Dumb Criminals: Unbelievable, But True

The latest evidence that, for men, size is important: Following a men's room argument in Durban, South Africa, in September, five men of Indian descent left a bar, returned with guns and killed three patrons. According to police, the altercation started when one Indian man at a urinal called attention to a white South African man's "small" size, and the incident escalated.

That explanation also failed in August in Naples, Fla., for Richard Obdyke, 19, when police found a stolen debit card in his pants. (In both cases, the men said they had no idea whose pants they were wearing.)

David Norris never knew his father, who left home when Norris was 5 months old. Now 22, Norris is serving a minimum-12-year sentence for killing a man after an earlier rape conviction and is housed in Peterhead prison, which is the primary lockup for Scotland's sex criminals. Soon after arrival, according to a Scottish Daily Record report, Norris ran into David Gilles, 39, serving life for the kidnapping and sexual torture of a young woman, and realized that Gilles is his dad.

Angel Cruz, 49, was indicted in August in Florida for various dubious financial schemes, including attempting to convince employees and contractors to accept his "United Cities Group" "currency" as of parallel value with U.S. currency. Cruz came to federal prosecutors' attention when he tried to sneak $214 million of UCG money into a Bank of America branch in Miami and allegedly threatened to take over the bank when it balked at allowing withdrawals in U.S. dollars.

And in August in Corpus Christi, Texas, a 25-year-old man was arrested for drug possession during a traffic stop, despite his volunteering to police that "It's not my truck," and "If you find something (searching it), it's not mine," and "If there's anything in that black bag, it's not mine."

Made for "Law and Order": David Steffen was convicted in Cincinnati in 1983 of murdering a 19-year-old woman and sentenced to death because the jury found that he also raped her, a violation that was an added devastation to her parents. Steffen confessed to the killing but vehemently protested for almost a quarter century that he did not rape her, and, finally, a 2007 DNA test of semen backed him up, disturbing the family even more (and calling Steffen's death sentence into question). In July 2008, the prosecutor learned that the DNA belonged to 55-year-old Kenneth Douglas, who is not a suspect in the murder but who was a morgue assistant in 1982 when the woman's body arrived and, said the prosecutor, had sex with it. Though the statute of limitations likely prevents prosecuting Douglas, the woman's parents seemed somewhat comforted that, after all, their daughter was a virgin.

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