Many crimes seem like a waste of effort.
When a car window is smashed open, for example, only so the thief can steal the loose change from a cup holder, or when a carjacker hotwires a police cruiser, just for a quick joyride.
Or, in the case of Karen Travis, when a burglar takes the trouble of breaking into her house, searching the whole place, and finding her jewelry box, only to ditch the box and all its contents in her backyard swimming pool.
“Really, it was just kind of confusing,” Travis says. “They obviously took the time to go all through the house, because everything was disturbed everywhere, and they found my jewelry box. But then they just ditched it. It makes me wonder why they even bothered.”
To explain the seemingly nonsensical actions of the criminal who broke her rear window and scoured her home, Travis theorizes that her noisy burglar alarm may have spooked them, making them fear the police were coming. However, her burglar alarm had been blaring full-blast from the moment the window broke, the entire time they were methodically roaming the house, so that doesn’t add up. Maybe, she theorizes, the thief just didn’t think her jewelry was worth it.
“I mean, it’s nothing special, I’ll admit,” Travis says. “But I at least had a big gold piece in there. Pawnshops would’ve taken that. You would think they’d at least steal the gold piece.”
Dallas Police Lt. Michael Woodberry, upon hearing the facts of the case, says he’s just as perplexed as Travis. Thieves typically hang on to their ill-gotten gains, he says.
“Sometimes burglars will throw the stuff they don’t want out the window of a car while they get away, but usually not anything valuable,” says Woodberry. “I have no idea why they would’ve done that. Maybe they just accidentally dropped it in the pool while they were taking off, and didn’t feel like diving in after it.”
To Travis, it makes sense that someone would break into her home. Every house on her block, she says, has had either a break-in or a package stolen off the front doorstep in the past two years. In the last year alone, three packages have been taken off of her doorstep. Her neighbors were seriously considering the institution of a neighborhood watch. The location of the crime made sense, she says – it was the crime itself that didn’t.
“I mean, they went through the whole house,” she says. “They saw we had electronics and stuff like that. Why they just took that box and left it in my pool, I don’t get.”
