Do you want fries with that?
Two Australian burglars trying to tunnel into a jewellery store on New Year’s Eve went the wrong way and instead tunneled into a KFC restaurant. Peter Welsh, 32, and Dwayne Doolan, 31, first tried to smash the window of the jewellers in the Australian town of Beaudesert. When that plan failed, they broke into the next store and knocked their way through the basement wall. But they chose the wrong wall, and ended up in the fast-food store – which they proceeded to rob of the night’s takings.
Facebook felon ‘likes’ theft:
Nineteen-year-old Rodney Knight Jr broke into a Washington DC home in 2011 and stole a coat, some petty cash and a laptop. But before leaving the house, Knight logged into the victim’s Facebook account with the laptop, where he posted a photograph of himself with the soon-to-be-stolen goods. Police used the Facebook photograph to track the perp down a few days later. One officer described him as the “most stupid criminal” he had ever encountered.
Disguise, or doodles? In 2009, Matthew McNelly, 23, and Joey Lee Miller, 20, were seen trying to break into an apartment in a city in Iowa in the US. A witness told police that after failing to break in, the pair had sped off from the scene in a large white car. When the police stopped the vehicle, it wasn’t hard to identify the perps – they’d tried to draw masks on their faces with marker pen.
Drive-by surprise:
The same year, an ungentlemanly American named Andrew Burwitz decided to fire a shotgun at the house of an ex-girlfriend – but forgot to roll down the driver’s side window before opening fire. Police found Burwitz at an auto glass repair shop nearby, after visiting his insurance company to make a claim to get the broken window replaced. It also turned out that his ex-girlfriend wasn’t home at the time.
Wrong-way getaway:
In 1989, two teenage criminals in California were seen by police trying to break into a parked car. The police gave chase, and the teenagers ran off. After a few minutes of pursuit, they decided to climb over a fence to escape – but the fence they scaled was the outside wall of California’s San Quentin state prison. “Nothing like this has ever happened here before,” said a police spokesman. “People just don’t break in to prison every day.”