An ongoing felony theft investigation

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My boss’s housekeeper stole some jewelry while cleaning on at least two occasions. My boss was not sure of any theft until last Thursday, when she took off a ring and put it in her jewelry box, it was gone the next day, and only the housekeeper was in the home during the intervening time. They called the local cops (her husband is a county cop, and the housekeeper knew it), who planned to get a warrant, and search the woman’s home. However, no one thought it would do any good, because they figured it would be pawned. My boss had noticed a couple of other rings missing back in July, but thought it might have been lost in a trip or just buried somewhere in the house.

Friday the police questioned the woman, but did not arrest her and did not search her home (there was not a warrant yet). That night my boss’s husband called the thief and offered a deal – we won’t sue you if you return the jewelry. The woman denied everything on the phone.

However, the next day they found my boss’s three rings, four other unidentified rings, and a signed confession letter from the housekeeper in their mailbox. The letter contained a statement to the effect of – “If your rings aren’t among these, stop by my place. I have more”.

The police have her fairly solidly on this one pair of thefts, and their value bumped the crime up to a felony.

But now they’re trying to figure out how or whether to pursue additional theft investigations against this woman. There are two bug problems. The idetified stolen goods were returned, and so went the obvious rationale for the search warrant. They don’t know for certain that the other rings are stolen, and they have no other recent complaints about stolen jewelry. Essentially, they don’t have another identifiable victim.

The cops will talk to a judge about obtaining a warrant based on the housekeeper’s letter, but are not optimistic. Another option they’ve discussed, pending the rejection of a warrant, is contacting other clients of the housekeeper (who worked through a local service, and so her contacts can be documented pretty well) and asking about missing jewelry that they haven’t reported. Perhaps if they can tie someone to one of the 4 unidentified rings and establish that it has in fact been stolen. they could go back again for warrant.

My boss is also considering a lawsuit against the cleaning ageny, which claims to screen their employees. My boss put the thief’s name into a WI state court website, and found a whole string of petty theft convictions.

2

Seems like the agency slipped up in their background checks. This story makes me feel much better about 1) not owning any jewelry and 2)not being able to afford a cleaning service.

Maybe your boss should “stop by and see the other jewelry” just to be able to give the cops an idea of what else she’s taken…they may be able to recognize something that has been reported stolen, and that would give them what they need for the warrant.

3

True. Why would they need a warrent when they have an invite?

4

Well, the cops don’t have an invite. The boss does. Now, the boss could invite the cops to go with her and, if the housekeeper allows them in to see the jewelry, problem solved. There may be some question also, if the boss goes to see the jewelry and then reports what he sees to the police, that she is acting as an agent of the police and anything she sees may become inadmissable as evidence. IANAL and I don’t know the relevant WI case law.

I don’t get why, in light of the housekeeper’s confession, the cops don’t contact the cleaning service for a list of other clients for whom this woman has cleaned (probably would need a subpeona for those records) and then contact them about missing jewelry. Any of them stating they are missing anything, coupled with the housekeeper’s confession to these thefts, should be all any judge needs to issue a warrant.

The cops could also arrest the housekeeper at her home and then toss the place “incident to an arrest.” That’s sort of legal in a limited way and hey, in John Ashcroft’s America all they have to claim is that her bottle of Formula 409 is a chemical weapon of mass destruction.

5

A little more update today. We chatted some about it. Kittenblue and NurseCarmen, my boss isn’t volunteering to visit the woman. She has all her jewelry back, so even going there would be deceptive. The invitation was to visit if any of her rings are still missing, which they aren’t. Plus, she wouldn’ recognize anybody else’s jewelry.

The cops found out the cleaning woman worked for another cleaning company before the current one, meaning she’s had a much bigger pool of targets to pick through.

The cops are still debating among themselves about whether to try to get a search warrant. I don’t get this. It seems to me they should just put it in front of a judge, and let the judge make the call. There must be some kind of “shadow” decision making process going on. Are they willing to commit x hours of cop time to pursue this? How many weak warrant requests can they put in before they alienate the local judge(s)? Actually, this part is just my speculation about why they’re not speeding through to an arrest.

Otto, the problem with going after the cleaning service is again, they don’t have concrete evidence that a crime has been committed, other than those commited against my boss. The letter, which I have not seen, was apparently not an explicit admission that she has other stolen property. It could be interpreted that she was willing to open up her jewelry box to my boss and more or less offer her anything she had in an attempt to avoid nastier legal problems later.

I’m finding this a very interesting thing to observe. And I can’t help comparing it to my favorite cop show, Law and Order. And when I think about how the TV cops get get that kind of “past association” data, it’s almost never with a warrant. They just ask people, and throw on various threats of harassment if the people don’t “cooperate”. It seems likely that they would not have the legal right to compel much of the evidence that they gather.

The owner of the cleaning service certainly has no incentive to cooperate. Who wants the cops contacting half their clients and suggesting that they may have been ripped off?

6

I think leaving more rings than were stolen, along with a note that says if these aren’t it come by and look at the rest is a pretty strong indicator that this woman has stolen so many rings that she can’t keep track of where she got them all from. That by itself should be enough to convince the cleaning company to release their client list (if asked using some of the “persuasion” the cops on L&O like so much) or to get a subpeona for their records.

7

Surely the fact that she has said, even if it was only implied, that she has various other pieces that could be connected to your boss, is enough for the cops to want to find ou whats going on.

You said she was employed by another agency, that you are aware of, which means that she could well have been employed by several others. Lets speculate that she took one piece of jewellery per household, and that by being employed by at least 2 agencies she has, roughly 30 previous households, most of the jewellery would be relatively expensive i would think, just how much would be the stuff be worth???

I’m thinking the cops should do everything they can to try and find out whats going on. The scare may have been enough to scare her, maybe so much that she’s not going to want the stuff in her house anymore, if they leave it too long she could hock everything before they get a chance to do anything about it.