Call the victim “Karen,” an appropriate moniker, as you will see. A patrol officer had taken the initial residential burglary report. It was the mid-1980s. The date of the offense was not known, nothing was known to have been taken from the house, the point of entry was not known, there was no forced entry, but there was a closeup photograph of the face of the intruder. As an investigator for the Plano Police Department, I was assigned the follow-up investigation.
I rang the doorbell and Karen invited me into the house. She was a middle-aged white woman, upper-middle class. The house was very neat and clean. Karen led me to the kitchen. She pointed to an SLR film camera in the middle of the dining table.
“That camera usually stays on this table so anybody can grab it to take a quick snapshot. Sometimes, it’s a couple of months before we fill up a roll and take it to be developed. Let me show you the pictures on the roll of film I had developed and picked up from the store three days ago.”
From next to the camera, Karen picked up a typical photo envelope like all the film developers used back then. Taking out a stack of photos, she began to go through them one by one, something like this:
“See this photo? That’s our dog, Rover, in the back yard. This next picture is my husband with a stringer of fish he brought home a month or so ago. This is my car after my son finished washing and waxing it for me last month. This is my daughter and a new boyfriend when he picked her up for a date several weeks ago. This was the birthday cake I made for our youngest daughter.” And so on for another dozen or more photos.
Then, “Now this picture was taken right here where we’re standing. See the plates hanging high on the wall in the photo? They are those plates right up there,” and she pointed to a row of plates hanging high on the wall in the room we were in. No doubt about it. We were standing in the spot next to the dining table and that was where the picture was taken.
“This is a photo of my kitchen. Those are my plates. But this is NOT my N*****!” Angry now, she used the N-word to refer to the face that had been so close to the camera it was out of focus in the photograph.
She went on, irate. “I have never allowed a N***** in my house. This man is a criminal and I demand you arrest him!”
In spite of her blatant racism, I had to admit that she had a right to feel violated by the intrusion of some unknown person into her house, and one who had the nerve to pick up the camera and take a selfie just to taunt her.
Since nothing was taken from the house and no other felony was committed, it was not technically a burglary. I reduced the offense to criminal trespass. I sent the photo to Texas DPS and one of their artists drew an in-focus rendering of the face. We circulated the images but we never were able to identify the guy. In the end, the case was closed unsolved.
I don’t expect Karen ever recovered from an unknown Black man having been in her house.