The Weirdest Things Thieves Have Stolen

One of history’s military geniuses, the Little Corporal’s privates were supposedly removed by his doctor after Napoleon passed away during his exile on St. Helena in 1821. The private parts were given to a priest and were eventually bought for $3,000 by a New Jersey urologist in 1977. The doctor’s daughter inherited the curious relic and has weighed offers for it.

A different version of beach erosion occurred in Jamaica in 2008. Sand was mysteriously disappearing at Coral Spring beach in the town of Trelawny, then police figured out that thieves made off with about 500 truckloads, or 1,300 feet, of sand and possibly sold it to rival beaches.

X-rays of 15,000 patients from a Detroit hospital that were stored in a warehouse were pilfered by thieves in 2013. X-ray thefts are not uncommon because the film contains silver. However, the process to remove the precious metal is expensive.

The reduction of a glacier in the Patagonia region of Chile in 2012 had nothing to do with climate change. A Chilean entrepreneur commandeered a refrigerated truck to steal five tons of ice by hacking away the Jorge Montt glacier in Bernardo O’Higgins National Park. The unscrupulous thief intended to sell ice chunks as “designer” ice cubes to trendy bars and restaurants in the Chilean capital of Santiago. The glacier is one of the world’s fastest-shrinking glaciers and police weighed charging the crook with violating a national monument.

The brain of genius physicist Albert Einstein was removed not for economic gain but in the interest of scientific advancement. Pathologist Thomas Harvey extracted Einstein’s brain before the body was cremated, as per his wishes, upsetting his family. Harvey convinced the family to let him study the brain and then write a paper on his findings. No paper was published and Einstein’s brain was largely forgotten. That is until a New Jersey Monthly reporter tracked Harvey down in 1978 in Kansas and saw the brain in a jar in a refrigerator.

You can imagine how puzzled a Cameron County, Texas, Juvenile Justice Department employee was when 800 pounds of fajitas were delivered in 2017, especially since the institution’s kitchen never cooked them. As it happened, 53-year-old Gilberto Escamilla, another employee at the detention center, had stolen $1.2 million worth of fajitas over the prior nine years by using county funds to buy fajitas and then selling them. Escamilla was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Thieves will never be mistaken for rocket scientists, but a curious theft from NASA in 2011 required real chutzpah. That year, the space agency tracked down a Pratt & Whitney RL-10 rocket engine worth $200,000. It had been stolen by an employee who had the brilliant idea of trying to sell it on an Internet auction. The RL-10 was used in the 1960s and was the first American rocket engine fueled by liquid hydrogen.

In 2008, a female Australian marbled cat shark was stolen out of a garage in Farnborough, 20 miles west of London, that a British aquatics shop owner used to house the pet. The shark was one of a breeding pair. The male was not taken.The two sharks had produced seven pups that were kept in another tank and not taken.

In 2018, a New Zealand man pilfered two toes off a cadaver at the Body Worlds Vital exhibit held in Auckland. The toes, which were valued at $5,500, were returned to the exhibit. Body Worlds Vital is a traveling exhibition that displays human remains that are preserved through the process of plastination.

Law enforcement was tasked with untangling criminal activity of a female gang that called itself “the piranhas,” who prowled the streets of Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city, in 2013. They accosted women and sliced off their hair and then sold it. The reason? To sell it to criminals who used hair for wigs and hair extensions that were sold to hairdressing salons.

In January 2023, a brazen crook stole a van from an Illinois funeral home in Rockford, Illinois, and then dumped a corpse that was in the back of the vehicle in a Chicago alley more than 100 miles away. The van was found one day before the dead body.

In early 2016, three containers of bull semen were stolen from a truck that was parked in Turlock, California. The contents belonged to the top specimens in the bull industry and were valued at $50,000. The highly valued semen was kept in tanks filled with liquid nitrogen at about minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit to keep the sperm frozen. It is shipped to farms in California and around the world and used to impregnate cattle. There was enough semen in the truck to impregnage 1,000 head of cattle.

Englishwoman Margaret Wells loved the cherished character E.T. from the movie of the same name. In fact, her daughter made her a life-size model that she kept at her home in Portsmouth. Someone broke into her home in 2011 and swiped E.T. Even though E.T. did not phone home, the model was found floating off the coast and returned to its owner.

Those gutters conveying water from your roof contain copper and are favored by thieves. Copper is desirable because it is 100% recyclable, and recyclers will pay as much as 90% of the new copper price, according to GuideOne Insurance. Crooks only need a few tools to do the job.

A skein of cheese heists occurred in, where else, Wisconsin. In 2017, a truck traveling the 130 miles between Green Bay and Milwaukee stopped to get serviced. The driver left the vehicle in what he thought was a secure storage facility. Thieves pilfered 20,000 pounds of cheese from the truck. Similar heists had taken place a year earlier in Wisconsin. Crime experts believe the cheese is sold off to mom-and-pop stores.

Shrubbery is targeted by thieves for sought-after plants and species. These include species of rare orchid and cacti and are traded on the black market. In the process of the theft, pottery and lawns get damaged.

The classic con artist pitch to gullible tourists of selling them a bridge pales in comparison to this crime. Thieves masquerading as engineers used forged paperwork to dismantle an unused footbridge in Slavkov in the eastern part of the Czech Republic in 2012. They apparently sold the material for scrap. Bridges have also been stolen in Pennsylvania and Ukraine.

Talk about a sweet tooth. In 2017, Yasuhiro Kawashima was accused of breaking into offices at night in Tokyo, plundering refrigerators and chowing down on more than 250 desserts in incidents that began in 2013.

A product as innocuous as laundry detergent has been the target of thieves. Detergents such as Tide are swapped for drugs and other illegal items. Because detergent boxes don’t have serial numbers on the packaging, tracking stolen detergent is difficult.

Thieves don’t come more eccentric than Edwin Rist. Rist came to England at age 22 to study the flute at London’s Royal Academy of Music. Rist also was obsessed with feathers, so much so that in 2009, he stole them from the National History Museum, which housed one of the finest collections of exotic and rare birds in the world. He stole almost 300 bird skins and sold them on eBay before he could fly the coop.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police, known for always getting their man, arrested a suspect in North Vancouver who allegedly stole $2,100 worth of toothpaste. By coincidence, the Mounties happened to be near a store when they saw a man bolt out of the store’s emergency exit carrying several bags, with store employees in pursuit. The Mounties said that the man was “trying to make a clean getaway.”

A family seeking a getaway to their cabin in the woods at Loon Lake, Washington, in 2015 couldn’t believe it when they got to their destination. Their cabin had disappeared as had the contents inside, the steps, the deck, even the paving blocks. They realized something was wrong when the lock to the gate to the property had been broken. The family had been coming to the cabin for four years. Tires marks on the property indicated that a trailer might have been used to haul the cabin away.

In 1990, Los Angeles police broke up a ring of thieves who were swiping the 300-pound manhole covers and selling them to junkyards for scrap metal. Rings of manhole swipers have popped up in other countries, with the thieves sometimes disguised as construction workers. Many of these thieves have lifted fire hydrant caps and stadium bleachers to sell for scrap metal.

In spring 2012, Czech police investigated the theft of a ski lift — yes, a ski lift — in the northern Bohemia town of Desná. The perps stole three steel columns, the lift’s supporting structure, and about a half-mile strand of steel cable.

Your car’s catalytic converter is attached to the exhaust system and converts pollutants into elements that are less damaging to the environment. Catalytic converters have been around since the 1970s. Thieves steal them by slipping underneath your car, hacking them off in no more than five minutes. The parts contain the metals platinum, rhodium and palladium, whose prices have soared in recent years. The price of rhodium, for example, soared to $26,000 per ounce in 2021 from about $1,600 in 2001.