2015 year-end news bites: crime

Here are a few unusual crime stories that caught our attention during the past year:

Driving for dummies
Two men cheated a British cab driver out of a substantial amount of money in March by telling him that a “sleeping” third man—the last to be dropped off—would pay the fare from Brighton train station to London. When the cabbie arrived at his destination, he discovered that the last man was, in fact, a clothed mannequin. City Cabs supervisor Andy Cheesman told a reporter: “You can imagine the stick he got from the other drivers.”

Yes, you’re being charged for that call
Police in Boyle, Alberta, arrested a man in December after executing a search warrant and finding cocaine and marijuana in an apartment belonging to someone who repeatedly called RCMP Cpl. John Spaans looking for drugs. Spaans started receiving the calls after getting a new phone number. Although he told the callers many times that they had the wrong number, they persisted, eventually using slang that Spaans—with the help of UrbanDictionary.com—identified as being a term for heroin.

Hamburglar revealed
Western Australia police in November reported that they had arrested a nude man in the town of Derby after he broke into a tradesman’s car and stole a special hamburger. The tradesman told police he had asked a friend to fly a Hungry Jack’s whopper burger to him from Darwin, 1,700 kilometres to the east. When he caught the would-be thief in his car, the hungry man took off his clothing and walked away. Officers charged the man with theft and disorderly behaviour.

Why puny humans always hound Hulk?
A family in Arizona woke one morning in late September to find that something had fallen out of the sky during the night, smashed through their carport, and destroyed a doghouse. The “something” turned out to be an eight-kilogram plastic-wrapped brick of marijuana, which investigating police said probably fell from a Mexican smuggler’s ultralight aircraft. The family dog, Hulk, was wandering elsewhere at the time of the incident and was unhurt.