America's Dumbest Criminals - Season 4, Episode 1 - Blunted Burglary - Full Episode | Forensic Files

NARRATOR: Tonight on America's Dumbest Criminals, what's the use of having a disguise if you don't wear it properly?
What's the most essential item if you're planning a shootout with police? These guys didn't know the answer.
And which was less sharp-- the blade of this antique knife or the thief who tried to pocket it?
For these and other cutting revelations, don't move a muscle. It's time for America's Dumbest Criminals.
[theme music] NARRATOR: Now welcome your hosts for ADC-- Daniel Butler and Debbie Alan.
-Thanks for joining us. We've got a cornucopia of crooked calamities to bring your way tonight.
Cornucopia-- is that more than a quart? -Yeah. But less than a gallon. -OK. Good.
Alright, look what I've got right here. Can you identify this? -Oh, that's easy.
That's fake money. That's counterfeit. You know I know that? -How? -Because Jesse "The Body" Ventura's picture
isn't on the three dollar bill. -You are absolutely right. -That's it. Elton John's is.
-I guess it wouldn't be smart to try to outsmart you. -Can't be done, Little Debbie.
-Can't be avoided most days. Well you can count on counterfeit money being passed off later in the show.
But now we're going to tend to other matters. -First up let's explore the system of checks and balances.
In this case, it's a bank robber who left behind a check that tossed him into the balances of the justice system.
-He's not just caught. He's caught on camera. [police siren] -It was kind of strange for us.
Especially in a rural county like this. I was working day shift. And I got a call to respond to a local bank for a robbery alarm.
Well of course when we got to the bank, the robber was no longer there. And I was told by the cashier that when the robber left,
he had dropped a lot of the money that he took. In the money on the floor, it was also
an envelope that he brought with him. Well we looked in this envelope and there was a check.
On the back of the check was a robbery note that said, "Stay of the alarm. Give me the money."
So he'd written the robber note on the back of a check which turned out to be made out to him.
Bank records revealed this person actually had an account with the bank he was trying to rob.
So he was pretty easy to track down after that. As a matter of fact, about four or five hours later,
he called the sheriff's office and told us where he was, and turned himself in. -That's an endorsement.
How dumb can they get? Alright, well this lout was dumb enough to identify his loot as part of his take.
-Here's the story of a hairball with an heirloom in a classic case of something to remember me by.
-We had a break-in call from one of our ocean cottages. They entered the house by an upstairs window.
And at the time I was processing the crime scene, patrol officers went out and located someone
unloading the property from the house, and were brought to the station. And upon questioning them, they said
they had bought these items not 15, 20 minutes ago from another area in town. So I went back to the crime scene,
looked again, and was able to retrieve a silver pocket knife in between the runs of a homemade stairs.
And so I brought it back to the station. I had to get him to say that it was his belonging.
So what we did was we placed all the items on the table. Everybody had cleaned out their pockets.
One by one, each person came and got their personal items so we could inventory them, and process
them before going to the jail. And the suspect picked up the silver knife and placed it in his bag with his other belongings.
So I went back to his bag, emptied it out, and I went through each item and made him speak about each item.
And when I got to the silver knife, he said, "That's an antique. My grandfather gave it to me."
I said, "What does it say?" And he said, "Silver Pheasant." He read that from a distance.
And claimed it to be his. This is the knife that I found in between the runs of the stairs at the crime scene.
He picked the right knife, so we took him to jail. -You know, it must be really hard to be
a good robber these days. I mean, there are just so many details that must be addressed,
you know. -You've got to plan your disguise. -Yeah well, your entry. -Your weapon.
-Your tough guy dialogue. -And your escape. -You know, with so much on your mind,
it's easy to overlook something. -And in this next story, the something that got overlooked
was pretty important. Take a look. -Very recently we had an armed robbery at one of the convenience stores.
A fella said he had a gun, had his arm in the right pocket of his coat, and demanded money.
He got the money. He left. But he was quickly arrested. The clerks come to find out, thought
it was a joke at first because he'd been in there all day long, in and out. He comes every day.
When he robbed the place, he had a ski mask on, but it seems as though he forgot to pull the ski mask down.
The clerk thought it was a joke at first. But I guess when he said he had a gun,
she figured it might have been for real. But it didn't really seen it was his day.
Not only had he forgotten to pull his ski mask down, but when he left the building, as he was dropping
the ski mask, as he was ditching his coat so he wouldn't be recognized, he didn't really realize
that we had had a stake out in the area. He was quickly apprehended. And he's facing a lot of time.
NARRATOR: In Arizona, it's illegal for donkeys to sleep in bathtubs. -It's not uncommon to have a bit of an identity crisis
at some stressful time in your life. But for a woman in Chickasaw, Alabama that stressful time came when an officer pulled her over
and she had trouble remembering just who she was. See what I mean. -A woman got stopped on the side of the road
for a traffic violation. And the officer walked up to her and he said, "What is your name?"
And she says, "My name's Jane Smith and my date of birth is so and so." He says, "Ma'am, I know you're not telling the truth.
You still got your name tag on from work right here, and it says your name is Mary Hudson."
Now we've given her a new name. Prisoner CH1033. -OK. First, they got away from a Nevada bank with $350,000.
But in their desperation to get away from police, they got away from everything that they
should have kept to themselves. See how haste makes waste in tonight's Blue Light Special.
NARRATOR: When officers closed in on the apartment where the two bank robbers had fled,
they had only a few facts. -They were masked and armed with a firearm and a pipe.
NARRATOR: But when they took a peek inside their getaway car, they found the robbers got away with less than they thought.
In their haste they'd left behind both their weapons and the money. All $350,000.
Armed with this information, police convinced the holdup men they could never hold out for long.
The unarmed men soon realized that their hands were tied and surrendered. -OK. Maybe it's a mean stereotype.
You see somebody with a shirt pocket full of pens, and you think they're kind of nerdy.
But what will you think when you see what this guy's got hanging out of his pocket?
Judge for yourself. -I was on patrol, and I was actually running radar in an area called County Eighth and Pacific Avenue, here
in Yuma. I heard the vehicle coming on the audio portion of the radar. And I could tell by the sound of the radar
that he was moving right along. There's a stop sign at the intersection of his direction of travel.
He didn't see it apparently until the last minute, and he skidded through the intersection.
Finally he puts it in first gear apparently, and takes off. I activated my lights on my car, and He yielded pretty quickly.
I made my approach. I walked up to him. I introduced myself and asked him for his driver's license, registration, and insurance.
And I could tell just by his physical appearance he might have had a little bit too much to drink.
But the other thing that I noticed about him was in this left shirt pocket-- he had on a button-down shirt--
and in his left pocket of his shirt, he had about two ounces of marijuana sticking
up in a plastic see-through bag. But I didn't tell him that I saw it. So he just sat there combing for his wallet,
his registration, and his insurance. Apparently he didn't realize he had the marijuana showing
in his pocket, or of course it wouldn't have been there anymore. The second time I walked up to the car
and I just asked him, just out of the clear blue sky, "Do you have anymore weed besides what's in your pocket?"
And then he just lowered his eyes, and he looked at his pocket, and he just rolled his head back
in his eyes, and he just goes, "Ohhh." -And now for a man whose credibility his earned him
the nickname of the Lying Lion King, here's Daniel with ADC Headlines. -Alright.
Was it a coincidence or an act of sod? Perhaps both. An intoxicated man made the bad decision
to go joy riding across the newly landscaped front lawn of a police station in New York.
His hapless shenanigans were picked up by the precinct's video cameras and viewed by astonished police officers, who
quickly stepped outside to halt his dirty dig. Two men in North Carolina stole two walkie talkies,
and were a little too anxious to try them out. A policeman monitoring their broadcast frequency
intercepted their conversation as they tested the range of the radios. You know, "Where are you now?" "I'm at Fourth and Main."
One remained stationary while the other drove in a car providing frequent updates of his exact location.
"Where are you now?" "Fifth and Main." They were over and out and out of commission in no time.
Multi-layered stupidity descended like a fog over a man who attempted to rob a Seattle area gun shop.
First he had to step around a marked patrol car parked next to the front door to enter the building.
Once inside, he stood next to a uniformed patrolman. When he announced his intention to rob the place,
virtually everyone in the crowded store pulled a weapon. Foo goo boom boom! He won neither the battle of wits
nor the shootout that followed. And that closes the file on ADC Headlines-- news ripped
from somewhere near the back of your local newspaper. Debbie. -OK. What would you do if you knew that a robbery suspect was
speeding towards your neighborhood with police cars right on his tail? Well you probably wouldn't do what this officer did.
But that's what makes it this week smashing installment of Special Delivery. -Officer Salerno and myself were on duty.
We had to do traffic control for a library on the corner of Keystone and Main. Officer Purdy's house is just two doors up from the library.
So we decided to go there and stop and have a cup of coffee. -So they had the portables on.
I put the big scanner on in the kitchen. They stayed to finish a quick coffee, went out back and rode on patrol.
-About an hour after that-- -We hear Scott Township get a call for a guy robbed a bank.
-And I hear this go on. And they put out the alert that the bank, they just had an armed robbery occur at the bank.
-And he fled down route 247 coming down towards our area. -I went up onto Route 6.
Officer Salerno went to Sturges Road to watch for the car. He ended up seeing the car.
-So I decided to try to pull it over. When I did, the guy took off on me. -And next thing I hear is one of our guys
saying that he thinks he saw the car. And he spins around and he's going after it.
Once he put the lights on, he says, "The guys not stopping. He's going." -At that point the car decided to go up and around
different blocks through the town. You're sitting there listening to this. And he's going to all the sites.
-Pursuit ended up onto Main Street, coming towards the library we had just left.
OFFICER PURDY:: When he pulled onto Main Street, he had a left or right decision.
A 50-50 chance. Left, he was gone to the other end of town. Right, he was coming more closer to me.
He makes the right. -At that point, we knew we were headed back onto Keystone where Officer Purdy lives.
-He went a block and a half, there's a traffic light. Now you got three choices.
Straight left or right. The only bad one was the left one. That's the one he made.
-To our surprise, Officer Purdy was listening to the pursuit on his radio. OFFICER PURDY:: When he got to the intersection, that's it,
I just grabbed my radio--the portable radio. Ran our, pulled the truck right to the edge of the driveway.
-He pulled his car right out from his driveway, straight across the road. -And I expected to get crushed.
I was going to get T-boned. I just sat there braced, and nothing happened. OFFICER COTILLA: The suspect, thinking that it was a dirt
road, an alleyway, decides to turn left into the alleyway. -Comes to a stop. Because at the end of his driveway is a fence.
So Officer Cotilla pulls up. I jump out of the car. He backs up into CJ's truck, and right there we got him.
Right in the driveway. OFFICER COTILLA: I couldn't believe that I saw this guy turning into his driveway.
Because it's a dead end driveway. It doesn't go anywhere. It was amazing. -You know, how many wrong decisions
can one guy make in a day? If he knew what was going to happen, he would have stayed in bed that morning, that's for sure.
-It's like valet parking. You know, but man, that's got to mess with your property values.
Sometimes we hear about a fellow who can't win for losing. And this crook was truly a triple threat to himself,
building up more charges than a power plant. He's the kind of guy who gives criminals a bad name.
Prepare to be dumbfounded. -One Sunday morning, I was in the office doing some reports.
Decided I would go get me something out the vending machine. When I walked into the lobby, I observed a white female
with a black dress, standing, looking around, looking nervous. And I noticed another gentleman on his knees,
doing this type of motion, and the vending machine was rocking back and forth. On closer, inspection, I observed
the subject had a crowbar and was attempting to break into the machine. I tapped the female on the shoulder, had her stand aside.
Tapped the gentleman on the shoulder. He dropped the crowbar of course, They both were arrested.
While he did that, he mistakenly parked in the handicapped zone, left his vehicle running, left it unlocked with the windows
down. I also gave him a ticket for parking in the handicapped zone, and leaving the vehicle unattended.
To show how some people are so stupid, he was in the courthouse here in Covington a few months later,
and walked past a gumball machine. Guess he was very tempted, got a screwdriver,
and then attempted to break into it. One of the bailiffs walked by, and saw the machine missing,
got to poking around, opened the door, and caught him red handed. He was then arrested and of course placed back in jail.
NARRATOR: In San Francisco, it's illegal to wipe one's car with used underwear. -I got a call about a bank robbery that had just occurred.
And it was within a block and a half of the police station. So obviously all the units went right to the scene.
We had a pretty good description of him. Didn't wear a mask, didn't wear gloves, didn't do anything.
Basically went into the bank. Did show a gun. Took the money and ran. Well, as the officers in the area
were looking for witnesses, and interviewing people, and asking if anybody saw anything, they went into a coffee shop which
is right next to our police station. When they went into the coffee shop, they asked the people there if they had seen anything.
And a woman there said, "As a matter of fact, a guy came in here. And he was like panicked."
-Excuse me. I locked my cars in my car. And I was wondering if I could just get a ride out of here.
Just get some help. -He came in and said, "I locked my keys in the car. Can somebody please give me a ride to my house.
I'll give them $20." So she said, we'll be happy to call the police for you. He goes, "No, no, no.
I don't have my insurance card with me. I just need somebody to run me home. I only live two towns away."
He figured, $20, he offered this guy a ride home. Meanwhile, our investigators went out and ran the license
plate on the car with the keys in it. And that was our offender's vehicle. -Get out!
Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Out of the car! -Once we knew where the car was, we ran the plate,
and the police department from the town where he lived was waiting for him when he got there.
We could not believe that this guy would go out and rob a bank, and lock his keys in the car.
-I think they wanted that guy to get out. -Get out. Get out. -You know, in the game of Monopoly,
you can buy your way out of jail for $50. -Yeah. But real life is not child's play,
as tonight's final criminal sadly learned. -Do not pass go. Instead, we're going to the wacky world
of We're Not Making This Up. -We had an individual housed at the Oklahoma County Detention
Center being held for two charges-- both failure to pay fines and costs. Two individuals came to bond him out.
They posted bond for the first charge, which was in the amount of about $450. They paid by cash.
As is procedure, our detention officer checked the bills for validity, and found
them all to be good bills. The second bond, they posted $625. The detention officer checked it,
and found that three of the $100 bills they gave him were counterfeit bills. D.O. SHAWN CANTRELL: I used a counterfeit detection pen
that you see used at the banks. And on counterfeit currency, it turns black. So they sat there and watched me do it-- check the currency
and watched it turn black. I was kind of surprised. When I checked the bill, I looked up and kind of expected
to see them running, but they didn't. And they stood there. -Can you hang on for just a minute?
Thank you. -So we called the Secret Service. SHERIFF JOHN WHETSEL: They were subsequently arrested.
On their person, as they were being booked, they found three additional counterfeit bills-- one
being a $100 bill, and two more $50 bills. -Do you have any money? Do you have any of this?
-Yes sir. -You guys gotta remember to do both sides. What's up? -Sad part was-- it made pretty much sense to me--
they had enough money to pay for it in real money. But they actually tried to use counterfeit money
to bond out their friend. -This half, is half a dollar. That's all for now, but if you've got a lead on a story,
or you just can't wait till next week for more state of the art stupidity, visit our website.
-Our address is www.dumbcrimes.com. -We want to thank you for joining us, and extend our gratitude to the law enforcement
officers who make this show possible. Every day, they lay their lives on the line
to keep us safe from the stupidity of would-be criminals. -As always, we hope we've all learned from others' mistakes.
-But if you haven't, we just might see you next week on America's Dumbest Criminals.
[applause] -Hey, you want to see how many candy bars a $3 bill buys? [music playing]

In this episode of “America’s Dumbest Criminals,” we’ll witness a man wearing a useless disguise, a criminal who forgot to bring a gun to a shootout and a not-so-sharp thief who put an antique knife in his pocket.

Crime is no laughing matter, except when the criminals are bumbling fools. Hosted by Debbie Alan and Daniel Butler, this show looks at lawbreakers through a humorous lens.

Brief Summary

This episode highlights absurd criminal blunders, including a robber who left a check behind and a woman forgetting her name during a traffic stop.

Key points

Counterfeit Confusion. A robber left behind a check with a robbery note, leading to his capture.
Ski Mask Slip-Up. A robber forgot to pull down his ski mask, leading to his quick arrest.
Counterfeit Bonding. Two individuals attempted to use counterfeit bills to bond out their friend.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

How dumb can they get?

3:13WatchMar 10, 2022

Tension

30/ 100Low tension

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