Wearing a wig, ratty old clothes, and contacts instead of glasses people were used to seeing me in, I was with the burglars all night except for the few minutes they gave me the slip to commit the burglary.
I had received a phone call from an informant who hung out at a local bar in Kerrville, Texas when I was a detective on the Police Department there. My snitch said several kids were in the place planning something. He couldn’t tell what, but he was pretty sure it was illegal, whatever it was.
I had a wig that fit and matched perfectly, custom made for me by a friend who owned a beauty college in Kerrville. This sounded like an interesting situation that called for a disguise.
Along with the wig, I put on some old jeans and a dirty shirt. I wore my contacts because on duty I wore glasses and that’s how people in town knew me. I tied on a bandana as a sweat band to make sure the wig stayed in place and headed for the bar.
The three kids I’d been alerted to were obvious. They were sitting at the bar and I sat at an empty barstool next to one of them. He turned and asked me if I knew where he could score some weed. I told him I had just come down from the interstate where I’d been hitchhiking all day and I didn’t know anything about the town.
We talked some, then he and his two friends, a girl and another guy, abruptly left the bar. I left behind them, just far enough so as not to be seen following them. I caught sight of them running across to the other side of the highway, but couldn’t go running after them without being spotted.
I needn’t have worried. Less than five minutes later, they came running back across the highway and ran to the back of a hotel, where they threw something into the creek that ran below a bluff there. Then they went into the hotel and into their room.
I went down to the creek and found a money box that had been pried open. Inside were receipts from The Sunday House, a fancy restaurant across the street from the hotel. A uniformed officer went by and confirmed that the front door had recently been kicked in.
Shedding the wig, I drove into town, drew up an affidavit for a search warrant for their hotel room, then woke the JP on call to sign the warrant. Armed with that, I got a couple of uniformed officers to go with me to search the room. Sure enough, we recovered the contents of the cash box, including some things that referenced the Sunday House.
We got them to jail where they denied any knowledge of the burglary. I confronted the guy who had sat next to me at the bar and recounted the exact words of our conversation, revealing the fact that I had been the guy with long hair sitting next to him. After that we got full confessions. It had been a fun evening!