New Hampshire Police Leave a Year of Weird, Brazen Crimes

From thefts of maple syrup to grave markers, snowplow blades and sunglasses, police in New Hampshire dealt with an array of weird crimes in 2011.

Some were brazen, some just plain inexplicable.

Among the former was a man’s attempt to sell a stolen bicycle to a uniformed officer in Manchester in September. The officer had approached the man to investigate a report of a bike that was chained outside a pawn shop being stolen, police say. They say when the officer approached the man, he offered to sell him the bicycle for $50.

Another man rolled across the hood of a car to rob a customer making a night deposit through his driver’s side window at a Conway bank drive-up in November.

A Londonderry man was sentenced to a month in prison in October, after aiming a .45-caliber handgun at two men who came onto his property to repossess his truck.

“That one’s unique,” said Rockingham Country Assistant Attorney Brad Bolton, who argued for a stiffer sentence for 51-year-old James Pincence.

Among the more baffling thefts were snowplow blades, firewood and generators, all reported missing to Merrimack police in recent months.

In Newport, Detective John Simonds has developed a new area of expertise, scrap metal.

Two residents there were charged last summer with stealing bronze markers from the graves of 10 veterans in town, each weighing more than 20 pounds. The thieves got about $30 apiece for the markers, which cost more than $800 to replace, Simonds said.

“You can’t make this stuff up, what we deal with,” said Simonds, who works closely with police in neighboring Claremont, home to two metal recycling operations.

Hillsboro police have had their own scrap metal mysteries to solve. They have yet to determine who stole catalytic converters from cars at auto repair shops in town, striking several shops more than once. The converters are worth hundreds of dollars as scrap metal.

Another unusual target for property crimes in 2011 was food.

New Hampshire state trooper Eric Berube spent months investigating a crime he described as variation of scrap metal scams: maple syrup fraud.

Jason and Kristi Raymond of Springfield, Vt., were leaders of a ring that stole drums of maple syrup from Vermont farms and sold them to a large distributor in Ackworth, N.H., investigators say. They’re charged with felony theft and fraud, and police said they falsified some of the syrup receipts to collect more money.

“Maple syrup isn’t the most stolen item in the world,” Berube said. “But this is no different than cutting the copper pipe out of people’s basements. … They were able to walk out the front door with $14,000.”

The Raymonds have both pleaded not guilty.

Police in two states were seeking a brazen bandit who was wheeling grocery cartloads of energy drinks out of supermarkets in Keene, N.H. and Enfield, Conn.

Four times in October, he filled shopping carts with Red Bull and other energy drinks and was caught on store surveillance cameras walking out the door of three supermarkets in Keene. Keene police say he also stole a car from a local dealership that may have been used in the thefts.

A Wethersfield, Conn., man was arrested after trying to wheel a cart full of energy drinks out of a supermarket in that state. The man, Thomas Beckwith, 50, told police he planned to sell the energy drinks to smaller convenience stores in Connecticut. He acknowledged taking the groceries, Enfield, Conn., police Lt. Larry Curtis said.

“It’s one of those baffling cases they’ll be talking about for years,” said Keene Police Lt. Eli Rivera.

Then there was the convention that wasn’t.

The “For Us Women’s Expo” was promoted on the Internet as taking place at a Manchester hotel Dec. 10. Vendors were solicited, with booths running from $565 to $1,000, and tickets were available for $6 to $10.

New Hampshire Attorney General Michael Delaney sent out an advisory Nov. 14 that the expo was a fraud. “No such event is taking place,” the advisory stated. His office said last week that it’s continuing to investigate who was behind the fraud.

Another seemingly brazen crime turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.

Just hours before the first flakes of the October snowstorm fell, surveillance cameras at a Concord shopping plaza captured a flatbed truck pulling up empty then leaving with a sizeable snowplow blade on its bed.

The case of the missing plow blade remained unsolved for more than a month before a plow operator called Concord police to say they had the blade police were looking for. It turned out that a driver hired to pick up a commercial-sized blade took the wrong plow from the wrong location, Lt. Keith Mitchell said.

“It’s all resolved,” he added.

But Concord had its share of unusual crimes, including the theft of an entire change machine from a Laundromat, a pair of designer sunglasses right off a man’s head and a rash of recent purse snatchings.

“We’re seeing property crimes going up: homes being broken into, foreclosed homes being broken into, copper piping and precious metals being stolen,” said Mitchell, who said the property crime wave is driven by drugs and the economy. “It’s rampant all over the state.”