America's Dumbest Criminals - Season 4, Episode 12 - Dynamite Date - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[music playing] ANNOUNCER: Tonight on "America's Dumbest Criminals," what do you say to a gentleman caller who
brings dynamite instead of flowers? Why is this suspect conducting his own strip search?
We'll reveal all the details. And what are today's drunk drivers doing to keep themselves physically fit?
Pull up a chair and take five. Make that 30, because it's time again for "America's Dumbest Criminals."
[police radio chatter] [music playing] Now, welcome your hosts for ADC, Daniel Butler and Debbie Alan.
-Thank you, Debbie. Have you got a light? -Whoa, that's not what I think it is, is it?
-Fake dynamite, absolutely. No, I bought it at the fake dynamite store at the mall.
Those specialty stores are getting so specialized now, aren't they? DEBBIE ALAN: All right.
Where did you really get it? -No, well, actually it's on loan from the Sheriff's
department in Bentonville, Arkansas. -And why would they need fake dynamite? -Well, it's practice drills for their fake bomb squad, I guess.
Now, do you know, if this was the real thing, it would be enough dynamite to blow up a house?
A big house. And you know, there's almost enough dynamite here to reactivate Jimmy Walker's career.
Huh? Remember? Dy-no-mite! -I get it, but that was a dud. So, let's move along, OK?
You think all sweet little grandmas just knit and bake cookies? Well, think again.
Prepare for the myth to be shattered with this mind numbing first person account.
The grandmother who runs this stand in North Bay Village, Florida, thought the young man who approached
her was looking for vegetables, not trouble. But she quickly learned otherwise. -And he had a baseball bat in his hand.
And I figured, well, he was just playing baseball somewhere. So, he says, no, I don't want strawberries,
he said, I want your cash register and the money, and I want the keys to that car.
DEBBIE ALAN: But this lady knew her produce. Realizing her gun was out of reach,
she grabbed the nearest weapon available. A two foot zucchini. -I bent down and I picked up a zucchini,
and I hit him on the head. And he went down. DEBBIE ALAN: The man had definitely met his match.
-I went down like this, and I picked up the zucchini, and I hit him over the head like that.
And that's when he went down. But of course I broke this one, you know, when I hit him.
DEBBIE ALAN: That's right. She pummeled him with the business end of a two foot vegetable.
High in vitamin C and potassium. You wouldn't think of her hurting anybody, because she has such a loving personality.
-People are joking about it, and I'm joking about it now, but it wasn't funny then, really.
DEBBIE ALAN: The man fled, but the experience made grandma grateful and wiser. -This is the zucchini that I'm going to keep as a souvenir.
I think I'll wax it. You know, so that I can remember that a zucchini does come in
handy for something if it happens. So ladies, carry a zucchini with you. [laughing]
DEBBIE ALAN: Kinda brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "garden glove" doesn't it?
-You know the expression, the buck stops here? Officers had every reason to suspect that a buck had been
stopped, based on the deer remains found in a garbage bag. -And that's where our story starts.
But it takes some real digging before law enforcement officers can bag their suspect.
Oh, but they do, and that's what makes it tonight's installment of something to remember me by.
-One day last summer, I was patrolling a stretch of river, and found an area where somebody had
dumped several bags of trash. Along with the trash, there were several deer parts included, where somebody had obviously butchered a deer.
As I commonly do to try to figure out who had dumped the trash, I dug through the trash
to try to find receipts and names, or any type of evidence. While doing that, I found three or four names
that came from the same address, which was just up the road. Another piece of evidence that I located there
was that all the trash bags had City of Bryant written on them in big orange letters.
I went to the address up the road, knocked on the door, and a person came to the door.
And I explained to him that I had found several trash bags that appear to belong to him dumped down by the river.
He explained to me that he did not ever litter or dump his trash anywhere it wasn't supposed to be,
and it was impossible that it was his trash. I continued my investigation, told him
that I had discovered pieces of mail and receipts that had his name on it, and I believed it was his trash.
And I'd also found deer parts, which would turn into another case, and make it more illegal.
He kept on pleading his case and explained to me that it was impossible that it was his trash, because he kept
all of his trash back up behind his house. We walked around the side of his house,
and stacked up 10 or 12 feet along the back this house were several trash bags that had City of Bryant
written on the bags, exactly like the ones down by the river. -Did you ever think about this?
If it weren't for some real goofballs, people of average intelligence would be a little less average, you know?
-We found a guy who must anchor the bottom, at least when he's been drinking. -Well, here's another round of surveillance video
you just won't believe. -Some time ago, I was following a guy that I had suspected of being intoxicated.
I noticed that he's pulled in a convenience store and raised his hood to go inside the store,
like he's working on his car. And after he came back out, I started my sobriety test.
He was not cooperating very much. In trying to get him to do the sobriety test-- one of them
is walking an imaginary line. This guy jumped up on the curb, and run along the edge of the curb.
Then he came back, climbed up on the top of the station wagon, which had the hood open, and jumped
from the top of the station wagon to the open hood of the car. He says, have you ever seen a drunk do that before?
And I said no, never have. ANNOUNCER: In Florida, men may not be seen publicly in any kind of strapless gown.
--[chuckling] Now I know why RuPaul doesn't vacation in Miami. Adlai Stevenson said, a lie is an abomination unto the Lord,
and a very present help in time of trouble. But that assumes that person is a good liar.
This guy wasn't, which qualifies his story for America's dumbest excuses. -Well, from time to time, we'll stop people, they uh,
they give us a false name. You know, they try to give us a false name, anyway. -I stopped this guy just the other night,
as a matter of fact, and for a traffic offense, and pull up to him, and ask for his ID.
He doesn't have it. So I said, what's your name? He says, Ju-- Ju-- Ju-- Ju-- Fred.
And I started laughing right away. You know, I know this guy's lying to me. -How do you spell that?
-How do you spell that? -[laughing] -First, he was naked as a Jay bird. And then, in good time, he was clothed as a jail bird.
It's all in its unencumbered glory, right here on our blue light special. -A number of years back, we had a sting operation going.
One thing we did was bought a brand new Lincoln Continental for $3,000. The fellow didn't know that we were indeed the police.
What he also didn't realize, he had encountered one of our officers before. The officer had arrested him about three
months before on drug charges. But he comes to the motel to talk about the car deal.
He says, you might be the police. So the officer said, well you might be the police.
To prove that he was not the police, he took his clothes off to show that he wasn't waring a wire.
And indeed, for him, unfortunately, it was all on camera. And he lifted up his clothes, took them off,
and showed that he didn't have a wire on him. When we quit laughing, we arrested him.
-The officer's nickname was Tiny, which, as you'll see, is quite the opposite of what he really was.
It's like our nickname for Daniel here. Einstein. Let's see the big doings in Kingston, North Carolina.
Prepare to feel small. -There was a certain officer that had a training officer, who was a very huge man.
And one night, they arrested this man that was intoxicated. And the guy had a lot of mouth, the one that they arrested.
And he kept saying, well, if you weren't a police officer, I'd kick your tail. He kept running his mouth.
So the huge training officer, he says, well I'll tell you what, he takes off all of his-- he takes
his badge off, takes his gun belt off, then he lays it down. He says, well let's step outside.
He takes the handcuffs off, they step outside, and all of a sudden, you hear, wham!
Wham! Wham! And he walks back inside, puts his gun belt on, puts his badge back on, and they walk right outside to, you know,
check on the guy. He's sitting there, he's trickling a little bit, and he says, whatever you do, don't
let that man ever come near me again. They said, why? Because he must have been the Jolly Green Giant.
Why is he the Jolly Green Giant? He goes, every time he hit me, he went, ho, ho, ho.
-Now here's your tour guide through the cavernous wasteland of journalism. Here's Daniel, with ADC headlines.
-A Tennessee inmate serving two and a half years for bank fraud thought he deserved a little leniency.
And since no one seemed to agree with him, he took up his own cause and wrote an obviously bogus letter
to a federal judge, posing as the warden of another facility. Now, instead of getting his sentence shortened by six
months, the four new charges pending could earn him up to 10 additional years. OK.
A duo of hold-up artists exhibited poor judgment as they patiently waited outside a convenience store
to steal a vehicle. They were apparently oblivious to the four marked patrol cars
that were directly across the street. When the bad guys made their move, the officers were on the case, even before a call to 911
could be placed. Now, that's service, huh? You've heard that criminals always return to the scene of the crime?
Well, it was true for an ex-con in Kansas. Although it did take her a while to make her come back.
That's because she'd been incarcerated for robbing the same bank six years before.
A teller recognized her and tripped the silent alarm. From that point, eh, it was just like old times again.
And that closes the file on ADC headlines. News ripped from somewhere near the back
of your local newspaper. Debbie? -This teenager wasn't going to stand idly by and watch
his friend steal from his father, so he picked up the phone called 911. Well, it's a call that dear old dad
wishes his loyal son had never made. See why in tonight's special delivery. -Well, we had a 15-year-old kid the one time,
and he called the 911. And the dispatcher called us and said that he was on the phone,
and his big complaint was that his friends were breaking into his dad's room. I don't think he was really upset about that happening,
but his friends were stealing his dad's marijuana. -Can you imagine someone calling 911
to tell the police that someone's stealing their marijuana? -They're taking my dad's marijuana.
-He got about halfway through his sentence, and realized what he was saying. He hung up the phone, but by then, of course,
it was too late. Went out and talked to him for a little bit. And he admitted what he did.
-We found more marijuana in the house while we were looking around for their stuff,
and all's he could worry about was his dad getting mad at him for the marijuana being gone.
-The dad, he denied that all the marijuana was his, and he tried to, of course, blame it on the son.
-He tried to tell us it was his dad's marijuana. -But it was in his dad's room, so we took all his marijuana,
and all his paraphernalia, and took it in with us. -It's strange. It's like father, like son.
-Neither one of them are real bright. -You know the warning printed on your rear view mirror?
Objects are closer than they appear. Well, we've got the story of a man who was wanted by police,
but appeared closer than he ever should have. Take it away in Elgin, Illinois. -We have a rider observer program.
A rider observer is an individual who will come into the station, fill out a form,
and they'll be assigned to ride with a police officer for about four hours. Normally we have college students
from the local colleges that'll come out who are testing to be police officers. One day, I was assigned an individual for ride along.
I-- I met him outside at the front desk. Really not the normal rider we get. Usually it's a clean cut college kid.
This individual kind of stood out a little bit to me. As myself and the rider went out to my car,
we passed Officer Bianci. And he approached me, and he had said that that individual
looked familiar, that he had probably arrested him before. With that, Officer Bianci and I went inside the station
and ran a warrant check on him. Sure enough, he did have a warrant for him. We decided that-- to go outside to the car
to actually arrest him. And as we approached the car, I asked him if he could step out.
He did, and I explained to him that we were going to begin the ride along program with the-- the showing him how we
arrest and book and process people. I asked him to step out of the car, and he did.
And asked him to place his hands behind his back, and handcuffed him, and explained to him
he had a warrant. And he asked what for, and I explained what it was. And he began swearing, more or less.
He wasn't too happy with us. We said, this was an easy one. It doesn't come any easier than this, when they walk
into the station and make it this easy for us. ANNOUNCER: Now let's look back at one of ADC's greatest hits.
OK. What's wrong with this picture? Is it the thermometer displaying a cool 53 degrees?
Is it the groovy, space age insulation? Or maybe it's this. A nice, healthy, pot plant, hermetically
sealed in a secret cultivation room. But maybe we need to look beyond the photograph
and turn our attention to the photographer. Evidently the proud gardener, who took pictures of his homegrown marijuana plants,
had them developed at a local drugstore. And the observant clerk who developed the photographs
turned them over to the Lodi, California, police department. What more could the police want?
They had multiple pictures of the evidence, a film deposit envelope with the man's name and address, even the date
that the photographs were taken. Oh yeah. One more thing. The green thumbed wizard also took a few photos of himself
in the mirror on the same roll of film. Open up to me, baby. Come on, work with me here.
And smile, because you're another dumb criminal, caught on camera. In Columbus, Illinois, it's illegal to sell
cornflakes on Sunday. -We were having a real busy shift, and we got a call. -It was an alert tone which tells us
that it's a serious crime in progress. -The woman was watching a man as he threw a parking sign
through the front window of a Budget Electronics business. She watched the man take a computer from the store
after he smashed the window. -And that gentleman then did go over to his vehicle, which
was parked on the side of the building, and then he was proceeding to load up his car as she was calling in.
-We were coming as fast as we could. -We were all quite a ways away. -By the time we got there, he'd already left the store,
and we went around looking for him. Well, when he saw us drive past, he thought this was his perfect opportunity to come back.
-Officer Griffin advised that the person had come back to the business and was trying to take more goods.
-Fortunately, he waited too long, and I was already at the store, beginning my investigation.
He looked at me, I looked at him, and he decided he was going to make a big break for it.
Took off, running stop signs and stop lights, at one point, we were driving 80 miles an hour through a 25 mile an hour zone.
-And he did rip out his oil pan shortly into the chase. -When all this was done, seven and a half miles
of chasing, 19 stop signs and stop lights, 80 miles an hour, he apparently didn't want to get a ticket
for failing to use his turn signal. So he used his turn signal on every single turn.
He had about $100 worth of stuff in his trunk. This wasn't his first burglary, and don't know that it will be
his last, but hopefully he keeps using that turn signal. -[laughing] -[laughing]
-We close tonight with a strange saga of a man who went in search of companionship
while carrying a handful of dynamite. -Well it wasn't me. But join us as we see what happens when you go looking
for more bang for your buck in tonight's sordid edition of we're not making this up.
-We got a call, subject wanting to trade dynamite-- -Dynamite-- -For sex and/or drugs.
-Wanna have some sex for this dynamite? -Hell no! -That was rather unbelievable to all of us.
RICHARD CARMEAN: He'd been knocking on several doors in one of the neighborhoods.
-We see a lot of unusual things, but this seemed to be really unusual. -Hey, you got any drugs?
-Of course not. -You don't have no drugs? -I don't have any drugs, no drugs at all.
-Do you want to have some dynamite for some sex? -No. Heavens, no. -Well, why not?
-At least not today. Not today. -Well why not? RICHARD CARMEAN: I responded to the call, got out there
and I met the subject trying to leave. I turned my emergency lights on. -Fleeing off into the woods.
RICHARD CARMEAN: He couldn't be located. I called for a K-9 unit, and after a short period of time,
found the subject about 30 foot up in a tree. -Come on down. -No. -Come on. -No, I ain't coming down.
-We'll get a dog. -I don't care. -He never had any detectors on his-- on his outfit.
-[laughing] -Dynamite. The explosive new fragrance from Calvin Klein. -Try it if your obsession is to meet eternity.
-Guaranteed. Hey, I got dynamite. Want to go out? Huh? That's a line I never tried in high school.
-I'm happy to hear that. -You know, I-- but I bet you won't be happy to hear that it's time to go.
-Aw, sad but true. But we'll be back next week. Between now and then, visit our website at 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 that we've all
learned from others' mistakes. -But if you haven't, we just might see you. Next week, on "America's Dumbest Criminals."
-See you next week. [music playing] [music playing] [music playing]

In this episode of “America’s Dumbest Criminals,” we’ll witness a man who brings dynamite instead of flowers, a suspect conducting his own strip-search and what today’s drunk drivers are doing to keep physically fit.

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

A grandmother uses a zucchini to thwart a robbery while a man tries to trade dynamite for sex.

Key points

Grandma's Zucchini Defense. A grandmother uses a zucchini to fend off a robber, proving she's no ordinary grandma.
Dynamite for a Date?. A man attempts to trade dynamite for sex, leading to a bizarre police chase.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

You think all sweet little grandmas just knit and bake cookies?

Introduction to a surprising story about a grandma's defense against a robber.

1:52WatchMar 10, 2022

Tension

30/ 100Low tension

More from True Crime Files

Solve the Crime

Read a real case one clue at a time, then see how your call held up against the investigators.