2009: in order to disguise himself while robbing a phone store, Thomas James spray-painted his face gold. He later began having trouble breathing and died.
It's not clear to me if he actually died because of the spray paint, though it must have been a contributing factor. His accomplice, who also spray-painted his face, was apparently fine.
In 1977, Carol Louise Hargis was convicted of killing her husband by beating him over the head with a lead weight. She was helped by an accomplice, Terry DePew. Apparently their plan was to split the insurance money.
But what made the case unusual was the various ways the duo had earlier tried to off the husband, without success:
feeding him pie containing tarantula venom
throwing a live electric cord into the shower with him
In January 1995, Macarthur Wheeler and Clifton Johnson robbed a bank in Swissvale, Pennsylvania. However, they had a plan to avoid detection: they rubbed lemon juice on their faces. Their reasoning was that lemon juice can be used to make invisible ink, so surely it would conceal their faces from surveillance cameras as well. They even tested this hypothesis by taking polaroid pictures of each other smeared with lemon juice, and it seemed to work.
Unfortunately, they showed up just fine on the bank's cameras, and they were identified and arrested several months later when the footage of the robbery was broadcast on a local news show.
This odd crime has an interesting postscript. The psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University read about it, and it inspired them to start thinking about the problem of stupidity: this being that stupid people often don’t realize they’re stupid. In fact, they think they’re quite smart, which leads them to do incredibly dumb things. This phenomenon (of dumb people not being able to recognize the limits of their competence) is now known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. In the journal article in which they introduced the concept, Dunning and Kruger cited the lemon-juice bandits as their inspiration.
Weird news aficionados will be familiar with the phenomenon of would-be burglars trying to gain access to buildings by climbing down chimneys or vents, only to get stuck.
The latest example of this comes from Alameda County, California, where a man got trapped for two days in the grease vent of a vacant Chinese food restaurant. Rescuers arrived in response to reports of a faint voice calling for help.
On its Facebook page, the Alameda County Sheriff's Office has provided pics of the rescue.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.