America's Dumbest Criminals Read Online Free

tormentors, the lit dynamite still hissing at its side. Kerry and David ran. The coyote followed. It would rush one way, zig and zag, then chase after the other guy. Finally, the coyote ran for the nearest cover, which was a five-by-eleven-foot shaded area—right under the new Blazer.
    The situation had quickly turned from bad to worse. The terrible two were now the ones scared, confused, and panicked. And they, like their little victim, were helpless. They couldn’t chase him off. They couldn’t drag him out. They couldn’t even get near him. In fact, they had to run even faster now . . .
    Kaboom! Bye-bye, Blazer.
    Dumbfounded, the two ghoulies were suffering the consequences of their evil. They were thirty miles from home and stranded in the middle of the desert. No guns, no beer, no water, no whatever else they had brought with them— not to mention the loss of a twenty-thousand-dollar vehicle.
    When the two were finally rescued and the investigation completed, the two faced charges of animal cruelty and other violations against nature. And once the truth was out, the insurance company refused to cover the Blazer.
    It wasn’t enough. But that little coyote, although doomed, had at least managed to give them a small taste of what they deserved.

15
    â€œNot by the Hair of My Chinny-Chin-Chin!”
    C harlie Hackett, chief of police in Kokomo, Indiana, tells this story about dumb criminals determined to live high on the hog:
    â€œSomeone called in a complaint about some rustling going on out in the country. My partner and I were working organized crime at the time, but we were the only ones on duty, so we had to go. We found that this farmer had been losing big time—twenty-five or thirty hogs in all—but not all at once. Those hogs had been disappearing one at a time, one a night. And each time the rustlers had managed to take the whole pig. The farmer had found blood, but no carcasses.”
    Hackett and his partner staked out the area the next night. Before long, they saw a big station wagon rolling down a little lane near the hog pens. Three or four men got out. The officers used night lenses to watch the suspects walk down the lane toward the hog pens. Then the commotion started.
    â€œThey were running,” Hackett remembers, “and the hogs were running. Then one of the guys pulled out a .22-caliber rifle and popped one of the hogs. He shot again, and the hog went down.
    â€œWell, we backed off at that point, knowing they would have to come back down the lane with the hog they had shot. So we’re sitting there waiting for them to get onto the highway so we can stop them. Sure enough, they came zipping down. We pulled them over.”
    The two officers approached the vehicle and peered inside, expecting to catch the rustlers red-handed. But all they saw were two men in the front seat, three men in the back—and no sign of a recently deceased hog.
    One of the officers peered into the rear of the station wagon. “Nothing back there but an old seat,” he said. Then they looked more closely and realized it was the backseat of the station wagon. The officers asked the men in the backseat to get out.
    â€œNow, it didn’t look too bad,” Hackett says. “There was a seat cover over what appeared to be the backseat. One of our guys reached in and pulled off the cover.”
    It wasn’t a seat at all. It was a very large, very dead hog. “We don’t know how they did it, how they got that hog into the backseat—it must have weighed around five hundred pounds.”

    Those hogs had been disappearing one at a time, one a night.
    But that’s not the end of our little pig tale.
    â€œLater on, we got a search warrant to go back to the house where one of these guys lived, and we found a small, live pig this guy had previously taken. We kept her for evidence, and one of our officers took her home to keep for the trial. By the time the trial