Man in prison gets cops to plow backyard for father with false confession?

Factual Questions
1

Has this joke/urban legend ever happened?

Set up is the adult son is recently put in prison, his elderly father cannot plant a garden without the help of his son. So son makes a phone call or writes a letter saying whatever you do dad don’t dig up a large area starting twenty feet from the back of the house, then 30 feet from that and 30 feet in both directions or something so.

So the FBI/cops know this must be where the drugs/money/guns/bodies are! They bring out a team with a warrant an dig it all up but find nothing.

Father thanks son for plowing the soil for the garden, son says no problem dad.:slight_smile:

?

2

Generally considered at Snopesto be an urban legend, with variations going back to biblical times.

3

I personally would doubt that the letter would get to the father in the first place. I also doubt they’d leave things in a way suitable for farming.

4

“Digging up” is not the same as plowing. The father would have to expend more effort to put the plot back into shape for his garden than he would have before the cops dug it up.

5

Thanks I have heard and seen so many variations of this joke I wondered if anyone tried it for kicks.

6

Digging up is, however, the same as tilling.

And it wouldn’t matter if the father got the letter. He wasn’t the intended audience.

7

What is the biblical edition of this story?

8

There isn’t actually a version from the Bible itself, but the Snopes link gives a bunch of variations and related stories, including a story with similar elements from Aesop’s Fables which probably dates back to the Sixth or Seventh Century BCE–i.e., “biblical times”.

9

Mark Twain used it when Tom Sawyer dupes some kids into painting a fence.
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/tomsawyer/section1.rhtml

10

Not really. If they’re going to search a piece of property looking for some buried evidence, they’re not going to leave the field in tillable condition.

They would search the field by excavating the soil, shifting through it for the evidence, and then dumping it somewhere outside of the area being searched. You’re not going to dump the soil back on the area where you’re searching because you’ll end up searching the same soil time after time. Or worse yet, you might be putting soil on top of the evidence you’re looking for.

11

Depending on how deeply they dig, the cops would probably unearth a lot of subsoil and big clods of earth. Someone would have to replace the subsoil and break up the clods and pieces of sod with attached soil, which by far is the major work involved in getting a section of previously undisturbed soil into shape for gardening (not to mention adding amendments if the soil is heavy clay, poor in organic content etc.

I just can’t see the P.D. bringing on bags of peat moss, compost, sand etc. to work into the soil and leaving everything in great shape to sow seed and transplant veggies.

12

So if you need a hole dug for your new hot tub… :slight_smile: (see the first “sighting” in the Snopes link Ethilrist provided.)