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Stealing hearts and more
 Our
society is male-dominated. Criminal society, too, is male-dominated and one
hardly finds women involved in major criminal activities.
Except in the illicit liquor
trade and prostitution, the presence of women in other criminal activities is
very minimal. Some women who work as maidservants are involved in petty thefts,
but such they are not professional criminals.
But recently, a woman burglar,
a professional one at that having been involved in at least 50 house burglaries,
was arrested on Chennai's outskirts.
An employee of BSNL, living
with his family at Pallavaram, had preferred a complaint with the Pallavaram
police station that his house had been burgled and Rs 30,000 cash and 40
sovereigns of jewellery were found to be stolen from his house during day time.
Since all the five family
members, his wife, two sons and a daughter, are all employed, the house had been
locked during the day. When they returned from office late evening, they were
shocked to see that the house had been ransacked.
When policemen visited the
scene of crime, they were astonishd to see that the criminal had poured water,
with the help of a mug, on all the articles which he had touched.
This was a clever play to
conceal fingerprints. After a lot of hard work, policemen were able to develop a
fragment of a fingerprint.
 When
the fingerprint was compared with the criminal records, to their surprise, it
was with a woman criminal. She was a professional house burglar who used to
target locked houses only during the day and was known by several names like
Deer, Anjali, etc.
The special feature of her
style of operation was that she would break the door lock and steel bureaux more
elegantly and efficiently than her male counterparts and no policemen could even
imagine that it was the handiwork of a female criminal.
Another distinguishing feature
of her operation is that wherever she strikes, she used to hang a cloth bag on
the broken lock of the front dor. Policemen could not understand the purpose
behind this.
Later, during interrogation, it
was found that she has been doing this in order to conceal the broken lock to
the outside world so that the neighbours do not get alerted.
She would drop a one rupee coin
inside the bag as she does not want, sentimentally, to keep an empty bag. After
her arrest, it was revealed that she was involved in several house burglaries
during the day in Chennai and its surroundings and since she concealed her
fingerprints by pouring water, her identity could not be established. However,
at last several lakhs of properties were recovered from her after her arrest.
 But, during the
interrogation,
the woman criminal leaked a shocking secret. She said she had gone to the
burgled house a few days ago under the pretext of seeking a job as a
maidservant.
The house owner, the BSNL
employee, had asked her to go to bed with him. As her intention was to burgle
the house, she consented and made a good note of the layout of the house and
planned her operation.
The house owner had paid her Rs
500 for her that one-day stand and asked her to come again after two days. But
she returned the next day itself for a different kind of operation and cleaned
out the house.
The house owner had pleaded
with the police not to tell his family about his escapade and was ready to pay
any amount as bribe. But the police deliberately leaked the information.
So house owners should always
be cautious about such criminals masquerading as maidservants and then stealing
valuables from their house. Worse, there was also the danger of inviting a
serious disease like AIDS by having sex with a stranger.
In this case, it was loss of
prestige also for a man since the burglary became a police case and the
skeletons tumbled out of the cupboard.
Harvey
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