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Source: ONE News
You reckon stealing cucumbers is odd? What about pilfering pubic
hair and horse tails, a crocodile or a luxury yacht?
When it comes to bizarre thefts, Australians are an enterprising
mob.
After all, it's a country where the testicles on statues of bulls
have to be padlocked to stop them being swiped.
Seriously.
The city council of Rockhampton, Queensland - the beef capital of
the nation - secures the testicles of bull statues to stop pranking
students stealing them to, ahem, prove they have the balls to meet
a dare.
At least Rockhampton police have irrefutable evidence of the stolen
property - after all, how many sculptured bulls balls can there
be?
Cucumbers, now they're a different matter.
South Australian police are investigating the theft of $A10,000
worth of cucumbers in the past three months.
Thieves have struck market gardens a dozen times, leaving police an
unusual challenge.
"The issue with the cucumber is, how do you and I tell who owns a
different cucumber?" SA Police Chief Inspector Kym Zander
said.
The cucumber heists are as baffling as the theft of the entire
produce from an olive grove in New South Wales in May last
year.
Thieves stripped 398 olive trees in Lovedale, in the Hunter Valley
- leaving just two trees in the grove untouched.
The grove's owner, Quentin Von Essen, was dumbfounded.
"It would take approximately six people up to three days to pick
our olive grove," he said of the overnight raid.
"The eerie part is ... there is not an olive on any of these trees
and not an olive on the ground."
Then there is Brisbane man Chad Daniel Haylock, jailed this week
for eight months - for crimes including the theft of 360 eggs and
five kilograms of freshly ground coffee from a south Brisbane
hotel.
While a motive for stealing food is plausible other robberies defy
reason.
Such as the 2004 theft of horse tails from a farrier's paddock in
Toowoomba, Queensland.
The tails were cut off six pet horses while their owner, Bob Hayes,
was in a Brisbane hospital with heart problems.
"It's a rotten lousy thing to do," Mr Hayes said, adding he
believed the stolen items could be destined for a market few would
know exists: the fake tail market, where they could collectively
fetch more then $A2,000.
The tails were never found, unlike rocks stolen from Uluru in
central Australia.
Tourists have long been snatching pieces of the big red rock - but
many later return them, often at great expense.
Thousands of rocks, along with samples of soil and sand, have been
sent back to Uluru from such far-flung places as Germany, France
and Spain over the past decades.
Most senders complain of bad luck or mysterious misfortune after
removing the rocks from the sacred Aboriginal site - notably a
German who returned a 7.5kg stone by mail.
Then there's the crocodile stolen from Rockhampton zoo, numerous
snakes reported stolen from wildlife parks, parking meters
plundered and polka-dot garden gnomes gone.
Even a luxury yacht has been pinched - and sailed from Melbourne to
Tasmania through one of the worst storms ever to hit south-eastern
Australia, in January 2005.
Those robberies almost seem run of the mill compared to the theft
of a purple, pink and yellow 40kg statue of a four-armed man
clutching vanilla slices in Ouyen, northwest Victoria, in
2004.
The town's mascot was missing for months - before being found
abandoned in a ditch with police suspecting teenagers were
responsible.
But pranks were ruled out in Cairns earlier this year when a man
twice broke into an adult shop in the north Queensland city.
He stole blow-up sex dolls and, as the local newspaper, the Cairns
Post, so eloquently put it had sex with blow-up dolls before
abandoning the vinyl vixens in a nearby lane.
The perverted purloiner joins a list of sex-related thieves which
includes a deviant baggage courier with a fetish for women's
hair.
The Victorian, Rodney Lyle Petersen, pleaded guilty to 50 counts of
theft of women's hair that he collected from the baggage of Qantas
passengers.
Sentenced in 2007 to at least two years jail, the Victorian County
Court heard Petersen would pull over his courier van and rummage
through the lost or delayed luggage he was returning to Qantas
passengers.
The courier collected the pubic and head hair from brushes and
underwear in the baggage, put it in plastic slips and recorded the
owner's personal details in an exercise book.
