When we watch crime shows on TV, often criminals are made out to be clever and cunning, hatching the most ingenious plans to carry out their capers. However, in reality, there are very few criminals who are actually like this, and most of them stand no chance of escaping the law, partly because they’re… well… not the brightest crayons in the pack. Read on to find out about 10 of the stupidest criminals who didn’t make their great escape.
1.
And finally, a suspect who was being interrogated by police became a victim to their cunning trap. They placed a metal colander on his head, and used wires to attach it to a photocopier. They placed a sheet with the words “He’s lying” printed on it inside the photocopier, and each time they thought he was lying, they pressed the copy button. The suspect believed that the “lie detector” was real, and eventually confessed to his crime.
2.
This one is actually pretty clever from the defendant’s side, but the situation itself is wonderfully stupid. When a man was accused of burglary, his lawyer tried to defend him in court by stating that he merely put his arm through a window and removed a few items, and you cannot punish an entire person for the work of one of their limbs. To this the judge said, “Using your logic, I sentence the defendant’s arm to one year’s imprisonment.” He also made the mistake of saying the defendant could choose whether or not to accompany his arm in prison, not realising that he happened to be the owner of an artificial arm. The defendant and his lawyer removed the arm, placed it on the bench, and left.
3.
A robber was waiting in line at a downtown Bank of America after having written a particularly badly spelled note to give the teller, informing them of his intentions. However, after a few minutes, he began to fear that somebody had seen him write the note and called the police, so instead he made his way to Wells Fargo across the street. He waited in line there, and gave his note to the teller, who read it and judged from the spelling that he must not have been too bright. She said that since the note had been written on a deposit slip for Bank of America, he’d have to go back there or fill out a slip for Wells Fargo instead. The robber returned to the Bank of America whilst she called the police, who arrested him a few minutes later whilst he was still in line.
4.
A man on trial for drugs possession claimed that he had been searched without warrant. When told that the officer had not needed a warrant to search him because there was a chance the bulge in his pocket could have been a gun, he brushed it off as nonsense and gave the judge his jacket to examine. The judge found a packet of cocaine in the man’s pocket and required a five minute recess because he found it so funny.
5.
In Maryland, a couple of burglars tried to cut into a safe. However, they hadn’t done an awful lot of research into the tools they should use, because they were using a laser tag gun. The robbery was, as you probably guessed, unsuccessful.
Donny Guy robbed two cash registers from a restaurant and vanished. Not for too long though. The cops only had to follow the trail of the white register tape all the way to his home, where he was trying to break open the registers!
Allen Koch walked up to the Citizens and Northern Bank at 12.01pm wearing a ski mask and gloves and holding a gun. Unfortunately the bank was closed and he was unable to enter it. His license plate was noted by the bank employees and he was arrested on the charges of attempted robbery.
This thief chose the wrong house to rob! It was the home of Christian Garces, a Pan-American karate champion and her fellow karate instructors and trainees. They caught him and beat him up, and hopefully scared him for life.
Daniel Glen did not want to rob a store which did not have enough money to make it worthwhile. Hence he called up the sales clerk to find out how much money there was in the cash register. When he walked in to rob the cash register, the police were ready and waiting for him.
Clive Halford was an experienced criminal, but his greed did him in. He loaded his stolen truck with 18 pallets of stolen nickel and copper. But the truck could not take the load and the suspension broke. Obviously he had not learnt his lesson from an earlier theft where his car’s suspension had broken down due to the load of stolen goods.
Carlos De Luna was found under a truck when Wanda Lopez was killed in a gas station. De Luna told the judge that Carlos Hernandez was the person they were looking for but despite the other man’s colorful criminal record, they ignored his pleas. De Luna was executed in 1989.
Larry Griffin was arrested after Quintin Moss was shot to death in 1980. Even though his fingerprints could not be found at the crime scene, other evidence was allegedly found against him. He was executed in 1995 and 10 years later a professor declared that Larry was indeed, innocent.
Ruben Cantu and David Garza robbed two men at gunpoint in 1984. One of the victims panicked and started looking for his pistol because of which the two boys started shooting and killed him. Even though no evidence was found, Cantu was convicted and executed.
David Spence was convicted on the grounds that he raped and killed three girls in Texas. The man received the death penalty even though no concrete evidence was found against him.
Jesse Tafero, Walter Rhodes and Sonia Jacobs were found by three police officers in 1976. Rhodes says that Tafero then shot at the two officers. He also said that the other two were responsible and he was released after about 20 years from jail. Tafero was executed in 1990 but it was recently found that Rhodes had shot at the officers, not him.
According to research, over 11 women have been linked to this serial killer- they are either missing or dead. He carried out these murders over a course of 16 years and made sure that some of them would never be found. Robinson had four children and was passionate about two things- murder and money.
Larry Eyler attacked his victims and killed them on highways which is why he was referred to as the Highway Killer. He would lure men towards secluded area, beat them up and murder them. His victims were almost always disemboweled. Eyler eventually confessed that he had killed 21 people.
Kurten killed young women every week during 1929. The bodies would be found horribly mutilated and slashed to death. He confused the police and made it seem like he was helping them find the bodies. This serial killer killed over 30 people but allegedly said that he would have liked to kill more simply because he enjoyed it.
After a brief stint with the army, Shawcross returned to America and married four different women over the years. He started killing young boys and girls in 1972- he would take them to isolated areas and strangle them to death. He spent 15 years in jail after which he started killing prostitutes.
Long would first rape women and then murder them- he took nine lives in 1 year. He was very accident prone when he was growing up and his mother was overly protective of him. By the time he was arrested, he had killed 9 and raped 50 women.
This fraud is kick-started when a dishonest person approaches that industry which looks into the repair and maintenance of cars. He tells them that he would like to be associated with such an accident that will make sense or exist nowhere else but on legal documents and papers. Because insurance companies tend to involve themselves only when the claim is above and beyond 1000 dollars, these criminals get away with it.
The criminal will orchestrate a seemingly real hit and run accident and go running to your insurance company. You will have no choice but to pay up the required amount.
The swindler will run towards a car that is moving at a great speed and suddenly come to halt, that is, squat, in front of it. An involved individual will appear in his car out of no where and move adjacent to the victim’s who will then try to keep himself from having an accident. The worst part is that chiropractors and doctors are usually involved in such cases.
This criminal in this case will move towards you and force you to have an accident. This is usually done in such intersections that are confusing simply because they have too many lanes and turns. Therefore, when you are traveling on such a street, make sure a car doesn’t overtake you from your left and force you to collide into them.
This technique is usually carried out during that time of the day or year when nobody really drives about. This is because the criminals want to make sure that there are no eye witnesses around. The swindler will patiently wait at the mouth of the intersection and smash his car into a passing vehicle. They will then allow their own ‘witnesses’ to speak to the authorities and you will be in major trouble.
This man killed over 300 people and was referred to as the Monster of Andes. By 1978, this ruthless serial killer had wiped out about 100 tribal women of Peru. Lopez went on to reside in Ecuador soon after and killed a minimum of 4 girls on a weekly basis. Lopez created a mass grave to bury his victims which was discovered unexpectedly.
Henry Lee Lucas initially bragged that he had killed over 3,000 people but after investigations, this number was brought down to 100. With the help of Ottis Toole, he managed to kill people almost every other day and died in 2001 in prison.
Ludke was only 18 years old when he had killed at least 85 women in 1927. He liked to attack women and molested them on a daily basis. He would stab or strangle them after sexually assaulting them. He was sent to a mental asylum wherein the doctors tested several chemicals on him. He died in 1944 when an experiment went wrong.
This man from Russia killed about 53 women and an equal number of children for 15 years till 1991. He picked those people who lived on the streets and his crimes were extremely violent. He would stab his victims over 25 times until he was sexually satisfied. He confessed to about 55 murders in 1990 and three of the bodies were not found.
From 1973 till 1980, Gerald Stano killed mostly hitch-hikers and prostitutes. Even though he did not sexually assault his victims, he made sure they were stabbed countless number of times or strangled till their eyes popped out. He was executed in 1998 on an electric chair.
David Goodhall along with two women tried to steal a few curtains from a store in South Yorkshire. The three were oblivious to the fact that the home supplies shop was holding a store detectives’ convention.
Charles A. Meriweather was 18 years old when he broke into a young woman’s house and raped her. When he realized that she did not have too much cash lying around, he asked her how she managed to pay her bills. She said that she paid by checks after which her ordered her to write out a check for 50 dollars. He was also smart enough to tell her his name after she asked him who she should make it out to.
A thief in England came up with a smart plan to clean out the cash register at a grocery store. He entered the checkout area with a few groceries, threw a 10 pound bill on the counter and gathered the cash register’s contents. The cash amounted to about 4.37 pounds which means that the thief lost 5.63 pounds.
Pedro Alonso Lopez was born to a prostitute in a Columbian environment, where crime was evolved. As a young boy, he was approached by a man who felt sorry for his situation, but then molested the boy. When he was 12, Lopez was molested by a male teacher. After that, he stole some money and lived in the streets. Lopez decided to get revenge by raping and killing. He has been one of the most dangerous serial killers ever. With a victim count of more than 300, children at most, he was infamously known as the monster of Andes. By 1978, he had killed about 100 tribal women in Peru. After 20 years of solitary confinement, Lopez was set free in 1998, even though he promised to kill again and again. Reasons being is that Peru did not have enough money for Justice. Lopez’s present whereabouts are unknown.
Henry Lee Curtis was born to an abusive mother. She would dress him up as a girl and curl his hair. Then she would make him go to school like that. By the time Lucas was thirteen years old, he was introduced to sex and animal torture by his older half brother. He committed his first crime when he strangled a seventeen year old female for resisting his efforts to rape her. At eighteen years old, Lucas spent six years in prison for burglary, and in 1959, he stabbed his seventy four year old mother to death. Charged for a second degree murder, he received forty years in prison. Lucas was released ten years later, even though he did not want to leave prison, but after only eighteen months of freedom, was back again for molesting two teenagers. All together, the number of victims Lucas had ranged from 189 to 600 between the years 1960 to 1983. Henry Lee Lucas died in 2001 in prison of heart failure at the age of 64.
Ludke was arrested in 1943, after a body of a 51 year old female was found near his home, strangled. Ludke admitted to have killed at least 85 more women, dating back to 1928. Each time he killed, he had sex with the corpses. It was unclear whether Ludke really did commit the murders as therhe was no evidence, such as fingerprints. It was at some point believed that Kriminalkommissar Franz used to clear up his unresolved cases, and hand them over to Ludke. It was also very unusual that Ludke could get away with murder for over 20 years, yet could get caught stealing something like chicken. Ludke was put in Vietnamese hospital instead of prison to have him experimented. He died in 1944 after an injection during an experiment.
Russia would never have a criminal in the country until this man’s crimes came to life. Chikatilo was a good husband and father, and only his wife and two children saw the gentle and calm side of him. Chikatilo was a very troubled man, and was seen as sociopathic to the ones around him. At the time that the crimes began, Russia was still a communist country. Therefore, the crimes he committed would unnoticeable. Chikatilo, a former teacher, would sexually abuse both boys and girls. The amount of killings came to such amount that the crimes could no longer be avoided. Chikatilo chose his victims by the “undesirables”, those who were seen as a lower class to him, such as prostitutes. Chikatilo was convicted of crime, and and sentenced to death. In 1994, he was instructed to stare at the wall and not look anywhere else. He was shot in the head.
Stano was an adopted child of Eugene and Norma Stano, who were unable to have their own children. Stano’s biological mother had three children whom she put up for adoption. She then had a girl who suffered a brain damage, and the girl was the only one whom she decided to keep. Statno was believed to be neglected, both physically and emotionally. Gerarld, who was first known as Paul, was considered to be unadoptable as a result of severe neglect. Even after Norma and Eugene adopted him, Statno had to be examined by physician, psychologists, and social workers. It was his adoption that seemingly led to Stano crimes. Stano killed over 40 women, including 17 year old hitchhiker, Cathy Lee Scharft. On March 23, 1998, he was put into an electric chair in Florida State Prison.
