was filming nearby.

Calamosca explained that he was involved in the filming of the latest Batman movie and that the script had called for him to steal the detective's vehicle. The fact that there was a staggering lack of cameras, film crew and Christian Bale anywhere near the scene of the carjacking made the story hard to believe, though, so Calamosca was hauled off to jail.

But even his excuse was a bit more plausible than that given by a guy who robbed a Belfast lingerie store, making off with bras, underwear, garter belts and stockings. At his trial, the man claimed that he didn't really remember what he was thinking during the robbery, but that Beho, his female elf character, might have had something to do with it.

He said he had been playing Shadowrun, a role-playing game set in a cyberpunk/magical future. His character, Beho, was an elven shaman who carried a Japanese sword, and the man claimed he had lost the ability to separate the fictional game world from reality. The judge didn't buy this, presumably because there is no quest in Shadowrun that requires you to go steal an armload of panties at knifepoint, even though that exact setup describes 70 percent of the games currently sold in Japan.

For more just awful criminals, check out 6 Baffling Mistakes Criminals Apparently Make All the Time. Or learn about 5 Real Bank Heists Ripped Right Out of the Movies.